Tom Rush Raises Concerns about SBTS

southern baptists need to understand what the issues are and it pains them to think that that there are some in their leadership that have gone off the track that have gone a direction that is unbiblical uh unsound in doctrine uh which i certainly would say that social justice is unsound and doctrine there's a need for someone uh to sound the alarm to be the watchman on the wall to say we've got a problem here and if we don't deal with this problem it's going to impact our ability to do missions and evangelism into the future i've been in pastoral ministry for uh 38 years my greatest interest in ministry has been preaching and evangelism and i believe those are the two methods by which people are saved preaching of the word and personal witnessing god called me to preach when i was an officer in the navy and i resigned my commission of the navy and went to seminary and began pastoring in 1982 and then because of my military background i had the privilege of of also serving as a chaplain in both the navy and the air force i retired from the air force in 2005 most of my military career was reserves and so during the time that i was serving as a reservist i was also serving as pastor of a local church i'm serving as a trustee from georgia on the southern seminary board i've been on the board for six years now because of my love for the convention i felt like it would be appropriate and it was certainly an honor to be asked i wanted to give back to southern baptist southern baptist done a lot for me and because i was asked to serve i was willing to do so the first several years that i served on the board i felt like things were going very well dr mohler has a tremendous reputation coming out of the conservative resurgence for many of the very positive changes that he made i knew some of the people that were on the board at the time he was elected as president 27 years ago and of course the the changes that occurred at the seminary were significant and returning the seminary to its confessional documents the abstract principles and then the baptist faith and message was i think very critical and after several years on the board i did become concerned that while there was a lot of emphasis on the inerrancy of scripture there was seemingly less emphasis on the sufficiency of scripture and so some some events occurred that just kind of raised some questions for me one of the issues was the use of sam alberry sam alberry is a alleged celibate homosexual priest from from the church of england he's anglican then in his in his theology his philosophy uh runs along the lines of same-sex attraction and the conception that uh that same-sex attraction is an acceptable christian position and i believe that that sin starts in the mind that that it's our thoughts that we have to control to overcome sin albert's position was problematic to me uh he worked at uh one time with an organization called living out and their documents can be found on the internet by anybody uh and these were very troubling and so dr mohler and i had some conversations about using all barry's material and using all barry as a speaker initially he was very defensive of sam alberry later he he said that he agreed with me that some of his positions were problematic and that he could no longer commend his ministry or recommend him as a speaker and yet sometime after telling me that there was a podcast put out by southern seminary where one of the professors interviewed sam albery essentially extolling his ministry and encouraging it and when i questioned dr mohler about that he asked essentially what do you want me to do remove the video and i said yes i think that would be appropriate if you if you would do so and although it was indicated to me that that video would be taken down it never was you know i chose not to press the issue at that point at the same time information that i was receiving from professors and students a concern that the seminary was moving in a direction of support for the woke movement that social justice was gaining a foothold i obtained a copy of some class notes from dr jarvis williams class and if anybody were to read those class notes it would be very clear to them that dr williams was teaching crt critical race theory and intersectionality when again in a trustee meeting questioning uh dr mueller about that his response was well we're we're not teaching critical race theory we're teaching about it now that's concerning to me because when i was a student at southeastern back in the 80s one of the issues was the historical critical method of interpretation of the old testament and the president of southeastern at the time had stated that we're not teaching the historical critical method we're teaching about it but i was in the classroom having jepd crammed down my throat so i knew that that wasn't true then on top of that we have the provost dr matt hall going on a podcast stating unequivocally that he was a racist and that he would be a racist until he died because of his skin color i've known dr hall for a number of years and i've never seen anything about him in terms of his actions or his words that would indicate that he's actually a racist i think what the issue is is false humility and trying to press this social justice woke narrative and this is not something that i believe that our students at southern seminary need to be taught dr mohler initially with matt hall his response at that point was to defend matt's credentials and qualifications which were never in question the man is eminently qualified he was gracious that he was given the opportunity to explain his statement and his answer essentially was i probably should have chosen my words more wisely but to my knowledge there was never any time that he backed down from those words or changed those words one of the suggestions that i had made at several meetings ago regarding social justice was to put forward the possibility of the seminary adopting as a governing document the dallas statement or the statement on social justice and i brought that up as a suggestion dr mohler stated that he didn't feel that the document was well vetted and that he had some issues with some of the things that it said i felt like it would clarify the issue but but he made it clear to the to the full body of trustees that he didn't intend to uh pursue that now there's a connection between uh the issue with uh some leanings towards social justice and and my concern that in spite of the fact that dr mohler has said he is opposed to crt it certainly appears to me that there's some inroads with crt teaching on the campus when the statement on social justice came out to my knowledge only one professor at southern signed the statement and that was dr russell fuller now there could have been some others that signed it that i'm not aware of but to my knowledge he was the only one who did i did have a professor tell me he said i can tell you why the professors are not signed it because dr mohler forbid them to do so now dr mueller has said to me that well we we only want to sign the official documents of the seminary the abstract and the baptist faith and message well i can understand that to some degree but we adopted the nashville statement on biblical sexuality as one of our governing documents we've adopted the chicago statement on inerrancy both of which are excellent documents i've had the testimony of several professors who have said to me that it was very clear that they couldn't sign the dallas statement on social justice without there being repercussions toward them in their careers and i have to believe that there there must be some faculty members at southern seminary who would disagree with what matt hall and jarvis williams are saying about social justice and yet we've heard and seen nothing now i have to make some assumptions at this point that perhaps they have been told that they cannot speak negatively about social justice i have the utmost respect for dr mohler and i appreciate so much the many good things he has done for the southern baptist theological seminary and the southern baptist convention in general i mean when you listen to dr mulder's uh daily podcast that he does about things that are going on in the society and uh there's a tremendous amount of wisdom that he uh provides not only to southern baptists but to the evangelical and christian community at large and very grateful for that it's really hard for me to understand how we've had this this this slide it's a downgrade if you will uh and and the slide uh is happening almost right under our noses and uh so that's why we've got the sound the warning and i have proposed in fact i proposed again at our most recent trustee meeting i actually made a motion that we adopt the statement on social justice at southern seminary because i felt like that would be the proper corrective if dr mueller is correct that we're not teaching crt then one of the ways to demonstrate that and one of the ways to give all of our professors a tool that they can use for what we do want to teach would be to adopt that statement just as we did with the nashville statement and before that the chicago statement it would seem to me that there is a desire sometimes among those on the academic side of the equation to kind of live in both worlds to to be acceptable to a secular mindset so we're against crt but we're not really against it and it becomes a bit clandestine it's an inability to tell the whole truth and someone said one time that a half truth is a whole lie you know if the truth gets out that we really are teaching crt but we have said that we're not that's not going to look good but yet we're trying to appease the world by making it appear that we're making every stride that we can for uh social justice back in the spring of this year we terminated several professors those terminations uh are i think directly related to the position the seminary is taking on social justice one of the professors terminated obviously was one of the professors who signed the statement on social justice and two of those professors were clearly in opposition to the seminary's current position on social justice the reasons for the terminations were an anticipated financial downturn due to the pandemic the anticipation of a a 30 percent loss in revenue due to the pandemic was possibly overstated i certainly think that it needed to be taken seriously and that the budget needed to be reduced i think in the end it's probably the downturn is probably going to be more in the 10 to 15 percent range but that's still something that has to be dealt with but southern certainly is not an institution that is in financial trouble it wasn't long after these professors were terminated that new professors were hired it doesn't look good to say we're firing seven professors because we're not going to be able to afford to pay them and then go hire several more there's no question that financially they could have uh absorbed the hit kept of all of these uh professors in position and and what a blessing and benefit that would have been to our students i mean the these these men uh particularly uh dr fuller and dr orrick invested in the lives of students um when i was a seminary student the professors at uh at my seminary never showed any interest in me they did not ask me about my personal walk with the lord that is a very positive thing at southern i think many of our professors are involved that way that's one of the things that i have really liked about southern seminary is that so many of the professors are involving themselves that way in the lives of students but if there were two men who set the example in that regard it would have been russell fuller and jim warwick the document that the seminary uses is called a separation and release agreement and in that agreement there is an nda now the people might recognize that as a non-disclosure agreement this actually is not non-disclosure it's non-disparaged immediately i became concerned about that we are supposedly terminating them because we don't have the money to pay them anymore in other words they're not being terminated for cause they're not being terminated because they did something wrong and so what it looked like to me is you sign this agreement you agree never perpetually to ever say anything bad about the seminary or its administration and we will pay you severance pay well there's a number of problems with that that i recognized right off the bat the separation and release agreement is a violation of first corinthians 6 where the apostle paul tells us that we should be able to judge ourselves that we should not go to court with one another the document is a legal document by its very nature it is threatening what it is saying is is that either you do what you've signed to do or else well i asked specifically what the or else was and the answer was we would not take them to court but that's the threat i mean that's what you're holding over their head and he said well yes we found threatening them works very well now from my perspective we're talking about this you know is this the right thing for christians to do this this seems to be um bearing false witness dr muller and i discussed this thoroughly and he absolutely disagrees that he does not believe that it is in any way a violation of first corinthians six and you know on that point we just had to agree to disagree and uh and i'll let people that are smarter than me determine who's right and who's wrong on that but my opinion remains the same i mean i i did everything that i could to appeal to the president to cease and desist from using this non-disparagement clause i can only conjecture at this point now i can tell you what he told me and i can tell you what i think what he told me was is that well it has to do with employment law and my response was what employment law let's be specific what exactly an employment law requires you to do this well we can't say anything about someone we fire well i'm thinking well why do you need to say anything about someone you fire especially if you're not firing them for cause and what we were doing i believe is using the pandemic almost as an excuse or a cover for removing people from the faculty that we didn't want now one of the things that i was told is is that it was a contract essentially that it was a two-way contract that the seminary also would not be able to say anything negative about these professors that have been terminated when i finally got a hold of the document i discovered that that was not true it was a one-way covenant it was binding only on the terminated employee now uh to to dr mohler's credit he finally admitted that the document itself did not bind the seminary in any way other than obviously to pay the severance pay but that brings up another problem the severance pay wasn't really severance pay but as you know educators in general are paid for one year of service and most of the time their academic uh responsibilities will end maybe around the first of may or at least by the first of june so the they're paid through july and their new contract picks up in august the truth of the matter is is that these professors severance pay was simply to be paid what they had already earned through the end of july i can't call that severance pay i call that earned pay and if they would sign this separation and release agreement then they would receive that pay and of course their retirement benefits and insurance benefits and so forth i don't know any way to look at that other than hush money in other words we're going to ask you to sign an agreement that you're not going to say anything bad there's no reason to do that unless you suspect that they might have something bad to say now my argument would be would be this if as a trustee if we have a professor that's being terminated even if it's for cause if that professor has something to say negative about the seminary disparaging toward the seminary or the administration or the president or the board of trustees for that matter i would like to hear it as a trustee i want to say maybe we've got a blind spot here maybe there's something that we're not seeing maybe there's something that we're missing and this could be pointed out to us and if that's true certainly we could take corrective action and get it fixed now somebody has just got a you know a bur in their saddle certainly we have enough people in the administration and on the faculty that could correct any misconceptions and make clear what the truth is uh so why do we need to do something that makes it look like we're paying hush money i'm a war veteran i'm an afghanistan war veteran and i went to afghanistan for one reason and that is to protect the rights of my fellow american citizens i served my country so that men like russell fuller and jim morick would have the right to say what they needed to say to protect their first amendment right it angers me a little bit to be perfectly honest with you i hope it's a righteous indignation i i don't want to give anybody the impression that i'm mad at dr mohler i'm not mad at anybody but i am righteously indignant that we would ask good and godly men to sign away their first amendment rights to free speech our first amendment rights were not given to us by the government they were given to us by god and the government said we'll protect your god-given rights russell fuller and jim orrick were men of conviction and they refused to sign that document what troubles me is that we have treated two of our professors shamefully we have withheld money from them that they legitimately earned now i don't believe that they should have been let go anyway we make matters worse when we terminate them and we don't pay them the money that they were earned so i came to the board in our last meeting and i and i notified uh all of my fellow trustees ahead of time by email what i was going to do i contacted the chairman to let him know what i was going to do i sent a copy to the president i didn't do this clandestinely i let them know what my intentions were to be honest with you i didn't know whether i would get a second i had two trustees that indicated they might second my emotions but my first motion was to have the president require the administration to pay dr russell fuller and dr jim orrick the full pay and benefits that they would have received if they had signed the separation and release agreement and that those monies should be conveyed to them in a timely manner but in no case no later than 30 days after the board meeting that motion failed because it never got a second now i made a second motion which i assume probably would also not get a second since the first one didn't and that was that the whole issue of the non-disparagement agreements the separation and release agreement that it be eliminated and that no new document replace it until approved by the board of trustees that motion also failed i want god to bless southern seminary but there's a tremendous amount of emphasis on you know there's never literally in the history of christendom been more preachers being trained more m-div students in one place at one time and listen i am all for that i really am i think that's wonderful but that's as a trustee that is not my greatest concern i don't want southern seminary to be the biggest and the brightest and the best in terms of numbers and finances i want southern seminary to be known as the seminary that is the most faithful to the word of god that there's never been another seminary that has trained its ministers trained its pastors any more faithfully than the southern baptist theological seminary that needs to be our concern and if our concern is only the number of students that we have and if we're going to spend our time bragging about how great we are in terms of size and in terms of you know financial stability for the future while i am for all of those things if we compromise our theological position all of that's going to come to an end anyway there's certainly a point at which we need to be very very concerned about the direction that our seminaries are going in terms of social justice the fact that someone says it's not happening does not necessarily mean that's true and what you have to do is you know that we have you have to research all you have to do is go look for this stuff it's out there the videos are out there the panels are out there the statements are out there the documents are out there i want to be very careful about how i say this because the last thing that that i want to do is is to make unfair accusations against anyone and i want to say again you know i have great love and respect for dr mohler and many of the wonderful things that he has done for our convention and for our seminary but one of the things that i have noticed from the time that i was a seminary student is that there's a bit of arrogance in the academic world and it almost comes across sometimes as is that well we we know better than you we're we're we're the guys with the phds we're the guys that have studied we're the guys who know this stuff and you're just gonna have to trust us and and what i want to say is is that okay we'll trust you but we're gonna still look at the evidence we're still going to look at what's being said and what's being done and we're going to try to make our own conclusion about the results of all of that and and that's that's my appeal to my fellow southern baptist pastors what happened with the conservative resurgence is we got leaders who saw what the problem was begin to state what the problem was begin to then share that down to the pew and southern baptists became so concerned that they began attending the southern baptist convention to do something about it we need the same thing to happen again if we're going to turn this thing around i don't want you to leave i don't want you to stop giving to the cooperative program i want you to get involved i want you to get involved in your local church i want you to do your work of ministry but i also want you to be aware of what's going on in your seminaries in fact in all of our sbc entities and be concerned about it what i want you to do is get yourself elected as a messenger and come to the convention and vote your convictions we're facing a very important election it may be the most important election ever in the history of the united states go to the polls and vote your convictions we've got to do the same thing with our own southern baptist convention we have got to care enough to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to go to the convention but we have to go informed we can't go and just listen and and do in essence what we're told to do by the leadership we need to hold the leadership accountable just like we need to hold our government accountable i mean we are a government of the people we are a convention of the pew and we need to stand up for our southern baptist convention otherwise we're going to lose the influence that god has given us to reach the world for christ you

Channel: Tom Rush

Views: 10,057

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Id: GB-DrUrBoEQ

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020