To the Old Guys: It's Time to Listen

The fundamentalist movement was built by young men. Many of the leaders during the modernist-fundamentalist controversy were in their thirties and even their twenties. The most prominent leaders, men like T. T. Shields and J. Frank Norris, were only middle-aged. Younger men are typified by Robert T. Ketcham, who gained a national reputation as a leader in the controversy during his early thirties. To a very large extent, Fundamentalism was a movement of young men.

My own experience as a young man was similar. Before I turned thirty, I had already been given a college professorship and had spoken from a national platform. During a significant controversy, I had published opinions that attracted both praise and ire from prominent leaders of the fellowship. While some men disagreed (vigorously!) with what I said, I was never simply dismissed, and I certainly never felt that I was excluded from the process.

Probably because of my own experience, I suppose that I have assumed that young leaders should and do have a significant voice within Fundamentalism. A recent conversation, however, took me completely by surprise. Speaking with a staff pastor in a large, fundamentalist church, I heard the young man say, “Nobody in Fundamentalism wants to listen to you until you’re forty.”

My initial reaction to this statement was one of disbelief. I immediately thought of Matt Morrell, the recently called pastor of Fourth Baptist Church. Pastor Morrell was only thirty-one when he became a candidate for this pastorate, and he is only thirty-two now. Yet he has the affection and support of a significant congregation, one that includes a large staff and seminary professors who are more than twice his age. When I mentioned Pastor Morrell to my interlocutor, he responded by saying, “Yeah, I know. How did that happen?” There seemed to be no category in his mind for a Fundamentalism in which young leaders could be respected. He was clearly puzzled and astonished that a person like Matt Morrell could exist.

We left our conversation at this impasse. My experience did not match his observations, but clearly his observations seemed accurate to him. As I have subsequently reflected upon our exchange and the difference in our perspectives, two explanations have emerged. I want to deal with one of them here and with the other in my next essay.

The first explanation is this: Fundamentalism has never been monolithic. Different types of Fundamentalism have always existed, and one of the features that has distinguished the different types has been their approach to leadership.

The version of Fundamentalism in which I was reared tended to understand leadership primarily as teaching, modeling, and inspiring. The leaders whom I watched most closely and who most influenced me were truly gentle men (I am not claiming to be a gentle person, but I am certainly more gentle than I would have been without their influence). They were teachers, mentors, and persuaders. They did not employ strong-arm tactics, and they abominated political gamesmanship.

These leaders were very concerned about preparing and involving the next generation of leadership. They were willing to take younger men, show them how to do the work, and then give them a chance to do it. They knew in advance that mistakes would be made, but they viewed those mistakes as teaching opportunities, not as crimes to be punished. As I think about it, they were men who loved to share power or even to give it away. Some of their names are John L. Patton, David Nettleton, William Fusco, Robert Domokos (the other Dr. Bob), and, more recently, Douglas McLachlan.

Even as a young man, however, I was aware of a different philosophy of fundamentalist leadership. The men who held this philosophy were highly committed to truth, and they sincerely desired to hold their ministries true to the truth. They accomplished this objective by using their positions of power to keep their followers from wandering. Very often the leader (usually known simply as “Doc”) would simply prescribe the correct position on a given issue. He would state the position strongly, perhaps emphasizing it with a bit of shouting (from the pulpit) or by stating it in capitalized italics with double-underlining (in print). Disagreement came at the price of losing influence, position, and standing. Doc knew how to keep his followers in line.

Doc led by telling people what he wanted done. Sometimes Doc (depending upon who he was) might micromanage his followers, while other times he might give them more free reign. At the end of the day, however, things had to be done Doc’s way.

Typically, Doc surrounded himself with only a few trusted advisors and maintained a few trusted friendships. These cronies constituted Doc’s entire world of counsel. Younger men did not exist to offer advice. They existed to take it. Younger men might have access to Doc when he held court, but they were not free to approach him as a peer.

Granted, my depiction of these two patterns of leadership is an oversimplification. As generalizations, however, they have been characteristic of different fundamentalist movements. Oddly enough, there seems to be a geographical component to the distinction. The first kind of leader has tended to be more recognizable in the North, while the second kind of leader has tended to dominate Southern Fundamentalism (which has been exported to the North in several places). The distinction also seems to run along through the various ecclesiastical alignments. The first kind of leader has often been found among Regular Baptists or fundamentalist Bible churches. The second kind of leader has been found more frequently in the groups that owe their origin to J. Frank Norris, or groups that broke away from the Conservative Baptist movement. These are mere tendencies, however, and not airtight rules.

The distinction is basically this. The first philosophy says, “Let’s give a young man some real responsibility and some real authority so that we can see what he’s made of.” The second philosophy says, “We won’t give a young man any real influence until we see what he’s made of.” The first philosophy is about mentoring, while the second is really about muscling.

Back to my young interlocutor. He grew up with fundamentalist leadership of the second type. Probably his brief experience had never even exposed him to fundamentalist leaders of the first type. He did not even know that such a thing could exist, and so he wanted to interpret all fundamentalist leadership in terms of the strong-man model that he had seen.

Does it even matter which version of leadership we choose? My answer is that, if our Christianity is one that teaches “let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind,” then it matters a great deal. Even in practical terms, leadership of the strong-man model has failed to produce a Fundamentalism that can perpetuate its ideals. It perpetuates only institutions and power structures. No, the biblical pattern clearly favors the mentoring, not the muscling, model of leadership.

I’m one of the old guys. And as an old guy, I think that something needs to be said. We do the truth a disservice by shutting capable young men out of leadership. We do ourselves a disservice by refusing to listen to them. By itself, age is no qualification for leadership, and youth is no disqualification. No young fundamentalist should ever have to think that he needs to wait until middle age to gain a hearing.

Eve

by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

“While I sit at the door
Sick to gaze within
Mine eye weepeth sore
For sorrow and sin:
As a tree my sin stands
To darken all lands;
Death is the fruit it bore.

“How have Eden bowers grown
Without Adam to bend them!
How have Eden flowers blown
Squandering their sweet breath
Without me to tend them!
The Tree of Life was ours,
Tree twelvefold-fruited,
Most lofty tree that flowers,
Most deeply rooted:
I chose the tree of death.

“Hadst thou but said me nay,
Adam, my brother,
I might have pined away;
I, but none other:
God might have let thee stay
Safe in our garden,
By putting me away
Beyond all pardon.

“I, Eve, sad mother
Of all who must live,
I, not another,
Plucked bitterest fruit to give
My friend, husband, lover;—
O wanton eyes, run over;
Who but I should grieve?—
Cain hath slain his brother:
Of all who must die mother,
Miserable Eve!”

Thus she sat weeping,
Thus Eve our mother,
Where one lay sleeping
Slain by his brother.
Greatest and least
Each piteous beast
To hear her voice
Forgot his joys
And set aside his feast.

The mouse paused in his walk
And dropped his wheaten stalk;
Grave cattle wagged their heads
In rumination;
The eagle gave a cry
From his cloud station;
Larks on thyme beds
Forbore to mount or sing;
Bees drooped upon the wing;
The raven perched on high
Forgot his ration;
The conies in their rock,
A feeble nation,
Quaked sympathetical;
The mocking-bird left off to mock;
Huge camels knelt as if
In deprecation;

The kind hart’s tears were falling;
Chattered the wistful stork;
Dove-voices with a dying fall
Cooed desolation
Answering grief by grief.

Only the serpent in the dust
Wriggling and crawling,
Grinned an evil grin and thrust
His tongue out with its fork.

This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.