Dallas Willard: Baptist Minister

How Dallas Willard has helped me understand my denominational identity

This week thousands of Southern Baptists gather in Orlando for our annual meeting. There will be motions and resolutions, reports and elections, the slow machinery of a convention doing its business. I will be somewhere in that hall, grappling with how the decisions that are being made impact our denominational identity.

The theologian who has taught me the most about following Jesus, and, to my surprise, the most about being a Baptist, will not be on any stage. He has been gone since 2013.

His name was Dallas Willard. He was ordained a Southern Baptist minister in 1956.

Roots

Willard grew up in rural Missouri, in circumstances that were anything but stable. As a boy, in the First Baptist Church of Buffalo, he gave his life to Christ. He carried a love of learning from the schoolhouse to the church house, and in 1956, while pastoring First Baptist Church of Thomasville, Missouri, he was ordained to the ministry. From there his road bent toward the academy. He spent most of his working life as a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California.

By most accounts Willard had not been a member of a Baptist church since the 1960s. For the rest of his life he worshiped across traditions, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Quaker, Covenant, and he drank from every stream he could reach. Richard Foster, his Quaker friend, once described one such gathering as a Baptist pastor inviting a Quaker to a Lutheran’s church to hear an Episcopalian who used to be a Presbyterian. And yet, to the end, in his books and his recordings, Dallas Willard kept calling himself a Baptist minister. That is the part I could never explain.

I asked his daughter, Becky Willard Heatley, why. She told me her father had laid low on the Southern Baptist name for a long season. Part of it was reputation. “There was just kind of a stereotype,” she said, “you’ve got the Southern twang and you’re a farmer, and not well educated.” In Southern California, where Baptist churches were scarce, it was not a name that opened doors.

So why keep it at all? Becky said she asked him about it once. His answer has stayed with me. The men who ordained him, she said, the men who taught him and raised him up, meant so much to him that he would never want to disconnect from them. And then she said the line I keep coming back to. “That’s what Southern Baptist means to him. It’s what those people were.”

For Willard the label was not a position on a denominational map. It was a debt of love to the people who first handed him the gospel.

What the Word Made of Him

If you read Willard looking for Baptist distinctives, you will not find him arguing the mode of baptism or the shape of church government. What was Baptist in him ran underneath all of that, down in the way he understood the gospel itself.

I put the question to James Bryan Smith. Smith was mentored by Willard and now holds the Dallas Willard Chair of Christian Spiritual Formation at Friends University. Willard believed, Smith said, “that the gospel rightly proclaimed was a form of power in the universe.” He went on: “More times than I can remember, he would pause and talk about the power of the preached word. That really connected him to the evangelical tradition, the Baptist tradition, because of that strong emphasis on the authority of the Bible as both written and proclaimed. That’s a very Baptist sort of thing.”

A high view of Scripture. A confidence that the preached word carries real power in the world. Those convictions did not fall away when Willard traded the Baptist pulpit for the philosophy seminar. They went with him into every classroom he ever taught.

A Presbyterian or a Methodist could claim much of that, and Smith knew it. He named the evangelical tradition in the same breath as the Baptist one. What tips Willard toward the Baptist side of that family is where he put his confidence next, in the ordinary gathered church. “The church is and always will be God’s best arrangement for his people,” Willard liked to say. Smith remembered him calling congregations outposts of the kingdom, not to be confused with the kingdom itself, but indispensable to it all the same. A man with Willard’s gifts could have floated above the ordinary gathered church and lectured the world from a distance. He refused to. He kept showing up to teach midweek classes in local congregations into his final years. That stubborn belief in the small assembly is a deeply Baptist conviction.

Keith Matthews, who taught alongside Willard for years, put his finger on something subtler. Willard’s Southern Baptist training, Matthews said, including the dispensationalism he learned as a young man, never entirely left him. What changed is that Willard toned it down, and he did it on purpose, “because he wanted to see the Spirit work, and not generate something of a feeling that would fade.” He kept the soil he was planted in. He pulled the weeds out of it.

The Gospel He Outgrew, and the One He Kept

I will not pretend Willard’s Baptist story was all gratitude. Some of what he carried out of those years he carried as a burden.

He was honest about what his own preaching had become in the Baptist pulpit. He grew disillusioned that his sermons produced rededication but not transformation. “When I came down hard,” he said, “the people who came forward to rededicate their lives were the best people in the congregation. Revival didn’t really change people.” Looking back, he named the deeper problem: “As a Baptist preacher, I was taught that one of my main businesses was to convince people that they were saved. I really don’t think that’s our business.”

John Ortberg, one of Willard’s closest protégés, described the gospel he and Dallas had both inherited. Even after years under Willard’s teaching, Ortberg admitted, his invitations still came out the same way. “Here’s how to be forgiven so that you can know for sure you’re going to heaven when you die.” A whole gospel shrunk down to a transaction settled at the end of life.

I know that gospel. I grew up on it. Willard called it the gospel of sin management. I have called it the gospel of minimum insurance requirements, the faith of a struggling Southern Baptist who could not work out why being saved never seemed to make him new. The first time I read Willard, on a flight, in the cheapest copy of The Great Omission I could find, I read one sentence I have never gotten past. Grace, he wrote, is opposed to earning, not to effort. Faith made sense for the first time.

Willard did not leave the Baptists because he stopped believing what they believe. He left a thin version of the gospel that some of our preaching had settled for, and he kept the convictions underneath it, the authority of the Word, the power of proclamation, the necessity of the church.

The ache, for me, is that the people most shaped by his work were not the people who raised him.

One of Our Own

Richard Foster, a Quaker, built Renovaré with Willard alongside him. Methodists in South Africa flew him across the world, again and again, to teach their pastors. A rising generation of younger ministers across many traditions has made his books the backbone of their formation. My own tradition, the one that converted him and ordained him and gave him the Word he never stopped trusting, has done very little to embody or appreciate his work.

I do not write that to scold the room in Orlando. I write it as a man who is part of that room, and who grieves a missed inheritance. We had a teacher of the nations among us. We let other people claim him and missed a great legacy we could have learned from.

I used to wear the Baptist name uneasily. Willard has changed that for me. He helped me see that being Baptist, at its best, is exactly what Becky described to me. It is the men and women who first hand you the gospel, who teach you to trust the written and spoken Word, who lay hands on you and send you out and never let you forget that the preached word is power. That is worth keeping. That is worth a debt of love.

So this week I will sit in that hall as one of Willard’s people, and as one of theirs. Maybe, as I told Jim Smith when we talked, that is the Baptist that is in me, and the Baptist that was in Dallas all along. Neither of us could quite take the label off. Both of us came to understand it was never about the label. It was about the people who handed us the Word, and the Word they handed us.

For Reflection

1. Who first handed you the gospel, and what did they give you that you would never want to disconnect from? Have you thanked God for them lately, by name?

2. Is your preaching aimed mostly at convincing your people they are saved, or at forming them into apprentices of Jesus who can do what he said? How would your congregation know the difference this Sunday?

3. Whose work has shaped your walk with God the most, and what would it cost you to carry that gift back to your own people instead of leaving it for others to claim?