Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410180076
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He was ascending the pinnacle of the Southern Baptist clerical career track - at least the road that the most ambitious pastors take.
Gregory was, a couple of years ago, pastor of one of the four largest Southern Baptist congregations in the country - First Baptist, Dallas, which claimed 29,000 members. He was heard around the nation every week as the "permanent" preacher for the ``Baptist Hour'' radio program. He was in demand in conservative Southern Baptist pulpits all over the country, including Roanoke's First Baptist Church. Only 44 years old, he was mentioned frequently, almost matter-of-factly, as a future president of the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
Today, he's out of the Christian ministry, making a living selling cemetery plots door-to-door in his native Fort Worth, Texas.
And he's plugging a just-released book on the "mega-church" experience that left him feeling "disenfranchised" by the denomination that created him.
Gregory pours out a tale of power and greed and other dangers of big-time religion. In a country where every three weeks another congregation joins the 400 existing "mega-churches" - claiming 2,000 or more members - Gregory's warnings are likely to become more and more relevant.
His most stinging observations are reserved for the leadership of First Baptist, Dallas, whose $200,000 a year pastorate he quit abruptly in September 1992 after charging that the senior pastor, W.A. Criswell, refused to step aside as promised.
But he saves some of the blame for himself, as suggested by the book's title - "Too Great a Temptation: The Seductive Power of America's Super Church" (The Summitt Group, Fort Worth, $24.95).
Occasionally Gregory falls into the slippery kiss-and-tell kind of confession so often seen on talk-show TV. And, since it is his book, it is told only from his point of view and can't be taken as the definitive story of First Baptist, Dallas.
The story has the ring of reliability to it, though, particularly in Gregory's conclusion, with its advice to other giant churches on handling the transfer of leadership.
"If my book has some redemptive value, I think it is in how these transitions happen," Gregory said in a telephone interview last week.
His contention is that congregationally led churches - such as Southern Baptist ones - should "let the great figure retire or die, hire an air-clearing interim and then hire a new pastor." It is a pattern required in some denominations and advised in others.
What Gregory found in Dallas was an intolerable netherworld in which neither he nor the congregation knew who was really in charge.
"You could watch it from the platform. If I announced something new or different, 3,000 pairs of eyes shifted to the right" to check out Criswell's reaction. "Everything you change is a reflection on Criswell."
In this case, the leadership challenge was to a legendary figure in the denomination's conservative movement who has now passed his 50th anniversary at First Baptist, Dallas.
Gregory not only described Criswell as duplicitous in failing to fulfill a promise to step aside after a few months' transition period, but accuses Criswell's wife of scheming to undermine his authority through her huge Sunday school class. Criswell's wife reportedly wanted O.S. Hawkins of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as her husband's successor. Hawkins was hired shortly after Gregory left.
"It was impossible to lead" with Criswell still there. Gregory worried that any effort to assume the primary leadership role would make him "look like an intransigent power monger trying to put the old man out on the street."
In the end, Gregory simply wasn't up to the fight for power. According to his account, the lay leadership of the church insisted he had to confront Criswell on his own. In his brief resignation speech, he told the congregation that he found that "an intolerable situation."
Leaders of the church generally have refused to comment on Gregory's book, but several have disputed his account that he was promised that Criswell would step out of the pulpit in a few months. Criswell himself reportedly told the Forth Worth Star-Telegram, "Before God, I did everything in my power to help him before, during and after what happened. I tried everything."
Since his departure, Gregory's critics have tried to "paint me as an inveterate womanizer" who might have been having an affair when he left. Gregory denies that, but his very public if amicable divorce in December of 1993 - more than a year after he left the church - and his remarriage last June to a divorcee from his former congregation in Forth Worth caused tongues to wag again.
It is his marital status that Gregory considers to have estranged him from the denomination in which he began preaching at age 16.
"It's hard for me to say where I fit in within the Southern Baptist Convention. Leaving [First Baptist, Dallas] did not disenfranchise me. Going through a divorce and remarriage effectively did."
Many, perhaps most, Southern Baptist congregations interpret a verse in I Timothy that a "bishop must be ... the husband of one wife" to mean that a man who is divorced and remarried cannot be a church leader.
"I don't consider myself to have left the ministry. I am still ordained. I've not turned my credentials in. But I think Baptists just don't know what to do with you if you're divorced and remarried. ... I don't feel I've walked away from Baptist life, I've just become a nonentity - even among my friends."
Gregory had been one of the better-known Southern Baptist pastors to avoid overt participation in the struggle between moderates and conservatives for control of the denomination through the 1980s. Finally, in 1990, he backed the conservative candidate and alienated some former supporters. He considers his endorsement to have been a key in the election of Morris Chapman as denominational president. Gregory was later rewarded with national offices, the last of which was heading the committee that recently nominated Jerry Rankin as new chairman of the Foreign Mission Board, based in Richmond.
"After two years off the battlefield," Gregory said, "I have a little different perspective on the issues. I spent most of the 1980s granting great credibility to the warriors for inerrancy" - the doctrine that the Bible is to be taken as literally accurate in all matters, including history and science.
Now, "I've found that some in the movement obviously were in it as a way to acquire power. ... A whole lot of the fundamentalists just wanted their guy" at the Foreign Mission Board, he said. "That disabused me of some naivete.
"I see evidence that the [Southern Baptist Convention] as we know it is disappearing. Virginia has almost seceded. Texas Baptists are meeting to talk about disengagement. Floridians have talked about it. The old machinery of the SBC ... the wheels are coming off, the dinosaur is about to die."
Nevertheless, "I have no quarrel with Southern Baptists," Gregory said. "Whatever I became, I owe to them through my degrees at Baylor University, Southwestern Seminary, their churches. The book is no blanket indictment of Southern Baptists."
In fact, Gregory had nothing but praise for Charles Fuller, pastor of Roanoke's First Baptist Church, who once headed a "peace committee" that attempted to outline areas where moderates and conservatives could cooperate in the national denomination.
"I consider Charles Fuller to be one of the great statesmen and princes of our denomination. He has endured years of unspeakable pressure to be politicized. It would have been far easier for Charlie Fuller to have been co-opted by either side than to be where he has been. He is his own man. That is almost unique."
While Gregory says he remains a conservative who considers the Bible "a perfect book, I don't believe I'd enter into any hair-splitting debates about what that means any more. ... I don't know that I'd go to war for it anymore."
He doesn't rule out a return to the pulpit some day, but says that he's not ready for that yet, although he's had offers outside Texas. He has an 80-year-old mother and two teen-age sons still living in his home state and he has "no desire to turn tail and run. I don't have anything to run away from.
"It's not always easy, though. When you go into a restaurant and they get quiet and look at you. Same at the club where I work out. But to live with that is better than running off."
by CNB