Heath Lambert: It is Christmas time and we are thrilled to celebrate Christmas this week on the podcast with Dr. Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. We are glad that you’re with us, Dr. Patterson, and one of the things that we do on the podcast at Christmas time every year is talked to folks that our listeners are familiar with and have a ministry that they understand. And we’re glad that you’ve joined us on the podcast this week to talk about your life and ministry. So many people who listen to Truth and Love are going to know who you are, but fill out our understanding a little bit. Tell us about your ministry, your place of service, and how you came to be in that role.
Dr. Paige Patterson: Well, it was sort of humiliating, Dr. Lambert, because my famous statement for many, many years was, “One thing I will never be as anybody’s president of anything.” And it was a deep commitment of my soul to do evangelism and I had no interest in any of this other—I’ve now been president of three institutions and once president of the Baptist Convention. So, it’s a way that God has of correcting you, you know, to say, “Well, you’re actually going to do what I want you to do.” So, that’s just how I became president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, against my will and surely, surely, surely there are 50 million other people who would do a better job than I. But my one claim to fame is I do love my students and I love to see them do well.
Heath Lambert: Hmm, one question about your ministry—and you are humble when you speak of this but you were instrumental in deeply involved in the conservative resurgence of the Southern Baptist Convention. What is something about that decades-long effort and your involvement in it that was a surprise to you that people might not know about?
Dr. Paige Patterson: Well, give you a positive and a negative. I’ll start with the negative. My negative surprise was the lack of courage among preachers. We have 40,000-something pastors at the Southern Baptist convention and many of them would talk to me on the phone and tell me they were solidly with me, but on the street, they would see me coming and cross to the other side to keep from having to speak. And they were just frightened, I understand that. It wasn’t a value judgment about me, but they were afraid of their own shadows, and that was probably the negative reaction that I had. The positive thing that surprised me so wonderfully well was, that we’d done a better job than we thought we had with our laypeople. And our lay-people came out stronger and goats breath! We were so proud of the way our laypeople stood, and stood no matter what the cost may be. And it’s really the laypeople, that to a large effect turned this whole thing and I thank God for them.
Heath Lambert: It’s coming up on 40 years since the beginning of that effort, any reflections?
Dr. Paige Patterson: Well, yes. I marveled at what God has done. We mentioned to the people out there a minute ago, the fact that there had been a monumental sea shift in the Seminary. Normally, a seminary begins adrift in a leftward direction and it never rights itself. You know, the number of those is legion. We had six seminaries, three of which never had been conservative, to begin with, but which were definitely left-leaning in every way. For all six of our seminaries to come back to an affirmation of the Word of God as believable, accurate, and true is pretty phenomenal. I believe only God could have done that and I honestly almost cringe when I’m given some credit for it because I don’t want to take credit for what only God could do.
Heath Lambert: That’s ministry, let’s talk about your family, your wife, and your kids.
Dr. Paige Patterson: Happy to do that.
Heath Lambert: Okay.
Dr. Paige Patterson: My wife is Dorothy. I have one doctorate, and she owns two.
Heath Lambert: Okay.
Dr. Paige Patterson: I have about twelve books and publications, and she has about twenty. So, I’ve had to get used to that over the course of years. We were childhood sweethearts and every other day with anybody else, I first saw her when I was seven, and she was 6. I told my dad that was the girl I was going to marry. I try to be a man of my word, so I did and she’s been with me through all these years of ministry. Unbelievable. I have a son and his wife, who is now associate pastor of a Japanese-speaking church in the Dallas area, a son-in-law, a daughter, and two granddaughters, who [son-in-law] is also a pastor of a large church in the Dallas area.
Heath Lambert: And how long have you and your wife been married?
Dr. Paige Patterson: We’ve been married fifty-four years, so there is some indication that it may make it.
Heath Lambert: There’s some indication. Yes, there is!
Heath Lambert: It is Christmas time and one of the things that we like to do on the podcast this week at Christmas, is to talk about your family traditions at Christmas. So you have older children now, but let’s think back to when your children were younger. What was Christmas like in the Patterson home?
Dr. Paige Patterson: Well, Christmas in the Patterson home involved the Kelly home too, which was my in-laws. And my father-in-law was a mortician. Nice man. The last man in the world who would ever let you down. And he was a wonderful Christian man, and by virtue of working with people who are always in sorrow and heartache, he developed a wonderful rapport with just about everybody and particularly with kids.
Heath Lambert: Okay.
Dr. Paige Patterson: And so listening to Papa read the Christmas story every Christmas, my children were not ever thinking about presents and Christmas trees and all that kind of thing. They were looking forward to hearing Papa read the Christmas story. And Papa, with great palm, with great seriousness, would approach the reading of the Christmas story and give it his own interpretation as he went along, and my children loved it very, very much. Might just mention one other thing, that part of our larger family which is the Seminary family—some years ago while I was pastor of First Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I began to realize that my people knew so much about Christmas that they didn’t understand it at all. And I started praying, Dorothy and I start praying, “Lord, what can we do to make this come alive to the people?” And so we hit on the fact that what I was going to do was preach a series of sermons beginning in November on the characters of Christmas, but I was going to do it from a monologue in full costume. And we had some people, of course, from the University of Arkansas who were very good at costuming and makeup. And so they put all this together, and I wrote the first-hand account of what I remember from Joseph, Mary, and Simeon, and I did “Herod from Hell.” That was pretty shaking. I did the shepherd from the hillside, one of the Magi, and I did it all first person, all biblical exegesis, but from the first person. And I never even told my people I was going to do it. I just came in the first day dressed as a shepherd, sat down next to a deacon who took one look, and got up and moved. And so, my people were shocked. The minister of music was in on it. And he said, “Well, I don’t know where the pastor is. It’s time for him to preach…” And that’s when I stood up, and I identified myself as a shepherd from the hillside. I’ve done those for years and years now. I do one every Christmas at Seminary. And we have found that it opens people’s eyes to see in a new way, the Christmas story.
Heath Lambert: Hmm, that’s wonderful.
Dr. Paige Patterson: And so, that I would mention is something we do with our broader family.
Heath Lambert: Okay. What about now that your children are older? What is Christmas looked like with that transition from young kids to old kids?
Dr. Paige Patterson: They all love to come back, and so we try every year to get together at our house because that’s easier for us old people. But the young people—that are now, of course, approaching fifty themselves—they love to come back, they love to bring their kids back, and we have a considerable time together around the Word of God. And we’re not much of a singing family, but we even do a little bit of that. And it’s a time which is precious to us every year at Christmas.
Heath Lambert: Tell us a favorite Christmas memory with your grandkids.
Dr. Paige Patterson: Ah, favorite Christmas memory with our grandkids. Well, I think I could do that. It’s kind of a funny one. My wife got into—for years she would outfit everybody for family pictures at Christmas time, and we would all get the same outfit. So, maybe one year we’d have a Hawaiian Christmas so all the ladies would be decked out in their Hawaiian dresses, and men would come in with their Aloha shirts and so forth. And every year was something different and sometimes related to something that they had seen in the movies or whatever. But always, I’m different, and everybody was adorned the same way. We tease them my wife about it a little bit too much, and so one year she outfitted all the women and gave nothing to the men. So all of us, which included Chuck Kelly, the president of New Orleans Seminary, her brother, and everybody else, we got together and we said, “Well, this is just not right for us not to have some similar clothing with the ladies.” And so we decided that it would be a shirtless Christmas. And we all came down for the family picture with no shirts on. Needless to say, that was not the happiest Christmas we’d ever spent.
Heath Lambert: [Laughs] Did they take the picture?
Dr. Paige Patterson: They took the picture!
Heath Lambert: Where could we get our hands on that picture if we wanted it?
Dr. Paige Patterson: I think that’s been put in the box that says “Not to be opened until the year 3040.”
