Chapter 11   Building a Takeover: Southwestern Seminary (one example)

We don't need a reason. We can do it. We have the votes, and we will [fire Dilday] — 
Trustee chair Ralph Pulley to Russell Dilday before the trustees voted to fire him.  

Dilday Dismissed. The premier achievement of the Takeover faction at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was the dismissal of seminary president Russell H. Dilday. Named president at Southwestern (SWBTS) in 1977, Dilday considered himself a thoroughgoing theological conservative, but he objected to the harsh spirit and the assault on Baptist freedoms associated with the Takeover faction. As a result, he became a target as the Fundamentalist uprising gained speed in the mid-1980s.

Dilday and SWBTS trustees reached a compromise over his role in the denominational controversy during a six-hour closed-door session in October 1989. Ken Lilly, a trustee from Arkansas who had mailed eighty-six pages of press clippings which he claimed were “political” statements by Dilday, said after the meeting, that Dilday was “one of the premier leaders in the SBC,” and that “Dilday is free to speak his conscience.”^[12] A few months later, in early 1990, Christianity Today, named Southwestern Seminary the top theological seminary in the United States .^[13]

While at the 1990 SBC in New Orleans , Dilday was quoted as saying the “crass, secular political methodology used in the Takeover of the Convention these past twelve years has satanic and evil qualities to which I am desperately opposed.” Seminary trustee chair Jimmy Draper was reported to have called other trustees about a possible meeting to “deal with Dilday.” Dilday explained he was not implying that fellow believers were satanic.^[14i]

Trustees lauded Dilday for fifteen years of “able leadership and administration” at the seminary during his March 1993 evaluation.^[15] He was then abruptly fired March 9, 1994, only one day after he had received the favorable job-performance evaluation and trustees said no action was planned against the embattled president. Trustees gave no official reasons for the firing. Trustee chair Ralph Pulley, a member of First Baptist Church in Dallas , told Dilday: “We don’t need a reason. We can do it. We have the votes, and we will.”^[16]

Trustees voted on preprinted ballots. Two letters were also pre­prepared, one if Dilday retired and the other if he were fired. Some faculty members received the wrong letter. Within minutes of the firing, trustees changed locks of the president’s office and denied him access. John Earl Seelig, a former seminary vice president, was placed in charge of the seminary’s public rela­tions. Seelig said he had been asked to take the position prior to the firing.^[17]

During the same meeting, trustees withdrew a three-year-old invitation to Keith Parks, extended while he was still president of the Foreign Mission Board, to speak at the seminary’s upcoming spring commencement. William B. Tolar, vice president for academic affairs and provost of the seminary since 1990 and a faculty member since 1965, was later named acting president of the seminary.

In response to widespread anger across the SBC, seminary trustees mailed 40,000 letters to pastors and directors of missions at a cost of $11,000 to explain their reasons for firing Dilday.^[18] In addition to failing to support the Takeover, the letter accused Dilday of holding “liberal views of scripture.”^[19] The letter specifically accused Dilday of demonstrating “a commitment to the principles of higher criticism, which spawned theological liberalism (modernism), neo-orthodoxy, the death of God, situational ethics, etc.” Dilday said he was “appalled by the “inaccuracies and distortions of truth” in the trustees’ letter.^[20] Seminary faculty, in an open letter to Southern Baptists, rejected the charges in the trustees’ letter and affirmed Dilday for his conservative theology and “traditional, conservative Southern Baptist views of the Scriptures.”^[21]

In 1994, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), one of SWBTS’s accrediting agencies, cited six concerns regarding Dilday’s firing and called for the seminary to show cause why it should not be placed on probation. ATS executive director James Waits said the firing was “a clear violation of acceptable governance practices”^[22] and issued a written rebuke to the trustees.^[23] In early 1995, ATS placed Southwestern Seminary on probation for two years.

Among its findings, ATS said a survey of the faculty found 67.2 percent of the faculty said academic freedom of some professors had been violated, and 88.1 percent said trustees were not acting responsibly in guiding the seminary.^[24] The probation was lifted early in June of 1996.

In July 1994, seminary trustees unanimously elected church growth strate­gist and former pastor, Kenneth S. Hemphill, forty-six, as the seventh president of the seminary. Hemphill said he was dedicated to hiring faculty members who were committed to biblical inerrancy.^[25] At about the same time, Dilday announced he would join Baylor University ’s new George W. Truett Theological Seminary as distinguished professor of homiletics and special assistant to the university’s president, effective August 1, 1994.^[26]  

In 2003, Paige Patterson, one of the two architects of the SBC Takeover, returned to his home state to assume the presidency of Southwestern Seminary, the SBC’s largest.  

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