New Baylor President Ken Starr needs to be as clear about his theology as he wanted Bill Clinton to be about his sexual activities

Back in the 1990s, when the flame of Southern Baptist interest in establishing better relations with other Christian denominations was flickering and getting ready to go out, our home was practically ground zero for Southern Baptist ecumenical dialogue.

At that time Southern Baptists had only two official dialogues under way with other Christian groups—Roman Catholics and Churches of Christ. I served as one of the 10 Southern Baptists on the Roman Catholic-Southern Baptist dialogue; my wife Kay served as one of the 10 Southern Baptists on the Churches of Christ-Southern Baptist dialogue team. Kay at one time was the only female among the 20 Southern Baptists, 10 Roman Catholics and 10 representatives of the Churches of Christ—40 people all total—serving on the two teams.

To say we had a ringside seat on these discussions would be an understatement. Both dialogue teams each met for dinner and discussion in our home for one of their meetings.

I was invited to be on the RCC-SB dialogue team because of my extensive interest in the Roman Catholic Church and the fact that as religion editor of the Houston Chronicle I had traveled with Pope John Paul II on some of his many trips abroad and had spent about a month working in Rome covering the Vatican.

Kay was invited to be a participant in the Churches of Christ dialogue because of her extensive knowledge of and interest in the Churches of Christ. Her paternal grandfather was a minister in the Churches of Christ and her father was a lifelong member of a Church of Christ congregation. Only the fact that her dad's particular Church of Christ in their hometown in the late 1940s did not have an air-conditioner and the local Baptist church did kept Kay from growing up a member of a Church of Christ. Instead her mother—with Kay's father's blessings—chose to remain a Southern Baptist and to rear Kay in a Southern Baptist church which had a wonderfully cool church nursery for Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday-night services.

Recently we were reminded of how these two strains--Baptist and Churches of Christ--flowed into our own lives when our alma mater, Baptist-born-and-bred Baylor University in Waco, TX, announced that Judge Ken Starr, a born-and-bred member of the Churches of Christ, would be the new (14th) president of the school. While most alumni are fixated on Starr's controversial—and some say divisive—political life, we were intrigued and puzzled by his Churches of Christ heritage and affiliation and the odd statement in the Baylor press release rather deep in the story announcing that Judge Starr plans to join a Baptist church on arrival in Waco.

(News reports say Starr is officially a member of non-denominational mega-church McLean Bible Church in Virginia where Evangelical politicos often have their memberships. Church of Christ sources say, however, he was a "weekly attender" at the University Church of Christ on the Church of Christ-affiliated Pepperdine University campus in California where until February 15 he was the dean of the Pepperdine Law School.)

This brought back memories of some of the most controversial points in the Southern Baptist-Churches of Christ dialogue. Most interesting was the fact that the 10 members of the Churches of Christ team did not fit at all the traditional Southern Baptist stereotypes of members of the Churches of Christ. These were not people who were against just about everything progressive in church life—such as pianos, organs, Sunday School, nurseries, homes for the aged, and so forth. The Churches of Christ team members were erudite, articulate, positive, and surprising in their receptivity to new things and in their presentation of their theology—a far cry from backwoods locales in which Churches of Christ members were stereotyped for the things they were against more than for anything positive.

Southern Baptists on the COC-SB dialogue team also were surprised at the many negative stereotypes the Churches of Christ members had of their denomination, too.

Theologically the biggest sticking point between Southern Baptists and Churches of Christ has traditionally been the matter of baptism. Southern Baptists believe salvation occurs through faith in Jesus Christ as one's personal Lord and Savior. Southern Baptists believe baptism is a symbolic act after salvation and illustrates what has occurred inwardly in an individual. Members of the Churches of Christ, on the other hand, believe salvation occurs through baptism. COC members believe salvation occurs in the actual act of immersion. Thus, COC members are more in keeping with Roman Catholic theology and mainline Protestant theology which link salvation and baptism together. Though those may sound like technicalities to some people, these are major theological dividing points in Christianity.

During the dialogue, Kay found some of the COC team members hedging on whether salvation is through baptism alone. (Members of the Church of Christ team almost universally confided that the very oldest Churches of Christ members--people in Kay's grandfather's generation--were far less adamant about baptism for salvation than younger members were and documented how that particular controversial tenet increasingly "gathered steam" as the movement progressed). She often returned home from the dialogues reporting that some of the participants sounded more like Baptists than the stereotypical COC members. She was particularly fascinated by COC participants who insisted COC members are more diverse in their theology than most people believe.

And of course we know Southern Baptists who are equally as diverse and who also hedge on whether they think immersion in water is actually necessary for salvation to occur.

From our experiences on these dialogue teams and other life experiences, we both learned that one needs to listen carefully to what a member of a particular denomination says he or she believes before assuming that the person falls in lock-step with whatever the prevailing theological stereotype is of the person's denominational beliefs.

That's why we are eager to learn more about what the new Baylor president actually believes about theology as well as other important issues. We hope in the next weeks and months Judge Ken Starr will articulate as clearly as he wanted President Bill Clinton to articulate in the courtroom and that he (Starr) will state emphatically what he truly believes about baptism and salvation as well as about minor issues such as whether a church ought to have instrumental music in its worship center, whether a church ought to celebrate Easter, and whether he agrees with the traditional Churches of Christ viewpoint on the role of women in public worship.

Baylor University's presidential announcement puzzling

I'm puzzled by the way Baylor University made the announcement of Ken Starr as the next president of Baylor.

I heard about it in an email from a friend who is editor of the national Church of Christ publication. He wrote wanting to know if Starr would be the first non-Baptist president of Baylor.

With no Baylor announcement to Baylor alumni in any of our email inboxes, Kay and I then checked out Starr on Wikipedia, which already listed Starr as the 14th president of Baylor University.

Finally about 30 minutes later the announcement from Baylor arrived in our inboxes. The fact that Starr is Church of Christ was buried deep in the story. The story also noted that Starr promised to join a Baptist church as soon as he arrives in Waco.

Absent in the story was anything that truly connected Starr to Baylor past or present. Now he is the future of our alma mater! He was until a few minutes ago the dean of the law school at Pepperdine University, the Church of Christ West Coast school.

So do you get hired as Baylor president by promising to join a Baptist church? Or when you become Baylor president does your theology suddenly shift from C of C to Southern Baptist? Interesting development.

For more on this development watch this blog later tonight.

Baylor Alumni Association fails to reflect the school's diversity, width, and breadth

One of the many things I enjoyed about being a big-city newspaper reporter was personal access to news events and newsmakers.  Instead of having to read about people and events through the filter of others, I was there as an  eyewitness.

I was reminded of this perk the other day when I drove past the place in which the much-anticipated meeting for the Baylor Alumni Association was about to be held. My wife said to me, "You like to see things firsthand, so why don't you just go on in?" So I did.

Kay knew that for the past several years I've been concerned about the direction the BAA has taken.

What I saw and heard at that meeting in the chapel at Truett Seminary on the Baylor campus confirmed my worst fears. While proclaiming its desire to represent all Baylor alumni and be the true and independent voice for all Baylor graduates, the organization has in effect been hijacked by a small group of disgruntled alumni who have a political agenda (a.k.a. "an axe to grind!") that they are very carefully carrying out.

Seldom do I attend a meeting in which I feel I am among the youngest in the audience. Even though I am 63, I felt a virtual youngster at this meeting. As I looked around I saw an overabundance of people who could best be described as a "Who Was Who" at Baylor many years ago. These former administrators, former faculty members, and former student leaders seemed to have one agenda: to re-claim the days of yesteryear.

This tiny minority of alumni want to turn the clock back to the days when Herbert H. Reynolds ran the university with his iron fist—the days when everything on campus was as Herb wanted it to be, or else. Or else included faculty and students—liberal or conservative—who didn't bow to his authority and were shunned or tossed aside. The group also didn't want to acknowledge that the glory days of Robert Sloan, Herb's young and visionary successor, ever existed. Many in the room were in the mob that at Herb's instigation ran off Sloan, throwing the university into its current state of political instability and chaos.

At the BAA meeting Herb's name, history, and family were invoked numerous times—almost causing some of his loyalists to genuflect—while Sloan's name, history and family were never acknowledged or present in any way.  Herb's daughter, Rhonda, who led the attacks on Sloan, sits on the BAA board and at this meeting was awarded an honorary leadership position; his widow, Joy, was introduced with adulation. But nary a word was said about Sloan, his wife, Sue, or any of their seven children who like their parents also are Baylor graduates. Nor was a kind word said at all about Sloan's wounded friends or allies or any of the good things accomplished under the Sloan administration. 

I easily concluded that working together for the benefit of ALL Baylor alumni is simply not on the agenda of BAA. Instead divisiveness fills its agenda.

The focus of the meeting was on the current Baylor administration's proposal to assist the BAA in becoming what it should be--a forum for ALL Baylor alumni that unites and motivates instead of divides and weakens.  Instead of supporting the administration's plan, the folks gathered at the BAA meeting last Friday were poised to spit in the eye of yet another administration (the third since Reynolds) that they cannot control.

 

Several days after the meeting, the Baylor administration withdrew its fair-and-balanced proposal, basically letting the BAA wander off on its divisive and schismatic way. 

Baylor needs to march forward into its bright future acknowledging the diversity of its large group of alumni and its great past, including the many good things accomplished by both the Reynolds and Sloan as well as other administrations. What it doesn't need is a small band of gray-haired, angry, schismatics continuing to masquerade as speaking for alumni that they truly don't have any intention of representing fairly. 

Reflections on two presidential inaugurations 40 years apart

 

Forty years ago, on January 20, I was serving as editor of The Baylor Lariat, the student newspaper at Baylor University in Waco, TX, and busy supervising the newspaper's coverage of the inauguration of Richard Nixon to succeed Lyndon B. Johnson as President of the United States.
 

Our student newspaper desks contained the old Royal manual typewriters. Stories were typed on paper, then edited by hand before being transported by foot across campus to the Baylor Press, where they were keypunched into an old linotype machine complete with hot, molten metal.
 

We watched the Nixon inauguration on a 13-inch, black-and-white TV carted into The Lariat newsroom for inauguration day. We obtained our Associated Press wire stories about the event from an old AP machine that noisily flowed a steady stream of paper from its top.
 

This past Tuesday, January 20, I thought back to those days while I visited The Baylor Lariat offices, one of my few times since 1969 to be there. I just marveled at how things had changed and yet how they had remained so much the same.
 

Student reporters this week sat in front of beautiful, clean iMac screens. They watched the news on a large, overhead color TV that appeared to be a permanent fixture in The Lariat newsroom. Their news of the inauguration of Barack Obama arrived via emails and blogs written by four Lariat students in D.C. for the event. (Student reporters in my day would have been blown away by the possibility of The Lariat paying their way to Washington for the inauguration.) Lariat stories and layouts of the paper moved electronically at lightning speed across campus to the printing presses of the local Waco newspaper.  
 

Watching President Obama's inauguration also stirred other memories of four decades earlier. I entered Baylor the same semester John Westbrook broke the racial barrier, moved into Baylor's Martin Hall (where I lived at the time), and joined the Baylor Bears on the football field. As The Lariat editor in 1968-69, I hired the first African-American reporter for the school's newspaper. His name was Willie White. I worked diligently to see that he was in line to become editor of The Lariat two years later. I also wrote an editorial in The Lariat welcoming Dr. Vivienne Mayes as the first Baylor professor of African-American heritage to the campus. My editorial scolded the Baylor administration for waiting so long to hire a black professor and also for trying to play down the fact that Dr. Mayes had been denied admission as a student some years earlier because of her race.
 

So here I was 40 years to the day later sitting in The Lariat newsroom watching on TV as America inaugurated its first President of African-American heritage. The goose bumps told me that was actually more overwhelming than was seeing the computers sitting on the students' desks.

(Adding to my feeling of being surrounded by history, later that day I also was on Interstate 35 after former President George Bush landed in Waco and his motorcade traveled on to Crawford.)
 

I was there as a guest of the Journalism Department to talk about my career in religion journalism and my new book, Witness to the Truth about my 40-year career. I spent two days lecturing in classes, chatting with students, and visiting with professors in both the journalism and religion departments. What a marvelous and humbling experience it was!
 

I must admit I felt a bit ancient looking into the faces of the young student journalists—and even into the faces of many of the journalism professors. I was grateful that my host, longtime friend from college days and now Baylor journalism professor Mike Blackman, accompanied me most of the time I faced the youngsters.

I also thanked God that most of the religion professors with whom I dined were around my vintage.
 

Lariat reporter Jenna Williamson did a excellent job in her interview and article about Kay and me being back in The Lariat newsroom for the inauguration coverage. (Though she certainly doesn't look like she's been around that long, Kay had been city editor of The Lariat back then.)

Students seemed bright-eyed and eager to learn. I particularly enjoyed giving lectures on ethics in the media. Some of my greatest delights arrived afterward when Jenna, Mike, and others wrote to say students were still discussing what I had to say about ethics in the field of journalism. I had been able to tell by their eyes, rapt attention, and questions that they were listening without diversion.
 

As Kay and I bid adieu to the faculty and students Wednesday afternoon, we felt really good about the future of newspaper reporting in the next generation. Baylor journalism grads have always been a magnificent lot. Our peers have contributed much to newspapers over the past 40 years. I'm now confident that tradition will carry forth into future years.

Baylor's "palace coup" shows moderates act increasingly like their stereotype of fundamentalists

When during the late 1980s and early 1990s the so-called fundmentalists (also known as the conservatives) opted to clean the Southern Baptist Convention's top bureaucracy of outspoken moderates, hardcore moderates at Baylor University screamed their heads off about the ruthless, vicious way they believed the conservatives were going about their task. Because of those firings, even when good reasons existed for some of them, Baylor's moderates painted the conservatives as people lacking in decency, honor, and just plain good manners. 

So why now—more than a decade later—are Baylor's moderates acting as boorish and ruthless as those they accused back in the 1990s? Somebody needs to pin them to the floor and get them to explain their contradictory actions today.

I say this because on Thursday, July 24, for the second time in recent memory, Baylor's regents fired the university's president.  Of course, they didn't use the word "fired", but that's what they did. Their public-relations staff issued a press release that danced all around the facts.  You had to read deep inside the whitewash to garner the information: President John Lilley refused to go quietly into the night, so he was uncerimoniously dumped, with a regent named immediately as acting president.

I was not a supporter of Lilley's presidency--nothing personal against President Lilley, but simply because he was replacement for Robert Sloan, his predecessor. I've never met the man. I did think, however, that he brought at least a sense of respectable calm and dignity after the storm Baylor's moderates stirred up against former President Sloan.

According to the press release, Lilley was fired to help unite Baylor's warring factions. I'm trying to figure out that one; I thought that was the same reason the regents hired Lilley in the first place. He was supposed to be a peacekeeper and quiet interim, not a lightning rod for moderate anger like Sloan became. 

So who is at war at Baylor right now anyway? Those of us who supported Robert Sloan have mostly sat on the sidelines for the past three years and watched Lilley's benign style with less-than-enthusiastic interest. He seemed to mean no harm, though issues that plagued Sloan also seemed to dog him, too. 

The way Baylor's hardcore moderates treated Robert Sloan was a disgrace, but Sloan has gone to Houston now. I trust he is continuing to do well and has a happy, good life as president of Houston Baptist University. Many of us who supported him are still exhausted from watching in horror as the children of Sloan's predecessors, Dr. Herb Reynolds and Dr. Abner V. McCall, and their moderate buddies bludgeoned Sloan unmercifully, including slanders calling him a "fundmentalist" (which he was not). Apparently the Reynolds-McCall mob couldn't cope with all the good things Sloan accomplished for the school! 

If Sloan's supporters were not fighting against poor Lilley, then who was? As Sesame Street's Big Bird would say, "Today's program was brought to you by the letter M." The "M", of course, stands for the word "moderates". 

The situation right now gives every appearance that the hardcore Baylor moderates saw their chance to strike down Lilley quickly to set the stage to put one of their own on the throne at Baylor.

For several months now I have heard the rumors that Lilley was "on the way out". Since he was hired so late in his life, I've always figured his tenure as president would be short. Since I've been hearing about this for two months now, I presume what happened today was not a big surprise to a lot of Baylor insiders. My hunch is behind the scenes some political scheming and deal-making have been going on.

But firing the poor fellow? In such a cruel manner? And at an age where he is unlikely to ever get another job in a university administration? Did the regents also lock this Baylor alum's office door and refuse to let him re-enter it to claim his personal possessions? Is this and the scene beforehand with BU graduate Sloan the way an alma mater treats distinguished alumni?

And the moderate-dominated Baylor Alumni Association's response?  Its lack of indignation over the regents' ugly behavior is puzzling. Its less-than-convincing statement about the upheaval makes one wonder what role the alumni organization actually played behind the scenes in this latest palace coup. Sloan supporters also couldn't help but notice that during the past three years the BAA has been rewarding Sloan's critics, especially the Reynolds family and its friends, with seats on its own board. So, I'm not surprised at the BAA's actions at the moment.

What did Lilley do wrong?  Fail to grant tenure to a handful of professors? Did the moderates' beloved Herb Reynolds not do that also? Or was that OK because he only shunned conservatives and truth-telling journalists—banishing even liberals who questioned him?

Baylor students and alumni deserve better than the sorry politics that have engulfed the university during the past decade, thanks to Reynolds and his ilk.  Robert Sloan deserved better. John Lilley deserved better, too.

Next time Baylor's moderates point fingers at the SBC's conservative leadership, somebody needs to tell them to first go look in the mirror. After protesting so loudly for years about the SBC's so-called fundamentalists, apparently Baylor's moderates have now morphed into what they hated so much!