The Kentucky Situation...Resolved. For Now.

A couple weeks ago, we asked, "What's going on at Campbellsville University?"  Last month, Campbellsville, a liberal arts college affiliated with the Kentucky Baptist Convention, had its quiet existence disturbed.  Reports reverberated throughout the Baptist blogosphere about a professor's contract being non-renewed, ostensibly because he believes every word of the Bible is literally true, even with respect to history, science, geography, etc. -- you know, the whole fundamentalist schtick.

This seemed pretty shocking to us, because at OBU we're used to seeing faculty dismissed, silenced, or sidelined for not being fundamentalist enough.  So it seemed like good news!  Finally, a Baptist college had the sense and sanity to say, "We take the Bible seriously, not literally.  If you believe the earth was created in 6 24-hour days 6,000 years ago, take a hike, fundy!"

But alas, there was more to the story.

For starters, this young professor's fan club (unsurprisingly, he's a graduate of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) cried foul and started making noise about all the other profs at Campbellsville who allegedly don't take the Bible literally and manage to hold on to their jobs.  They flooded the inbox of KBC Executive Director Paul Chitwood, and many started calling on the KBC to de-fund Campbellsville.  (Like OBU, the KBC schools receive a tiny percentage of their operating budgets from the convention -- money the convention might spend on evangelism and missions but chooses not to.  Instead, the convention directs scarce offering plate dollars to institutions that raise tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue on their own.)

It was about to get ugly.

The Reverend Dr. Paul Chitwood, however, handled the situation masterfully.  Please take the time to read his blog updates on the situation here, here, and here.  Leaders from Campbellsville and from the KBC came together and re-affirmed their historic partnership.

Since we hadn't heard much noise from the KBC colleges in the cacophony of Baptist college disasters over the past year or so, I (very erroneously) assumed they must be pretty fundamentalist.  After all, they are in the shadow of SBTS which has its own undergraduate arm, Boyce College.  I had ignorantly assumed that, of necessity, the KBC colleges would be locked into a race with Boyce as to which has the most unforgiving doctrinal litmus tests and which loves the BFM 2000 the most.

Not so.

I'm amazed at how much freedom Campbellsville profs seem to have.  If you teach there, the default assumption seems to be that you are a believing Christian, but one who takes the Bible seriously (and thus not literally).  Yet in the spirit of Christian unity, cooperation, and openness, literalists are welcome, too.  So you might have a young-earth creationist from time to time.  But most profs are evidently moderates.  The KBC may not like it, but there seems to be little desire among the fundamentalists to remake the school in their own image.  This is a lot like the OBU I remember in my student days.

Today's OBU seems to start from the opposite assumption with respect to faculty: you are (or ought to be) a literalist who believes in young-earth creationism and the historicity of every miracle.  But, in the spirit of not being able to fire everybody all at once, we'll let it slide if you are a professing Christian and active church member who happens to erroneously believe that maybe Jonah didn't get swallowed by a fish and perhaps some variant of theistic evolution is more convincing than flat earth young earth creationism.

We'll look more closely at trustee dynamics at the KBC schools in the weeks to come, as we search for parallels and points of departure with OBU's relationship to the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.

As legitimate media outlets report on the happenings, we'll share the news articles on our Facebook and Twitter accounts.  The SBC's public reliations shop, Baptist Press, unsurprisingly obfuscates the situation.  Their writeup quotes Dr. Chitwood as saying, "Everyone who teaches at Campbellsville is a professing Christian and believes God created the world."  But notice what Baptist Press says on Twitter: "Ky. convention, college affirm partnership (all Campbellsville profs are Christian creationists)."  Lots of people believe God created the world, but would not call themselves creationists.  Presumably most Campbellsville profs would fall into this category.  (But then again, no one but the most ardent SBC Takeover loyalists have taken Baptist Press seriously since 1990.)

How grateful Campbellsville must be to have a state convention whose senior leadership realizes that while having a few biblical literalists on faculty is important to many in the churches, the academic (and frankly, spiritual) integrity of the college depends on having devoted Christian faculty who take the Bible seriously, not literally.

I hope we have that in Oklahoma.  We certainly have some great trustees and some prominent pastors who support OBU's great liberal arts heritage.  But after the past four years, it would be nice to have some Kentucky-style assurances that OBU's lurch backward toward fundamentalism is something one or two over-zealous administrators came up with on their own, and not some grand design hatched in the Baptist Building.

New Trustee Leadership at OBU Seems Promising

As we mentioned earlier in the week, OBU's Board of Trustees had its fall meeting last Friday.  Among other vital business, the board elected officers for the year:

Board officers for the 2012-13 year were elected at the close of the meeting. They are David Lawrence, Weatherford, Okla., chair; Jarrod Frie, Tulsa, Okla., vice chair; Todd Fisher, Shawnee, Okla. secretary, and Nadine McPherson, Oklahoma City, Okla., treasurer.

We will definitely miss the very fine leadership of Dr. Reagan Bradford, who rotates off the board this year.  He served two years as chair.  During his tenure, longtime Edmond pastor and board vice chair Rev. Dr. Alan Day tragically died.  Bradford also had to contend with the uproar caused by the administration's botched dismissals of two well-respected professors in the College of Theology and Ministry.  With vociferous faculty protests, last fall's alumni petition, and the emergence and growth of Save OBU, Dr. Bradford has certainly contended with many challenges as he guided the trustees.

I frankly don't know a lot about OBU trustee politics.  When I began the Save OBU project, I thought the first order of business would be finding out how the BGCO uses the board to control OBU.  But much to my pleasant surprise, that isn't how things work at all.  In fact, OBU has great trustees who care about the university's growth, success, independence, and continued flourishing.  Unlike the seminaries, whose boards reek of insider SBC politics, and many state convention-run colleges, whose trustees actively abet fundamentalist takeovers of once-proud institutions, OBU's trustees are quite outstanding.

But make no mistake.  The trustee board is the linchpin.  As the architects of the original SBC Takeover well knew, if you control the trustees, you control the institution.  Fortunately, that hasn't happened at OBU yet.

We welcome to the chair Rev. Dr. David Lawrence, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Weatherford.  The vice chair, Jarrod Frie, is a layperson.  I don't know if this means Frie will acede to the chair.  But while we definitely have some great non-fundamentalist clergy, I tend to think we're definitely safer with a layperson.  For one thing, laypeople don't have as much to lose from not engaging in BGCO politics.

We dodged a bullet in that Rev. Dr. Todd Fisher will not chair the board (unless the BGCO elects him to another 4-year term sometime in the future).  The main reason I say this is that he is an officer on the board of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.  Southern is thoroughly fundamentalist, and it is likely that Fisher sees many of the things SBTS does as normal.  For instance, the seminary tolerates no moderates (let alone liberals), and has a fundamentalist ethos on everything from the Bible to politics to gender roles.  The last thing we need is someone who might be tempted to think it's God's will to make OBU more like a monolithic, extremely homogeneous post-Takeover SBC seminary.  Dr. Fisher, pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Shawnee, states on his blog that you can't be a Christian if you don't believe in a literal Adam and Eve.  Nothing against the man personally, but I'm glad he's too busy with SBTS's board to be an officer on OBU's.

We're lucky to have people who actually believe in God and science chair OBU's board.  Dr. Bradford, a M.D. research physician and Dr. Lawrence is a Ph.D. mathematician who entered the ministry as  a second career.  I can't imagine that either of them are happy about Provost Norman's and Dean McClellen's antics.  In fact, last winter some faculty were hopeful that a group of trustees might try to help President Whitlock realize that Provost Norman should move on.  Our sources never found out whether such a meeting took place.

Let's hope and pray that OBU's trustees stand strong against any further fundamentalist encroachment!

Georgetown College (KY) President to Retire

Over the weekend, Associated Baptist Press reported that Georgetown College President Bill Crouch is retiring after 21 years.  Among Dr. Crouch's many accomplishments at Georgetown are the fact that he never wavered in standing strong for academic freedom and he avoided a painful, fruitless war with the Kentucky Baptist Convention.

We've blogged extensively about Stetson, Furman, William Jewell, Louisiana College, Shorter, Truett-McConnell, Brewton-Parker, Yellowstone, among other evangelical colleges.  But we haven't talked about Georgetown at Save OBU, and it's a shame.  In fact, Georgetown has a lot more in common with OBU than some of the schools we ordinarily consider peers due to geographic proximity.  Like OBU, Georgetown has exemplified the best of the moderate Baptist liberal arts tradition even as it existed in the shadow of a large SBC seminary that has become avowedly fundamentalist since the early 1990s.  Also, Georgetown's path to independence, sustainability, and a bright future as a legitimate institution of Baptist higher education is one we would do well to follow.  Like many evangelical colleges, Georgetown has maintained excellence while upholding its Christian identity even as OBU has fallen in the national rankings.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

For decades, the state convention trusted and proudly supported the college, a beacon of intellectually honest and academically rigorous Christian higher education.  The nearby SBC seminary served as a natural pipeline for religion faculty and administrators.  Though many state churches were fundamentalist, moderates had a place at the table when it came to college, state convention, and SBC life.  After the Fundamentalist Takeover of the SBC, the college kept on excelling even as the nearby seminary and the state convention moved sharply in the direction of fundamentalism and authoritarianism.  The tenuous partnership continued until the state convention began demanding changes at the college that its faculty, students, and alumni could not in good conscience abide.

Yeah, I've heard that one before.  We've all lived it.  The people at Georgetown lived it, too.  But they fought back in ways we've been yet unwilling to do.

Wisely, Georgetown and the KBC negotiated an exit strategy.  Georgetown would be allowed to elect its own trustees, and the KBC would phase out its annual subsidy to the college.  Rather than downplay its Baptist heritage, Georgetown has continued in its tradition of unashamedly Baptist Christian higher education.  For the KBC's part, it has been able to allocate funds to a variety of critical mission and ministry priorities rather than add a drop in the bucket to an institution that raises almost all its money on its own.  Students who want a fundamentalist Bible college experience can attend any of the KBC's five colleges, including Boyce College, the undergraduate arm of Louisville's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  Students flock to Georgetown if they want a serious, rigorous Christian liberal arts education with professors who are free to teach and do not seek to indoctrinate their students.  For a while, the KBC listed Georgetown as a "ministry partner," but today's Baptists don't like to be affiliated with anything they can't control, so even that relationship is about to end, though neither entity really cares anymore.  Both realize they are infinitely better off without the other, just as OBU and the BGCO will immediately realize once they, mercifully, finally sever ties.

If it weren't for the very unfortunate fact that the BGCO literally owns OBU's buildings and grounds, the path of Georgetown's exit from KBC control would be the most ideal path for us to follow.  President Whitlock would cement his place in OBU history as one of our greatest presidents and would have the unending gratitude of generations of faculty, students, and alumni.

Instead, we will continue our awkward little dance with the BGCO, which next month will elect another slate of 8 Anthony Jordan-approved trustees.  Eventually, more professors will be fired, more fundamentalists will be hired, and the quality of our academic programs will gradually erode.  This is not just speculation.  It's exactly what will happen if nothing changes, just as it happened to literally dozens of other state convention-controlled colleges.  Maybe if we boost enrollment, build athletic teams, and add master's programs, few people will notice.  Instead of fully funding ministry, missions, and evangelism, the BGCO will chip in a pittance toward our annual budget, in exchange for controlling the trustee board, dominating presidential selection, and the presumption of control of the institution's direction, mission, and ethos.

Georgetown offers a path forward for us, and Dr. William Crouch deserves credit for leading the college toward a future not only of prosperity and excellence, but also integrity and the very best of the Baptist tradition.  We wish him and his wife, Jan, all the best in their retirement.

Diversity at OBU: Chapel

When I started creating this post, I was surprised to learn that OBU was not as white as I thought it was. According to the OBU website, OBU is actually only 70% white-- a number much lower than probably most of us expected.

Actually, it turns out that student-wise, OBU is doing pretty well. The US is about 64% white and Oklahoma is at about 66%.  So, good job, OBU. I am pleasantly surprised.

But, perhaps that makes even more tragic my original reason for writing this post. As I have mentioned before, I spent two of my years at OBU serving on Chapel CREW-- the group of students who plans and executes chapel. And the truth is, students do actually have a lot of sway over what happens there-- so that is good.

But students do not have the final say (which is probably also good), and there are other political factors at play in who comes to speak at chapel at OBU.

One of the most interesting are three themed days which were there all four of my years at OBU and  remain on the OBU chapel calendar. One of them I have already mentioned: women in missions and ministry day. The other two are like it African American heritage day and Native American heritage day.

What are the implications of the existence of these days?

First, we had already wondered on this blog why someone like Voddie Baucham was possibly asked to preach at chapel this year. Well, the OBU press release does not say that it is African American Heritage day-- but everyone knows that that day falls on the first chapel of the spring semester. So I guess it doesn't matter that Baucham is well known throughout America for being sexist-- we'll still ask him to preach at OBU because he's black and, well, it's that time of year again.

Or what about the time that a pretty well known man from the area was asked to preach on Native American Heritage day? He made an interesting statement to the tune of, "I don't preach because I'm Native American, I preach because you want me to come." Luckily, he was given a different day to come preach.

All of that to say, it may seem like these measures strengthen diversity. But to me it really seems to highlight something I said in another post: if chapel is supposed to be a place where we are all led into worship, it looks to me like the only people being asked to lead are white men in suits.

It seems like the only reason we can affirm ministers of a different color is because we give them their own day-- but otherwise it's assumed that the best preachers are white. How is 30% of OBU's student population supposed to feel about that?

And if you happen to be neither white nor male, forget it. There's no day for you.

What does all of this have to do with OBU leaving the BGCO?

One of the things I have stressed from the beginning is that BGCO politics are negatively affecting OBU. We all know that the SBC has a pretty terrible history with regards to race. The denomination was founded upon the refusal to reject slavery-- something they later apologized for, in 1995. It seems a little late to me, but maybe I'm just a cynic.

Of course, it's not that surprising from a convention whose seminary president Al Mohler once said about the split between northern and southern baptists, "What Northerners were saying is that ending slavery was more important than spreading the gospel." And that was last December. The original article has since been removed, but in the world of the internet, nothing cam be unsaid.

So with cries of "Don't let culture change the gospel" the convention that currently owns OBU has set up three days a year to make up for past mistakes against minorities. Maybe it's just me but that sounds a lot like saying, "We're not very good at seeing when we are wrong." I can only hope that in 150 years my daughter will be alive to see the SBC apology to women.

Until then, these are the kinds of politics I am tired of seeing dominating my alma mater.