A few months back, I shared my reaction to Matthew Barrett’s less-than-discreet departure from both Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the entire Southern Baptist tradition for the troubled terrain of contemporary Anglicanism. At the end of that first reflection, I initially planned on exploring further what “I deem the deeper pathology at work in Barrett’s move, as well as in evangelical church life generally—namely, the now multi-generational abandonment of covenant models of congregational life for seeker-sensitive, attractional models.” 

But now, with a massively consequential SBC annual meeting in Orlando barely more than three months out, I’m ready to move beyond Barrett. However, I do have more to say about how our Southern Baptist abandonment of “covenant models of congregational life” for the seeker-sensitive slippery slope has dumped us in a treacherous pattern of repeated and seemingly reflexive accommodation to the Left.

To embark upon a much-needed course correction, one should consider what led us here and who might lead us out. Let’s get started. 

Whither the SBC?

As far as I can judge, the likelihood that the ostensibly conservative Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) will “conserve” what strength it still retains of its theological, cultural, and political faithfulness is not great. A decade of ill-conceived dalliances with progressive political and theological forces has damaged the SBC’s witness to Jesus Christ. However well-meaning its motives, the SBC’s prioritization of “winsomeness to blue communities” calls into question its ability to resist further absorption by the now century-in-the-making progressive march through the institutions.

Nevertheless, gratitude for the SBC’s continued resistance to feminist demands for the ordination of women as pastors would be hard to overstate, even as the struggle to stop egalitarian compromise continues. We are indebted to Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler for the clear stand he took on this matter in the face of Rick Warren’s brazen declaration that he does more for the advance of the gospel (while blessing women pastors) than does the entire Southern Baptist Convention. President Mohler’s recently announced partnership with Robert P. George of Princeton University, along with an array of high-profile evangelicals seeking to overturn Obergfell, marks one of many bold and courageous efforts that have characterized the SBTS president’s leadership. 

Still, even as some of our secular and political institutions in American life are “leaving woke behind,” our denominational branding, messaging, and platforming regularly adjust to SBC elite readings of progressive-community cultural and political sensibilities.

The problems in the SBC are still, fundamentally, a problem of leadership. Or rather, a lack of leadership. We enjoyed such leadership not so long ago. It thundered from the pulpits of Adrian Rogers and W.A. Criswell. It echoed from Charles Stanley’s broadcasts. It was lightning in a bottle of cleansing fire from a young Al Mohler at SBTS in 1993. 

What happened? 

When Leaders Lose Their Nerve, Secular Market Forces Take Over

The most potent prospective sources of needed leadership in the SBC reside in 1) the annually-elected president of the SBC and 2) the presidential offices of our seminaries—three of which positions will likely be filled with new men in the near future (Southeastern, Southwestern, and Southern). 

Unfortunately, the behavior of our Convention presidents and SBC seminary presidents over the last decade suggests that they’ve feared losing Timothy Keller-influenced prospective students more than they’ve feared alienating their Trump-voting Southern Baptist constituency. Such a hierarchy of fears may seem warranted by the SBC establishment’s doubt that Southern Baptist critics from their conservative Right can mobilize sufficient votes at annual conventions to effect the changes they seek. 

So far, that doubt has proven largely justified (though the grassroots campaign to force real change at the ERLC, which led to Brent Leatherwood’s resignation, is a success story in the making). Accordingly, SBC brass too often respond more readily to perceived external threats than to challenges churning in-house, so to speak.

Responsiveness to large political and cultural realities may not always signal Bible-abandoning accommodation to the world. But too often, SBC moves do not so much suggest efforts to bear faithful witness as to package products and services to appeal to the progressive/urban community’s market sensibility. The seminary presidents need to attract students. For fifteen-plus years, the pool of prospective students our seminary presidents have been most loath to offend and most anxious to attract has been those identified with the Timothy Keller iteration of the Reformed Resurgence in evangelical life.

Could the fracturing and shrinking of that pool of prospective students open the door for the search for other markets to target? 

The post-Charlie Kirk assassination phenomenon, including the surge in requests to launch TPUSA chapters at high schools and universities, could lead to SBC adjustments in a less blue direction. If such a turn materializes, alienated Southern Baptist conservatives should rejoice but also lament that the impetus for change issued from market-driven readings of conditions outside the Southern Baptist family rather than from warranted theological critique from within. 

Absent generationally-transformative strong leadership, the SBC’s decision to settle for market-oriented efforts to protect and grow institutional assets should not surprise us. The last time such leadership appeared among us was during the Conservative Resurgence, primarily through Paige Patterson. Patterson led in the literal sense of that word. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and Charlie Kirk also led others in this strong sense. They “created markets,” mobilizable markets, through their leadership. They forged paths of their own choosing and inspired others to follow them.

We need that sort of leadership now. 

How to Solve a Problem Like the Fear of (Left-Leaning) Man?

Too many colleges and universities in America have become factories pumping out pro-abortion, pro-open borders, gay-marriage supporting, trans-rights activist, Democrat Party voters. The “leadership” their presidents provide reflects accommodation to market conditions and a ranking of fears of the sort I’ve sketched above. 

Such secular “entity heads” correctly judge that progressives inside and outside the institutions under their care are much more likely to protest publicly, set fires, topple statuary, deface property, accuse them of racism, invade campuses, and stoke violence than are conservatives. Accordingly, progressive agendas are catered to; conservative ones are not. Perhaps no class of Americans exhibits more clearly what living by fear produces than do presidents of universities.

Dependent upon a more conservative constituency as its base, SBC entity heads, while cognizant of Southern Baptists’ support for Donald Trump, Mike Stone, Tom Ascol, and Voddie Baucham, are not particularly afraid of them. Whom do they fear? Operatives on the Left, such as Rachel Denhollander, JD Greear, Russell Moore, and anyone who might call them racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc. When, on occasion, lefty accommodation blows up in their faces, SBC seminary presidents sometimes take recourse to President Obama’s infamous “leading from behind” tactic.

Recall when then-SBTS professor Curtis Woods, while chairing the SBC Resolutions Committee, sparked an avalanche of criticism after he touted and rammed through Resolution 9 at the Convention in Birmingham. That Resolution commended Critical Race Theory as an appropriate hermeneutical tool for interpreting scripture. Uh oh! Lefty SBC accommodation found itself caught in the harsh klieg lights of public exposure, with the sordid details disseminated through national news outlets. Now what? Resolution 9 was then branded as unwise. Leading from behind? 

The default tendency of Convention responses to many controversial issues, when pressure mounts, remains demonstrably sympathetic to the Left. The women-as-pastors coalition remains alive and poised for action, and our entity heads’ dread of being smeared as racist continues.       

Wet-finger-in-the-cultural-and-political-wind branding, messaging, and platforming suffuse what passes for leadership in the current SBC. Yes, the conservative base on which our institutions depend limits how far to the Left the SBC ventures. But unless conservatives elect an SBC president or two, and soon, the SBC Overton Window will continue to move in an increasingly liberal direction.

The pressure to protect and grow institutional assets shouldered by SBC entity heads prompts them to accommodate a fierce and left-lurching culture. That’s how “loving one’s neighbor” became a basket full of Democrat Party priorities, preferences, and peccadillos. 

Thus, our churches were called to provide safe spaces where the same-sex-attracted can “tell their stories,” but where chagrined and fearful residents of Dearborn, Michigan, surrounded by Sharia-loving Muslims, cannot. 

The sanctification of Christian votes for a morally insane Democrat party proceeded while Trump voters were charged with idolatry, fundamentalism, and Pharisaism. 

Kevin Smith’s smearing of political conservatives as “prostitutes for Trump” was tolerated while liberation theology-friendly professors Jarvis Williams and Walter Strickland were assiduously shielded from objectors such as Voddie Baucham, Carol Swain, Virgil Walker, and now Chad O. Jackson. 

Presbyterian Kevin DeYoung was platformed by SBC entities over Southern Baptists Mike Stone and Tom Ascol, even as SBC presidents feigned pursuit of Southern Baptist unity. The ironies abound. Can this spiritually compromising and corrosive state of affairs change?

Who Can Make a Difference?     

The best near-term hope for an SBC willing to dial back its fear of progressives and re-embrace unapologetic conservatism centers on the future prospects and actions of two people: Albert Mohler and Willy Rice. 

Mohler, if he decides to leverage his cultural and political views more forcefully in his leadership of Southern Seminary and/or if he endorses Willy Rice’s candidacy for president of the SBC and/or if he wisely influences the selection of his successor at SBTS. 

Rice, if he is elected to the SBC presidency in June and takes effective actions to address denominational problems he has identified, namely corruption, financial malfeasance,  and the cowardly placation of threatening progressives. To learn more about Willy Rice and his seven pillars of small-r reform for the SBC, visit his website here: https://baptistrenewal.us/. 

I’ll undoubtedly have more to say about Rice in the months to come, but for the remainder of this installment, I want to explore and contrast the potential happy prospects of a Mohler-led future for the SBC with the continuation of the dangerous model set by his North Carolina counterpart, SEBTS president Danny Akin. 

Why We Need the “Whole” Mohler 

Given his role as president of the SBC’s oldest and still flagship seminary and his decades-long investment in the intersection of theology, culture, and politics, Mohler has been and is now better equipped than any other single person to lead a righting of the SBC ship. His decades of public thinking as a self-confessed theological and political conservative equip him for such a task. 

But Mohler’s careful separation of his political conservatism and engagement with culture from his voice as SBTS president and as a major player in the SBC has deprived Southern Baptists of urgently needed benefits he is uniquely equipped and institutionally positioned to deliver. We need the whole Albert Mohler to lead Southern Seminary going forward, not only the least politically engaged version. The SBC needs the trumpet blast of the Mohler of World Opinions and The Briefing to sound in its ears.

At 66, Mohler’s transition out of the SBTS presidency is on his mind and should be on ours as well. In November of 2024, Mohler sat for what turned out to be a remarkable interview with Sean DeMars on the Room For Nuance podcast. In four-plus decades of observance of the one who leads my beloved alma mater, nowhere does the best of Albert Mohler, the man, shine through so clearly as in his sit-down with DeMars. 

Asked about transition to new leadership at Southern, Mohler responded, “I shouldn’t say too much here…there is a formal plan…I didn’t spend my entire adult lifetime helping to build this institution in order to dissipate it in the end.” And build he did.

Mohler did not squander the opportunity afforded to him, to me, and to many others by Paige Patterson’s strong leadership that rescued SBC institutions from the grip of theological liberalism. Mohler contributed to the SBC’s urgently needed course correction once upon a time. I pray he does so again with every millibar of energy left to him.

Would that the SBC could become, once again, a powerful national spiritual engine to which many could confidently and profitably hitch their wagons. Do local church autonomy and the dispersed authority within the SBC to which our trustee system gives rise render such hopes fantastical? Or might one or two of our SBC entities, such as Southern Seminary, play a decisive leading role under strong leadership?

For too long, SBC entities have hitched their branding, messaging, and platforming wagons to smaller, fleeting, and trendy spiritual movements and celebrity figures. Is that a practice worthy of a nine-plus billion-dollar, asset-wielding denomination?  Outsourcing our messaging to the Keller phenomenon was a mistake. Let’s learn from it and lead rather than be led. 

Might Mohler’s post-Kirk-assassination comments signal a pivot away from the Keller-fixated SBC era, and the beginning of a Kirk/TPUSA-friendly near future? Before Kirk’s assassination, no SBC seminaries platformed TPUSA voices. They were busy nodding, brows furrowed, before Jim Wallis, Sam Allberry, JD Greear, and the PCA’s Kevin DeYoung—an insightful pastor-theologian who also periodically assumed the role of tone-monitor, mood gate-keeper, and scold who lets the “scolded ones” know that he has no intention of sparing much if any of his precious time responding to objections from the “scolded ones.” But Kirk and TPUSA might as well not have existed for the SBC seminaries. 

Then, lo and behold, after the explosive national reaction to Kirk’s assassination, Mohler wisely canceled chapel plans at Southern and instead conducted a fascinating panel discussion about what had happened. Moher said: 

“Charlie Kirk was an amazing young man…he was a political activist, a public speaker, a public leader, an organizer. He was a provocateur. It was the very love for that kind of debate that set him in Utah yesterday on a college campus, under a tent, with the charge, Prove me wrong…he was incredibly powerful. I don’t think any movement has a future that does not mobilize youth. I think in his generation, Charlie was unique, and frankly, at a time when no one thought this was going to happen, he was incredibly powerful…I think someone like Charlie, for instance, in taking on the LGBTQ issues and all the rest, was just far more effective than anyone prior to him in terms of activating young people to understand what’s at stake.”

Such a commendation from Mohler, and in the Alumni chapel no less, was a welcome breath of fresh air.

Might appropriate screening questions for aspirants to the presidencies of SBC seminaries run something like this: “How do you assess the ministry of Charlie Kirk, including his public support for Donald Trump? Please explain in detail. Do you find yourself more in sync with Timothy Keller’s view of the proper relationship between politics and culture and the mission of the church or with that of Charlie Kirk?” 

Contrast Mohler’s response to Kirk’s assassination with that of Southeastern Seminary president Danny Akin here. Akin fails to identify Kirk as a Christian. The statement here, signed by all the SBC entity heads, is much better. 

But take note, before the assassination, Timothy Keller-friendly streams of evangelical influence loomed large in SBC branding, messaging, and platforming—Kirk and TPUSA were nowhere to be found. SBC brass deemed silence on the Kirk assassination risky, even though they know that Keller world views Kirk’s Christian engagement of politics as an invitation to idolatry. 

The SBC, too often of late, has reacted to the “watching world” that James Merritt fears to offend rather than lead and let that lost world respond as they will. SBC brass has repeatedly picked high-profile influencers they deem useful for the growth of the institutions they steward for us, adopted portions of the language and emphases of those influencers, and then slathered the borrowings with hermeneutical goop and religious cliches, “for such a time as this.” 

Fine—now that the Keller experiment has failed, why not give Kirk/TPUSA a go and learn to lead, as Kirk did?

But if we are going to do that, we need more “whole” Mohler-like leadership and less Akin-accommodation. 

Enough Akin Already

This may be controversial with some, but my comments here are neither personal nor vindictive. My encouragement to reject “any more Akin” is not about the man as such but about the record and the clear implications of what the “Akin vision for the SBC” has produced—and will keep producing if it’s not left behind. 

In my opinion, the SBC should avoid any further deepening of the nepotism-tainted spread of the Akin family influence. No SBC seminary president has done more damage to Southern Baptists for the last decade than has Danny Akin, damage that I and others have identified and examined here, here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere. 

The problem is not just that Akin has led Southern Baptists from his perch at SEBTS into the open waters of wokeness and theological liberalism. It’s also how he has responded to (in fact, bullied) critics.

In an attempt to shield black liberation theology-friendly professor Walter Strickland from my critique of his views, Akin had Southeastern’s attorney send a letter to my employers at Samford University accusing me of slander. Thanks to laws governing disputes between public figures and my tenured status, Akin’s bullying attempts to frighten and silence me failed. But how many others have Akin and other SBC bullies succeeded in silencing by threatening to jeopardize their livelihoods?

What ought to have occurred after my critique of Strickland? What recourse did Strickland have to respond? The same recourse I and other such public figures have—they may, as did I on a few occasions, choose not to respond at all, or they may publish a response, thus engaging in public conversation like adults. But as I have written elsewhere, the last thing Danny Akin and many other white male heads of institutions want where Wokeness lives and breathes is public conversation that includes pronouncedly un-woke voices, especially black voices.

That is why Walter Strickland has enjoyed infantilizing shielding by white men from interaction with the likes of Voddie Baucham and continues to be protected from having to interact with the views of Carol Swain, Virgil Walker, and Chad O. Jackson, et al. White men at the top use blacks for their own purposes. Baucham, Swain, Walker, and Jackson don’t fit the profile suited to that use, so they’re out, no matter their theological compatibility with our denomination’s confessional statements, membership in good standing in Southern Baptist churches, or superior command of issues surrounding race from a biblical perspective.   

After surviving Akin’s attack, I asked him for an apology. Akin responded, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” But after being made aware of documents detailing his bullying, presto!, Akin’s memory functioned a bit better and evoked this half-admission: “We asked you to stop misrepresenting Walter…I will not apologize for something I did not do. I consider the matter closed.”

Still, from the Strickland, Karen Swallow Prior, Keith Whitfield, and Nate Brooks fiascos, to their anti-white “Kingdom Diversity” scholarship program, promotion of radical (even Marxist) climate change ideology (and everything else documented by Megan Basham in Shepherds for Sale), Akin’s collaboration with disgraced plagiarist Ed Litton (who still serves on the board of SEBTS), to the attempts along with his son Jonathan Akin to strongarm First Baptist Naples, ought not Southern Baptists conclude that enough is enough? 

To whom much is given, much is required. Character matters, right? That’s the message Kellerite NeverTrumper SBC critics deliver to 80-plus percent of their constituents. And they are right. Character matters in the Oval Office, and even more so in the presidential offices of our seminaries. 

Conclusion

As my friends at the Center for Baptist Leadership have rightly noted, the main issue plaguing the SBC is a lack of genuine, biblically grounded, authentically Baptist, and courageous leadership. In this article, I considered where that leadership could come from in general (the SBC president and the seminaries), why we haven’t seen it thus far (captivity to seeker-sensitive, winsome-to-the-Left market forces), who might rise to the occasion (the “whole” Mohler) and what we need to leave behind as a failed model in SBC life (the Akin approach). 

The SBC needs sunlight and a rush of fresh air—new faces for new challenges, not Bush-Clinton-like uni-party, wagon-circling, doubling-down, and soft-woke consolidation in the wake of a decade-plus of measurable failure and public disgrace.

In my third entry, I’ll hone in on how the seeker-sensitive model in the SBC has led to widespread denominational disinterest and what it might take to rekindle the spark in grassroots Baptists to mobilize for real change—for both Orlando and beyond.

Stay tuned.