March 27, 2000
Dilday retiring from Truett Seminary
___WACO--Russell Dilday, immediate past president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, is retiring after six years as a professor at Baylor University's Truett Seminary.
___Dilday, 69, officially will retire in August, but a reception honoring him and his wife, Betty, was held March 23.
___"All of us at Baylor University are grateful for the service of Russell Dilday, not only to the university and Truett Seminary, but also for his lifetime of extraordinary service to Texas Baptists and, indeed, Baptists throughout the world," Baylor President Robert Sloan said.
DILDAY
___In a poll of Baptist Standard readers last fall, Dilday was named one of the 10 most influential Texas Baptists of the 20th century.
___The son of a well-known Texas Baptist minister, Dilday gained prominence as founding pastor of Tallowood Baptist Church in Houston, then as pastor of Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta.
___He returned to Texas in 1979, when he was named president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. An extremely popular president among students, faculty and Texas Baptists, Dilday ran afoul of ultra-conservative trustees placed on the seminary board amid sweeping changes in the Southern Baptist Convention.
___Those trustees abruptly fired Dilday in 1994, achieving their goal but in the process elevating him to near-martyr status among moderate and centrist Baptists.
___Sloan, at the time dean of the new Baylor seminary, quickly hired Dilday as distinguished professor of homiletics. When Sloan became university president in 1995, Dilday served as Truett's interim dean.
___In 1997 and 1998, Dilday was elected president of the BGCT, guiding the nation's largest state Baptist convention through a period of defining itself apart from the new direction of the SBC.
___Truett Dean Bradley Creed called Dilday "a national treasure among Baptists" and "a very effective and popular teacher of ministry students."
___Dilday said his six years at Truett Seminary have been fulfilling and that he will continue to support the school.
___"It isn't often one has an opportunity to participate in launching an institution that promises to have such an enormous impact on the future of Christian ministry and on the contour of Baptist life in Texas and around the world," he said.
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