Roy L. Honeycutt

Following the retirement of President McCall in 1981, Roy Honeycutt, Southern’s eighth president, took office in 1982.  Two years later, Southern celebrated its 125th anniversary and opened the Carver School of Church Social Work. Anne Davis directed the school and became the first female departmental dean of the Seminary. Enrollment reached an all-time peak in 1986. In 1990, Southern saw its twenty thousandth graduate receive his diploma. Southern’s endowment reached roughly 56 million dollars in 1992, a remarkable advance from the six hundred thousand dollars President Mullins set out to raise at the turn of the century. This income allowed Southern to open a new 104,000 square foot campus center, replete with classrooms, cafeteria, bookstore, and gymnasium.

Timothy George

Statistics aside, the mission and message of Southern had changed. Although professors like Timothy George Timothy Georgeand David Dockery defended the inerrancy of the Bible and other conservative doctrines, most professors repudiated biblical inerrancy.  Many rejected such doctrines as the sanctity of unborn life, the sinfulness of homosexuality, and the call of qualified men only to the pastorate. The faculties of the other SBC seminaries held similar views.

The movement that reversed this trend and restored biblical faith and practice at Southern began in a battle for control of the SBC in the 1980s.  Conservative leaders Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler organized Southern Baptists of all backgrounds to reclaim control from denominational progressives.  While moderates, who had controlled the SBC for decades, called for accommodation within the SBC, the vast majority of Southern Baptists had grown weary of paying the salaries of professors who undermined student’s confidence in the Bible and taught them error.  Conservatives insisted that belief in the inerrancy of the Bible was prerequisite to denominational service.  Most Southern Baptists agreed and elected inerrantists to the presidency of the SBC, who in turn appointed inerrantists to the Committee on Committees, who in turn nominated inerrantists for the Committee on Nominations.  The Committee on Nominations then proposed inerrantists to serve as trustees.  These moves, based in the ballots cast by thousands of laypeople, turned the direction of the convention. After Rogers was elected president of the convention in 1979, conservatives won the SBC Presidency in every successive year.

The resurgence returned the convention to its roots.  Soon, it would reach Southern’s campus and bring with it restoration of sound doctrine and resuscitation of a mission to the church and the world beyond.

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