An open letter to the Southern Baptist Convention By Wallace B. Henley, Exclusive Columnist for Christian Post
Dear Southern Baptists:
Though I am an elderly man, I am your kid.
And though I am no longer a pastor in a Southern Baptist church, I am employing skills and applying knowledge you nurtured in me beginning in 1950 when I first joined a Southern Baptist church at age nine.
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
Through scholarships and grants you enabled me to graduate from a Baptist school, Samford University, and then attend Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Alabama Baptists surprised me in 1983-1985 by twice electing me president of the million-member Alabama Baptist State Convention.
You licensed me to ministry in 1958 and ordained me in 1962. From 1973 to 2019 I had the privilege of serving as pastor or associate pastor of Southern Baptist churches, including your largest, Second Baptist of Houston. There I was a senior associate pastor for eighteen years under one of your finest leaders, Dr. Ed Young.
While I am not currently in a Baptist pulpit, my love for you has not faded. There are three great themes that have reverberated in my spirit and soul, whether in newspaper journalism, covering the turmoil of the 1960s, or in the White House where I served three intense years, or the U.S. House of Representatives where I worked as an aide for a year.
The vision the Lord used you to instill in me has never faded and continues to drive me in my eighth decade of life to the extent I cannot sit down and be still.
Those three great themes that the Holy Spirit seared into my heart using you as an instrument were these:
- The Bible is the inerrant Word of God, fully inspired by the Holy Spirit.
- Evangelism is the passion of our existence as a body of Christians seeking to work together.
- Missions is critical to our task, and we must keep our eyes and minds open to the whole world as our mission field, beginning with our own communities.
I write this letter to you in the wake of your recent convention in Nashville. My mind and emotions traveled back over the decades. In all those conflicts, we were intensely conscious of outside forces trying to deepen the wedges that we ourselves had first opened in our fellowship. Those issues, their propagators, propagandists, and perpetuators, diverted our passion for evangelism and the energy and material resources for global missions, and weakened commitment to the highest view of biblical inspiration and authority.
