Paige Patterson was not alone in nearly destroying Southwestern Seminary’s reputation, student enrollment, financial solvency, and faculty morale.  He had helpers and enablers at every step along the way. Some of them have already resigned.  Some have been asked to resign and their classes appear to have been removed from the Fall 2018 course list.

A handful of others probably need to start making their way for the door.

Three years ago next month, Wade Burleson exposed the battle mentality that fueled Patterson’s missiological subterfuge at the International Mission Board. The consistent effort to undermine the leadership of IMB Presidents Jerry Rankin and David Platt was both public and private. At times, Patterson would state his opposition to Rankin and Platt clearly.  At other times, he was content to whisper rumors and raise the specter of “neo-orthodoxy,” an ominous sounding word Patterson frequently divorced from its proper theological context to use as a cudgel when bashing the IMB.

The Baptist Blogger is working on another post — likely to come later this week — that will dig deeper into the extent of Patterson’s manipulations at the mission board and the perverse ecclesiology and anthropology that inspired his actions. While preparing for that post — and a section of the book project we are presently researching — we ran across two relevant documents in our archives.

First, a paper written in 2003 by the current dean of Southwestern Seminary’s School of Evangelism and Missions and one of Patterson’s most prolific pamphleteers entitled “Vision Assessment: The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.”  It can be read by clicking here.

Second, a response letter from former IMB President Jerry Rankin challenging the assumptions of that paper, exposing its analytical fallacies, and addressing its underhanded dissemination. It can be read by clicking here.

Stay tuned . . .