May 8, 2000

Decade's journey brings
Joel Gregory back to his Baptist roots
___By Marv Knox
___Editor
___ATLANTA--A lonely decade away from the limelight led Joel Gregory back to his Baptist roots, the former pastor told the Network of Mainstream Baptists April 26.
___As a young minister, Gregory shot meteorically through the Baptist ranks.
___In 1983, as a young professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, he presented the theme interpretations at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. In

JOEL GREGORY climbed the heights of denominational politics, but he found his Baptist roots during a decade of solitude. (File photo)

1985, as pastor of Travis Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth, he was asked to nominate both SBC presidential candidates. In 1987, he was elected president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. In 1988, he preached the SBC annual sermon. In 1990, he became pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas.
___Gregory turned out his own spotlight in 1992, when, burned out and disillusioned, he abruptly resigned the Dallas pastorate. "I had a gift to preach. That gift propelled me into positions and expectations I was not prepared to face," he said of his ascent and decline.
___After a time as "a door-to-door salesman of funerals," he now owns and operates a small publishing business in Fort Worth. And in the past two years, he has begun to preach again--70 percent of the time in African-American congregations and 30 percent in "small Baptist churches."
___Gregory told the Atlanta gathering "what I found out about myself, the church and Baptists over the past decade":
___ "As someone who moved from the pulpit of a 'super church' to the other side of the pew, I saw my own ignorance about how hard it is for the people in the pew simply to get through life," he confessed.
___Ministers, particularly in very large churches, "deal with people in the masses rather than individually," he said. But since his departure from the pulpit, he has "encountered the dilemmas and difficulties of life of people who sit out in the pews."
___ "Small is beautiful," he acknowledged. "Texas Baptists, we think bigger is better. But I recall the Lord Jesus said, 'The Kingdom of God comes without observation.' God is not always in the large, the grandiose, the big. He also is involved with much that is never seen, known, noticed.
___"Baptist triumphalism needs to be muted by knowing God is doing a lot in the world we never know about."
___ "The Kingdom is God's Kingdom with a capital 'K' and not our kingdom," he said.
___Gregory compared himself to the neurotic rooster who became delusioned, thinking the sun came up because he crowed. "A burden I found too heavy to bear was that rooster phenomenon--that the kingdom was mine," he acknowledged.
___"What God does in his kingdom is like a river flowing through time. It was there long before we arrived, and it will be there long after we are gone. We are the craft on the river. It carries us; we do not move it."
___ "The church is an institution of human beings with a divine origin," he observed, conceding he had as pastor "lived in a situation that tended to divinize the pastor and the institution around him."
___"The last decade has been a good opportunity for me to get in touch with the humanity of the church," he said. "God is working in, through and around an institution that should not be treated triumphalistically."
___ His experience caused him to re-evaluate "my own journey with and about the Bible, my life, times and education," he recalled.
___"I grew up with simple biblicism--a profound confidence that this is God's word for us," he said, holding up his Bible. "I fell into what a number of Baptists fell into in the '80s, an attempt to define, analyze and denominalize Scripture."
___Regarding politics that divided the denomination, he noted: "In the late '70s and early '80s, I was like a number of younger Baptist preachers in Texas. We really believed (the controversy) was about the Bible. One by one, we were disabused that was what it was about."
___"It was more about style and hermeneutics," the approach to biblical interpretation, he explained. "It was about uniformity ... and a certain style or way of doing church. ... Of course, it was about power."
___ The years out of the limelight also caused Gregory to examine "the value I attached to my own roots as a Baptist," he noted. "I had the experience of being cut off from virtually every root that had been mine."
___So, he had to ask himself, "Where do you come from?" he remembered.
___"The values in my life had to do with the Baptist heritage I received as a child growing up in Connell Baptist Church in Fort Worth," he said. "The priesthood of the believer, the autonomy of the church and the emphasis on a simple biblicism in which the Bible was not used as a tool or a wedge."
___"My own heart is back at home, where I grew up," he claimed. "Those simple, basic Baptist truths have sustained me through a decade of challenge, loss and surprising friendships."
___Gregory's time travelogue was not an attempt to climb back into the limelight, to stand behind America's foremost pulpits, he insisted.
___"I own a publishing company and will continue to own a publishing company," he said. "I'm not running for anything in Baptist life. I do not intend to re-enter the pastorate."
___And speaking to a small moderate Baptist organization certainly was not self-serving, Gregory vowed, noting, "Some close personal friends will be highly offended I met with you today."
___

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