Dockery Center to focus on global evangelical theology amid a changing culture
The newly renamed Dockery Center for Global Evangelical Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary seeks to recover the “best of evangelical theology, a renewed commitment to historic orthodoxy, and a reclaiming of the best of Christian tradition,” President Adam W. Greenway told the seminary’s board of trustees during its recent spring meeting.
“Southwestern Seminary has become a majority non-Anglo institution with more than half of our student body something other than people who look like me,” Greenway told trustees, who voted unanimously to rename the center in honor of David S. Dockery. “We truly are one step closer to becoming a Revelation 7:9 seminary – a seminary that looks like what eternity is going to look like with leaders from every tribe, every tongue, every nation, every people group who are worshipping before the throne of the one true and living God. Southwestern Seminary is truly becoming a global evangelical seminary.”
Dockery, distinguished professor of theology and special consultant to the president at Southwestern Seminary, served as the interim provost of the Fort Worth institution from December 2020 to February 2022. Editor of the Southwestern Journal of Theology, the oldest theological journal continuously published by a Southern Baptist seminary, Dockery will serve as the Dockery Center’s inaugural director.
“When I heard the news that the Center for Global Evangelical Theology, which had been announced this past November, would be named in my honor, I was incredibly surprised,” Dockery said. “I am genuinely humbled by the decision. Moreover, I am truly thankful to the board of trustees, to President Greenway, and to all who were involved in the naming of the center.”
Originally established in 2003 as the Center for Theological Research, the previously named center was led by Malcolm B. Yarnell III, research professor of theology, and W. Madison Grace II, associate professor of theology, for many years.
“We are thankful for the good work that Malcolm Yarnell and Madison Grace have done through the years in leading the Center for Theological Research, the predecessor of the new Center for Global Evangelical Theology,” Dockery said. “We trust that we will be able to expand and extend their faithful efforts.”
The Dockery Center’s work will be formed by “convictional commitments to the life of the church and great tradition of historic Christian orthodoxy,” Dockery explained. “In an age of rising secularism and advancing pluralism, the center will not be satisfied to declare theological neutrality” and will follow “paths proposed by James Leo Garrett Jr.” and “emphasize commitments to denominational evangelicalism, stressing the importance of being Baptist evangelicals and evangelical Baptists.” Garrett, a longtime distinguished professor of theology at Southwestern Seminary who also taught at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Baylor University, was widely influential, especially in the areas of Baptist theology and engagement with other Christian denominations.
The increase in secularization, a “growing interest in a vast and amorphous spirituality,” a new atheism, and the rise of the “nones,” are being “shaped by and within a postmodern culture” within the 21st century, Dockery said. This “rapid culture change” has produced “alternative trajectories” to the church that are “not unlike those offered in the early decades of the early 20th century” which necessitates a trajectory “that is faithful to Scripture and respectful to the best of our history, and that at the same time is applicable for the global future of the evangelical movement.”
The work of the Dockery Center will focus on evangelicalism globally.
“We think it is important to emphasize the global aspect of the evangelical community at this particular time,” Dockery noted. Citing statistics of all kinds of Christians worldwide, he said “it has been estimated that in 2000, 814 million Christians lived in Europe and North America in 2000 compared to 660 million in Africa and Asia. Currently, the Global North holds 838 million Christians while Africa and Asia have climbed to 1.1 billion. It is estimated that by 2050, Africa alone will be home to nearly 1.3 billion Christians. And the number of Christians across Latin America continues to increase.”
Dockery said it is important to recognize that “North American and European evangelicalism has been weakened in large sectors of the church and is under assault in our secular culture, resulting in a great evangelical recession.”
The Dockery Center will work “constructively” within the Southwestern Seminary community to partner with the institution’s other centers, schools, and programs in the areas of worship, education, cultural engagement, and global evangelism, Dockery said.
“We believe that one aspect of the renewal and revitalization of Southwestern Seminary involves calling our faculty, students, churches, and friends to the biblical strength and theological beauty of the evangelical heritage,” he said.
Dockery, who led Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, from 1996 to 2014, also served as the president of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School from 2014 to 2019, in addition to other positions in Christian higher education.
A prolific author and editor, Dockery has served as editor of Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals, Southern Baptists, Evangelicals and the Future of Denominationalism, Christian Higher Education in the Evangelical Tradition, and New Dimensions in Evangelical Thought. Additionally, the Southern Baptist statesman has given major addresses on evangelicalism at leading evangelical universities and seminaries.
The Alabama-native holds degrees from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Grace Theological Seminary, Southwestern Seminary, Texas Christian University, and the University of Texas system.
