(RNS) — For much of the past decade, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Once the nation’s largest seminary, and one of six Southern Baptist seminaries, the school has been a center of controversy since the 2018 firing of its former president, Paige Patterson, for mishandling a claim of sexual abuse by a female student at a previous job. Since then, the school has ousted a second president, who then sued the school, admitted to overspending its budget by $140 million, fought in court with ex-employees over a foundation that supported the school, dealt with a Department of Justice investigation, and experienced internal board conflict over declining enrollment and fiscal crisis.
By the time David Dockery, a soft-spoken but well-respected Baptist leader, was named the school’s interim president in the fall of 2022, the school was out of cash. “In September of 2022 we had $4.2 million of short-term debt with the credit line maxed out, and wondering if we were going to be able to navigate our way even through that particular academic year,” Dockery told RNS in a recent interview…