For reference, here's Stephen's post, the one he is referencing is May 4, I believe...
http://foxofbama.blogspot.com/So this was probably anticipated and expected. I'm still a bit surprised. The Southwestern trustees are as stacked, hand-picked, pre-selected and pushed through as you can find anywhere in the SBC. On the other hand, in a denomination that has a reputation for dismissing people from program leadership at the slightest hint of falling numbers, no other leader would have survived more than a couple of years against what happened at Southwestern. So he gets a nice apartment free of charge on campus, and a salary of unknown proportions. He'd already been told he was getting that, so going back on that wouldn't be good, but then, how big does a golden parachute funded by church donations have to be? Your Cooperative Program dollars at work, and good luck convincing churches and state conventions they need to up the ante after this wasteful spending spree.
There may be some justice involved. It was discovered there was no legitimate reason for firing the student who lost his job tweeting a criticism of Patterson. Give him back his job.
There is an inherent victory in this for moderate Baptists. Call it a "takeover" or a "resurgence," whatever it was, the Patterson-Pressler led movement was never able to capture the soul of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The school's greatest achievements, its highest enrollments, its worldwide influence, and the peak of its respect among the Evangelical Christian community, occurred under moderate Baptist leadership. It was one of the top prizes that conservatives aimed to capture, to the point that they accelerated the turnover of trustees to move it more quickly. Patterson's career ambition was aimed at moving from the small, obscure, run-down Criswell College to the big chair in Fort Worth. Eventually, after having to prove himself with a stint at Southeastern, which waited to achieve its success until Danny Akin arrived, Patterson came to Fort Worth and got the staff to pose for pictures with cowboy hats. But Southwestern never thrived under his leadership. He will leave behind a legacy of continuous budget cuts, downsizing, elimination of programs, postponement of development plans, drastically reduced enrollments.
He has his fellow Texas Baptists to thank for that. Texas Baptists made up the bulk of Southwestern's students and leadership, and were the core constituency to which it played. For the most part, his fellow Texas Baptists have never liked Paige Patterson, never really followed him in any great number, avoided Criswell College like the plague, paying little attention to it, and to him, and even the more conservative churches resisted drawing the line between themselves and the SBC conservative resurgence. While the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention has siphoned off a lot of CP support from the BGCT, they've never been able to provide Southwestern with the full assistance and support that it lost from Texas Baptists. The percentage of students on campus from Texas fell every year that Patterson was there, to a point where it is disproportionately smaller than that of most of the other states represented. Texas Baptists walked away from Southwestern and Patterson, into their own seminaries, or into other evangelical schools. And so, after yesterday's announcement, it can be said that they have successfully denied Patterson the ability to claim triumph in achievement in "restoring Southwestern Seminary to its conservative roots."
Posted: Wed May 23, 2018 7:34 am