Chapter 8   The Takeover Breaks Ground

In June 1979, the annual meeting of the SBC was held in Houston, Texas. A few months earlier, Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson had announced that they and their colleagues were going to elect a “conservative” SBC president and restore the SBC to its “historical roots.”

Pressler, a state appeals court judge in Houston (now retired), and Patterson, then president of Criswell College in Dallas, had adopted an overall strategy for controlling the Convention. These two men had met years earlier while Patterson was a student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Pressler had proposed a political strategy to Patterson to elect a president in sympathy with their objectives. The presi­dent would, in turn, nominate like-minded people to the Convention’s committee on committees. This committee would nominate like-minded people to the committee on nominations. This second committee would nominate like-minded trustees and directors to Southern Baptist agencies and institutions who would hire only like-minded staff members.

Adrian Rogers, pastor of the Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, was selected by the Pressler-Patterson coalition as their candidate for president of the SBC in 1979.

Largely due to a large get-out-the-vote campaign Pressler and Patterson conducted in fifteen states prior to the Convention, Rogers was elected on the first ballot, even though there were six candidates, several of them very conservative.^[6] Fundamentalist candidates have won the Convention presidency every year since 1979, although Jim Henry was not the hand-picked candidate in 1994-1995.

Going for the Jugular.  In the strictest sense, the Southern Baptist Convention exists for only a few days each year — while the annual meeting is in session. The work of the Convention is carried out by staff members who are employed by the approximately twenty agencies of the Convention.

The best known of these SBC agencies are the Foreign Mission Board/ International Mission Board, the Home Mission Board/ North American Mission Board, the six seminaries, and the Sunday School Board/ LifeWay Christian Resources, an immensely profitable self-supporting enterprise that publishes and markets literature mainly for Southern Baptists. Most powerful, but probably less well known, is the SBC Executive Committee.

Each of these agencies and institutions is governed by trustees or directors nominated and elected by messengers to the annual meeting of SBC. These trustees set policy, adopt budgets, and employ or fire at least the top level of staff in their respective agencies or institutions. Pressler referred to these individuals in his often-quoted statement in 1980: “We are going for the jugular. We are going for . . . trustees of all our institutions, who are not going to sit there like a bunch of dummies and rubber stamp everything that's presented to them.”

By early 1989, nearly every one of the SBC boards had a majority of Takeover people on it. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, would not “tip over” until 1990. The Home Mission Board, the first agency to be taken over, had a majority of Takeover directors by 1984.  

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