We’re coming off the election of a new SBC president in Anaheim, and I’m reminded of something Herschel Hobbs told me back in 1989. But first, a quick take on the field: Bart Barber represented the “Relax. We got this” party; Tom Ascol the “Really, are you sure about that? I don’t think so” party; Robin Hadaway, the “Let’s quit fussing and get back to missions and evangelism” party; and Frank Cox, the “How about an alternative?” party.

I endorsed Ascol, and along the way, I recalled a Hobbs observation. The occasion was the invitation of David Dockery and Timothy George to write a chapter for their Baptist Theologians book, one which featured a couple of dozen contributors (including Phil Roberts, Tom Nettles, Lewis Drummond, James Leo Garrett, Russ Bush, and even Molly Marshall-Green) summarizing the work and impact of such luminaries as John Bunyan, Andrew Fuller, C. H. Spurgeon, Walter Rauschenbusch, E. Y. Mullins, Frank Stagg, and Millard Erickson. I was pleased to draw a living theologian, so that I could interview him. Indeed, he welcomed me to do so, so I drove up from my post at FBC El Dorado, Arkansas to his home in Oklahoma City. I was hoping to get at least thirty minutes on tape (old cassette technology), and I ended up spending hours with him as he gave me a ton of great material.

At the time, we were in the midst of the Conservative Resurgence, and I asked him what he made of the phenomenon/phenomena. As long-time pastor of FBC Oklahoma City, he’d been the Convention president and also the voice of The Baptist Hour radio program. He’d chaired the BF&M committee in 1963 and had essentially brought forward the wording on biblical authority featured in the original 1925 version, which read, "We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.” In 1963, they tweaked it a bit, to add “and is the record of God’s revelation of Himself to man.” But pretty much the same. And he, indeed, had come out as a believer in biblical inerrancy.

Still, he wasn’t thrilled with all that was going on in the resurgence, so I asked him how he would have done it. His answer, in a word, was “prevention” rather than the radical surgery then underway.

We heard protests. Not many at first, but we heard some protests. But we didn’t listen. I said we didn’t listen. I’m a party to it just like anybody else who was more or less in the thick of things. Then we heard more, but we still didn’t listen. After all, everything was going fine. The seminary enrollment was up. Cooperative Program was up. Evangelism up. New churches and all. You know the old saying that if it’s working, don’t fix it. 

He observed that the faithful had come with complaints and warnings in the 1950s, and then again in the 1960s. But Herschel and company had brushed these aside until a critical mass of alarm and indignation surfaced in the 1970s, and it was too late to avoid the revolution begun with the surprising election of Adrian Rogers in 1979. 

Until then, he represented the “Relax, we got this” establishment, and they enjoyed success and sway for decades, even as seminary professors, paid by Cooperative Program dollars, were undermining biblical fidelity. (The examples are manifold, from denying that God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, before stopping him from doing so to saying that the feeding of the 5,000 was really just a matter of the crowd’s emulating in love the example of the shepherd boy sharing his lunch.) 

The problem with Greear, Litton, and Barber replicating this “Move on; nothing to see here” approach is that it’s now hard to assure folks, “It’s working; don’t fix it.” For it’s not working so well. Baptisms and membership are down, even as the old joke about unregenerate membership rings sorta true: “The SBC has fourteen million members, and the FBI can’t find half of them.” Evangelism has been downgraded at NAMB, wokeness has crept into the seminaries (despite disavowals from the leadership), and good people have lost or walked away from their jobs over it; the ERLC under Russell Moore has been a willful, snarky disaster, and the current, post-Moore crew is pushing the lame conference theme that we should be “Uniting to Make Abortion Unnecessary,” as if tough circumstances (which often don’t obtain) were enough to excuse child murder; NAMB has run roughshod over state conventions daring to question initiatives in their neck of the woods; LifeWay deployed a massive golden parachute for its departing, not so successful, CEO; church plants are down drastically from the 1990s; we more readily indulge instances of plagiarism, of “gracious” accommodation of bizarre pronouns, of women pastors, and of a lighter-touch approach to the homosexual agenda. Resolutions coddle Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, and, in high PR mode, we play the “world is watching” card to order our affairs. I’ll stop there.

Maybe, given such concerns, we’ll be spared decades of brush offs by the elites. Maybe we’ll see our Adrian Rogers moment sooner rather than later. 

PS: The photo was taken the Wednesday night after the final gavel in Anaheim. A few of us went to a Dodgers/Angels game up in LA, and here you see the city lit up in the distance. In the foreground, a guard sits at the bottom of ramp, barring access to the upper decks. To the side, some attendees are already leaving. Of course, the ramp goes both up and down, a symbol of the question now before the SBC. Which way are we headed?