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Jason Allen was elected on Oct. 15 as the fifth president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. As an alumnus and former administer of the school I earnestly wish him success that ultimately eluded his predecessors. Those of us who’ve never even been to Kansas City should also wish Dr. Allen every success for the sake of our Great Commission ministry.
Midwestern is a school with a checkered past. It was begun in 1957 as Southern Baptists abandoned comity agreements that had allocated the Midwest for American Baptists to reach. That denomination was not headed in a positive direction so Southern Baptists decided to become a national as well as global denomination. You’ll find a lot of work in the north that began around 1960. Midwestern’s first faculty was made up of professors from other SBC seminaries, including a prof from Southern who had just completed a book for the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board that cast doubt on the truth of Genesis. Since Ralph Elliott was now at Midwestern, the school was immediately in the middle of a denominational controversy that resulted in his dismissal (though only after convention-wide outcry) and the Baptist Faith and Message (1963). Midwestern’s first two presidents built an institution staffed by a puzzling variety of conservatives, neo-orthodox faculty members, a theology prof who believed God was still learning, and at least one lost professor who professed Christ during Midwestern’s third administration. It was one of the three most liberal seminaries in the SBC for 30 years. I read recently a comment from a man who claimed that you could have driven a pickup truck to all six of our seminaries prior to our denominational reformation and not filled it up with liberals. Nonsense. You could have filled it up at Midwestern as late as the early 1990s.
Our Kansas City seminary was the last SBC agency to benefit from the Conservative Resurgence when it elected an inerrantist as president in 1995. The direction of Midwestern changed drastically in the 1990s but the second two administrations had their own controversies. Both of them were truncated by leadership conflicts, leaving behind a conservative student body and staff as well as some morale issues that would negatively impact recruiting and fundraising.
Some of this is painful to recount and I’ve gone into as much detail of those years as I intend. The point is that launching an institution in an area where Southern Baptists are not strong has proved more challenging than we expected. These challenges imply some needed responses from our convention if we are to continue to have an institution in the Midwest.
A basic challenge is Midwestern’s location. The long influence of American Baptists and paucity of strong and well-established Southern Baptist churches resulted in a weak foundation for the school. To this day, some of the churches closest to Midwestern geographically are weak and liberal. There are some fine churches there also, churches that have been shored up since Midwestern turned toward biblical integrity, but there is no comparable situation to that a student might find at Southwestern. There is no Birchman Baptist Church, no Travis Avenue Baptist Church, no Wedgwood, no Southcliff—all Fort Worth churches that were strong and conservative even when I was a student in the late 1970s. The makeup of Midwestern’s original faculty was in some cases a handicap, and so was the resistance of the region. Both factors hindered the building of a conservative and missionary seminary on the Kansas-Missouri border.
The location was difficult for another reason. Maybe call this one “out of sight/out of mind.” It is understandable that Texans would call Southwestern “our seminary.” It makes perfect sense that folks in Louisiana feel a special kinship with New Orleans Seminary. That sense of ownership bears fruit in recruiting and fundraising. Texas and Louisiana both have enough churches and strong churches that make that fruit healthy and plentiful. Consider neighboring states like Arkansas and Oklahoma for Southwestern, and Mississippi and Arkansas for New Orleans Seminary and you have regional support that matters in some pretty substantive ways. As enthusiastic as Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and Minnesota might be for Midwestern, their ability to help “their” seminary is not as substantial. Southern Baptists in Louisiana and Texas also have a seminary in Kansas City though most of us don’t know much about it or take it very personally.
We’ve often noted how innovations in technology and travel have made the world smaller. That progress has been slow to affect the missionary hearts of our southern SBC churches. The need for missions in Des Moines is academic in our minds, hard to personalize. Missionary needs in our own community or another part of our own state are more personal to us, more urgent somehow. Ingrained regionalism determines to a high degree the specific ways we express our obedience to the Great Commission. That instinct is one reason that we need strategic missionary partners at the state and national level. Someone needs to look more deliberately at the whole picture. I’m grateful to hear that our North American Mission Board has recently named Kansas City a “Send” city. Send North America is a focus on the largest population centers in the country in an effort to reach the 83 percent of the U.S. population who live there. More churches and stronger churches in Kansas City will mean evangelistic growth hundreds of miles into an underreached part of our country. Midwestern Seminary is the only SBC institution in that part of the country and it is well-located to be our launching point for reaching the Midwest and plains region of the U.S.
Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary needs our attention. Some strong churches in Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana and North Carolina need to remember that a far flung missionary outpost on a hill that overlooks the western plains is also “our” seminary. If a great church in Nashville or Houston were to embrace Kansas City as if it was their city, Midwestern would benefit from that attention. Why couldn’t this be? If rich churches in the U.S. can plant churches in other nations, why can’t they learn about and advocate for a city and seminary with less native strength than their own?
Midwestern Seminary needs to succeed. The first four administrations of the school were of mixed results. At this point they have a very small endowment compared to some of their larger and decades-older sister seminaries. They have a smaller endowment and fewer ready prospects for growing it. The area they recruit in is not as rich in Southern Baptists as are the assigned areas of four of their five sisters. Their campus is modest and less appealing in some ways than those of their four larger sisters. President Allen has some challenges that would be daunting to even his most experienced colleague. I believe it would be appropriate for the entire SBC, including all 12 of our SBC agencies, to decide that we want to have a seminary in Kansas City until Jesus comes. What would we have to do to make that more certain? We should do those things, and start in 2013.
I hesitate to get too specific lest my suggestions rather than the need become the focus. Perhaps the seminary funding formula should acknowledge to a greater degree that two of our seminaries simply cannot compete on a level field with those in the regions of our greatest strength. Maybe other protocols between the seminary presidents need to be changed with the intent that Midwestern will succeed. Maybe a strong state convention or two can give Kansas City the kind of attention SBTC is giving to the borderlands region of Texas, and for the same reason. It’s a missionary frontier and a great opportunity in this day. Could larger institutions sacrifice some initiative in favor of their weaker sisters? Maybe one seminary could adopt another and help her do the work cut out for them both. Something in the way Southern Baptists have supported Midwestern over the past 50 years must change if the school is going to continue.
I think I’d be saying these things if I had never lived in Kansas City. Objectively, we need some way to train pastors from the heartland and then send them back to their home region. Kansas, Iowa and Missouri could really use the kind of boost a solid and biblical institution can give to the local work. If Southern Baptists did not have Midwestern we’d have to come up with another way of meeting the needs of people living in some big country far away from our traditional places of strength. Since we do have Midwestern we should fight to keep it.
Midwestern is my alma mater along with Criswell College and Southwestern Seminary. I treasure friends and colleagues from those days and remember fondly the brisk pioneer spirit of Lewis and Clark country. In some ways I think Southern Baptists have dropped Midwestern behind enemy lines, wished them well, sent in occasional supplies, and marveled that the school hasn’t routed the adversary. We should try another way. Yes, I wish President Jason Allen god speed, and I pray that world-changing ministries will be launched from Kansas City, but I also think it’s time for a few hundred churches, a few thousand Baptists, to add good works to our good intentions. President Allen and his institution need more attention—real aid—than we gave his predecessors.
