DALLAS?In the four decades since W.A. Criswell founded the school, Criswell College has pursued its mission of “serving the churches of Jesus Christ by developing God-called men and women for ministry leadership.” Andrew Hebert is traveling Texas, making sure the churches of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention are aware of the benefits of a Criswell College education.

As the newly named director of enrollment services, Hebert serves as a liaison between the college and the SBTC. He said he plans to deliver a two-fold message?challenging those God-called servants to commit their lives to ministry and encouraging them to prepare at the Dallas-based school.

“For those who are interested in either full-time ministry or just want to be better prepared as a believer, I will be encouraging them to take a class or start a degree at Criswell College.”

He said SBTC churches will enjoy the benefit of Criswell graduates, who prove to be conservative pastors, missionaries and Christian leaders who will serve Southern Baptist churches with doctrinal clarity, missionary fervor and moral integrity.

“I will be working to build relationships with pastors and churches so that we can explore new and creative opportunities to partner together for ministry in the future” and build a stronger connection between SBTC churches and Criswell College, raising awareness for the school and preaching messages that will challenge people to a stronger commitment to Christ, he said.

Hebert earned his bachelor of arts in biblical studies from Criswell and is currently working on the master of arts in theological and biblical studies with an emphasis in New Testament. Last year he received the Paige Patterson Preaching Award. He has pastored two churches in North Texas, encouraging evangelistic outreach that led to contacting every house within a 10-mile radius of the last congregation he led in Sumner.

“Although young, Andrew Hebert has become a seasoned pastor of a Southern Baptists of Texas Convention church,” noted SBTC Executive Director Jim Richards. “He is a Criswell grad who can represent the values that the college and SBTC share. Andrew models what other young ministers can do by going to Criswell,” Richards added.

Whether a church needs a preacher for a revival, regular church service or an event like DiscipleNow, Hebert is glad to travel to Texas churches at the school’s expense. “Criswell College is the best place in the state of Texas to prepare for ministry and I want to get that message to the churches,” Hebert said.

“We have a servant-hearted and scholarly faculty. We require more classes in biblical studies and theology than any other undergraduate program in the state and more than many graduate programs.”

With convenient class schedules and low tuition rates, Criswell College remains well below the national average for private Christian education, he said.

“We offer the kind of specialized training that is hard to find anywhere else.”

TEXAN: For those who don’t know, briefly outline the ministry assignment of the Hispanic Initiative/Ethnic Ministries team at the SBTC.

GONZALES: It has expanded in the last year. In addition to Spanish-language groups, our team is serving a greater number of Asian people groups. We are still very involved with the Korean Baptist Fellowship of Texas, which meets once a year for a fellowship.

TEXAN: What is the status of the Hispanic Initiative and the Hispanic Education Superhighway, a collaboration between the SBTC, Southwestern Seminary, Jacksonville College and Criswell College?

GONZALES: At this point we are still developing and growing but we have had some success stories. We had our first graduate at Jacksonville College last spring, Manuel Giron. He received his certificate, which is 26 hours. He is now studying in a seminary and was able to transfer all hours, and that is the purpose of the Education Superhighway. We want to raise up a generation of Hispanic ministers with higher education. Now we have six students who are studying at Criswell in the program. This next year we anticipate anywhere from five to seven additional students. That is a great success for us. B.B. Alvarez of Criswell College is chairman of the commission for our Hispanic Education Superhighway.

TEXAN: What changes have you seen in your five years at the SBTC?

GONZALES: We’ve seen phenomenal growth at the Spanish-language session of the Evangelism Conference. Last year we had 1,000 people at our rally at First Baptist Colleyville and we had 100 professions of faith as church folks brought family and friends. We had greater attendance at the Hispanic Women’s Conference. In Houston this year, we had over 650 ladies attending. Youth Week at Alto Frio has grown, along with a singles conference, a men’s conference that is coming up at Mount Lebanon in Cedar Hill–numerous events that are well executed and meet a need in the ministry to Spanish-language people. We had a marriage conference that drew more than 200 people last month and was very well received.

One highlight recently was a regional Hispanic conference at Central Baptist in College Station last August with 120 people joining us for a weekend of inspiration and relaxation away from the rigors of ministry.

We are going to be doing three Hispanic Leadership Conferences in 2010, along with a pastor-wives retreat in Fort Worth for two nights. We will be inviting 25 of our pastors on a first-come, first-served basis. There is a real need for these connection points in our service to Hispanic and ethnic churches.
In addition to these, we have an annual Asian retreat in the summer that drew over 150 people; they met at Chinese Baptist Church in Arlington for a two-night retreat. It was a very inspirational time of fellowship that brought together Laotians, Chinese, Indians, people from all ethnic groups came together with English as the common unifier. Last year, Dr. [Jim] Richards was our keynote speaker.

TEXAN: Bruno Molina joined the staff last year. What is Bruno’s role?

GONZALES: Of course, he’s shared by the evangelism department and our department. Next year he will be in charge of the Hispanic session at the Evangelism Conference. He will also lead the pastor and wives retreat and the four Hispanic leadership conferences. On the evangelism side, he is leading the Muslim outreach trainings that are very, very succcessful. He also this year did a Muslim Awareness Meeting with African American pastors, which was very successful.

TEXAN: As Texas becomes more diverse, how will Southern Baptists need to adapt?

GONZALES: The challenge remains in reaching out to the immigrant, and also the Hispanics who are bilingual and bicultural. Many people groups from various Latin American countries are here. The culture and customs, foods, are all different. When you have in the same congregation Salvadorans, Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, that’s a hodgepodge and that could become a problem unless the pastor is able to manage the differences by creating an authentic Christian unity. That’s one of the biggest challenges we have is finding pastors who can unify these various culture groups.

TEXAN: How can people pray for your ministry?

GONZALES: Continue to pray for the Hispanic Education Superhighway so that more students can take part. Our future ministry will depend on these students. And also, that the SBTC would pray for our various events throughout the year, that we would continue to build up and equip the churches we serve.

In May 1900, everyone in Hot Springs, Ark., was hoping for tranquility. Barely a year had passed since this hotbed of organized crime and illegal gambling had erupted into an open gunfight between corrupt Hot Springs police officers and corrupt Garland County sheriff’s deputies. Arkansas Baptists and the Hot Springs city fathers somewhat nervously prayed that Bathhouse Row would put its best foot forward for the Baptists of the Southland.

The leadership of the SBC were saying their own prayers for peace, knowing that the Hot Springs meeting would feature an ambitious and potentially controversial set of historic proposals for the Southern Baptist Convention?the fruit of an entire year’s effort by a task force known as the “Committee on Observance of the Year 1900.”

Franklin H. Kerfoot was the public spokesman of the task force, reading a report recommending unprecedented interagency cooperation among associational, state, and national Southern Baptist entities in denominational fundraising.

This was not change for change’s sake. Southern Baptists faced serious fundraising problems in 1900. The coterie of Southern Baptist entities was young, growing, and in desperate need of money. In 1900 Southern Baptist entities were seeking those funds independently of one another?in competition with one another. A class of Southern Baptist employees emerged whose sole business was to solicit money from Southern Baptist churches and wealthy church members. The multiplication of institutions and agents meant that some churches were inundated with people seeking a Sunday to speak at the church and take up an offering. The resultant distribution of funds was haphazard rather than strategic, reflecting more the skill, lineage, and network of the employed agents than the spiritual importance of the institution. Some agents were authorized to keep for themselves the solicited funds until their own salaries had been funded. The activity of these agents tended to provoke resentment among Southern Baptists. Consider this passage that appeared in the Missouri Baptist Word & Way in early 1901 as a measure of Southern Baptist angst:

“Every observing person must recognize the advance of a dread commercialism which is eating like a [cancer] at the vitals of our generation. . . . We are coming to believe that there should be no agents going up and down the land whose sole business it is to get money. . . . Let our agents change front, and instead of seeking only the money of the Lord’s people, let that whole matter take the secondary and incidental place where it belongs, and make piety, consecration of life and property the great burden of their message.”

The birth of the Cooperative Program

The delegates at the Hot Springs meeting weren’t the only ones looking for a solution. The First Baptist Church in Murray, Ky., “began in 1900 a new approach to church finance. [H. Boyce] Taylor, pastor 1897-1931, avidly promoted this unified budget plan.” Taylor’s idea proved to be the solution to accomplish all of the star-studded task force’s goals.

Radical changes are difficult to make in a voluntaristic union, especially among a people zealous for local-church autonomy and sometimes peevishly resistant to demagoguery. The statesmen of the SBC in the early 1900s employed a process marked by careful patience and deliberate inclusiveness that is worthy of note. Before proposing a permanent structural change to the operations of the Southern Baptist Convention, the leadership of the SBC embarked upon a one-time trial run called the Seventy-Five Million Campaign.

The time period from the launch of the Seventy-Five Million Campaign to the adoption of the Cooperative Program was fully six years, from 1919 to 1925. These six years were filled with a truly inclusive and thoroughgoing effort to involve and inform every Southern Baptist of the benefits to be gained by moving to such a plan. Southern Baptist laypeople across the South enlisted to give “four-minute speeches,” mimicking a successful grassroots fundraising campaign by the United States Government during World War I. The theological basis of this decentralized approach, however, was much older than Liberty Bonds; the new Southern Baptist plan back in 1900 involved state conventions, district associations, and local churches as well as the national convention.

Both in its successes and its failures, the Seventy-Five Million Campaign was time well spent in determining the future path for the SBC. It succeeded in demonstrating that Southern Baptist entities were better off financially to join in cooperative fundraising than to continue in internecine solicitation rivalries. Yet the

I loved it when Paul Harvey would abruptly say, “It’s not one world.” Whatever came next was going to be a zinger of weird behavior or political opinion, at least to most of Mr. Harvey’s listeners. What do you think he’d say of the “debate” regarding the punishment (his crime is admitted) of acclaimed director Roman Polanski.

What’s he accused of? According to then 13 year-old Samantha Geimer, the acclaimed director offered to take photos of her (without clothes as it turned out) to help with her acting career. He gave her alcohol and a Quaalude before trying to convince her to have sex with him. She resisted but raped her. Polanski pleaded guilty to the rape, although the details of the event are “alleged” because of a plea bargain. Seeing that he would likely go to jail, the world-class artist fled to France and has lived there since.

What’s to debate? Well, remember that Polanski is an Oscar-winning director, an artist in the minds of many. For the French (Polanski is now a French citizen) film community his artistic talent has some bearing on the consequences he should face for criminal behavior. French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand says that an America that would arrest Roman Polanski is the “America that scares us.” Other French newspapers refer to Polanski being persecuted for his art.

But it’s not even “one America.” American actress Whoopi Goldberg claims that Polanski’s crime was not “rape-rape.” Is there a way to describe non-consensual sex between a 13 year-old child and a man 30 years older that is palatable to civilized society? She, in defense of the director, added that we are “a different kind of society” than we were when Polanski was arrested 32 years ago. American directors and actors including Woody Allen, David Lynch, Michael Mann, and Martin Scorsese have signed a petition demanding Polanski’s release. Film producer Harvey Weinstein added, “Whatever you think about the so-called crime, Polanski has served his time.” I wouldn’t call 30 years of freedom and wealth “serving time.”

I’ve not heard any of these celebrity spokesmen suggest that Louis Soltren should be released. Soltren was recently arrested and charged with hijacking a plan to Cuba 41 years ago. Surely he’s also served his time, and in less luxury than the rapist. Or what about Dennis Bradford who was recently arrested here in Texas for raping an 8 year-old girl nearly 20 years ago? Maybe a petition for him should be arranged.

Two important principles occur to me as I read of the Polanski case. The first is pragmatic and the second is philosophical.

Pragmatically, I remember the warning of those who disagreed with our national move toward the un-defining of marriage. If marriage may be between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, then why not between adults and children or among more than two people, and so on. This case does relate to marriage because it involves sex. Even in our “different kind of society” we must acknowledge that sex that doesn’t disrupt a community is sex within the bounds of marriage. It is still true today and the many children born without benefit of married parents remind us of that verity.

To those who still call those earlier watchmen hysterical, I offer the reminder that some have offered legalized gay marriage as a justification for polygamy. And now the Hollywood subculture argues that a man who raped a child 30 years ago and then fled the country to avoid prosecution should be vindicated because our society has changed since then. That fuzzy logic could justify nearly anything.

Philosophically, we must recognize that Whoopi Goldberg’s 30-year age of enlightenment was caused by something and it has consequences that even she might find regrettable. Undeniably, attitudes toward marriage, extramarital sex, and single motherhood have changed. Those who try to clean up the effects of social catastrophes agree that divorce and single motherhood are leading causes of poverty in America. Who’s in favor of poverty? We also observe that the objectification of women in our culture has grown during this time. Who’s in favor of that?

In a selectively idealistic subculture like our entertainment industry, most people say justice for the weak, hungry, homeless, or sick is a high priority. That idealism joins other motives to explain movies that put black hats on faceless bureaucracy, the pharmaceutical industry, industrialists of all sorts, and most members of the military.