G. Avery Lee died on December 23 in Lake Charles. Readers with New Orleans backgrounds will remember this one-of-a-kind pastor who served St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church from 1961 to 1980. He was 92. A memorial service will be held at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church (7100 St. Charles Ave) on January 30 at 2 pm.
The lengthy obituary in the Times-Picayune fills some of the gaps of my own knowledge of Dr. Lee. Prior to coming to New Orleans he served the FBC of Ruston from 1948 to 1961, and before that directed Baptist student work at LSU while serving as associate pastor of the FBC in Baton Rouge.
I was a student at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-60s, so had occasion to learn of Dr. Lee first-hand. After I became director of missions for BAGNO in 2004, he and I swapped a few notes and kept promising to get together. I regret that we didn’t.
Would it be too harsh to say that Dr. Lee took a special pleasure in being a burr-under-the-saddle to defenders of the status quo in our denomination? (The newspaper’s headline calls him a “pioneering pastor.” That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.)
Some quotes….
“A prolific author, Pastor Lee was an advocate of civil rights and ecumenical causes.” Those who lived through the 50s and 60s in this denomination will recall that the voices calling for us to do the right thing in racial situations were few and rare, and the speakers were circumscribed if not ostracized. Such a ministry took vision, courage, and fortitude.
“His work in bringing the Grambling University community together with the town of Ruston is credited with breaking social barriers in north Louisiana.”
“In his 1993 book, ‘Affirmations of a Skeptical Believer,’ Lee wrote, ‘Christianity should not be a pallid, censorious, joyless way of life, but a zestful, venturesome realization of its finest possibilities.'”
The Southern Baptist Convention has changed in a hundred ways in the forty years since I was in seminary and the nearly 30 years since G. Avery Lee led SCABC, some of it good, some questionable. The latest pastor of the church, Stephen Meriwether (who has since left; the church is presently pastorless), informed me a couple of years back that they had voted to pull out of the SBC, the LBC (state convention), as well as BAGNO. He said, “We’re not mad at anyone, just see our mission differently from that of the denomination.”
One unhappy aspect of our present situation is that we no longer have dissents and mavericks in this denomination the way we used to. While denominational leadership never appreciates critics, every movement of any kind — and particularly Christian denominations — must have prophetic voices among their members or suffer the consequences. The consequences of a vacuum of critics include inbreeding, failing to see omissions, failures, and needs all around, and a smugness from the mistaken conceit that no one complaining means we’re doing well.
In the late 1960s Newt Gingrich was a grad student at nearby Tulane University and dropped by to see Pastor Lee. “He was not a member of any church,” the pastor later wrote. “He said that in his (studies) he noted how much influence the church had had on political theory and asked if I could explain.”
After that conversation, Lee wrote, “We talked often. Newt began coming to church… I baptized him into the membership of the St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church.” He added, “It has been suggested by some that in baptizing him, I didn’t hold him under long enough.”
Two days after Dr. Lee’s death, as we have reported here, Dr. Marshall Truehill, another of our pastors who knew how to “speak truth to power,” went to Heaven.
I’ve never been one who colored outside the lines much. Never spoke up very loudly at times when I felt the denomination (national, state, association) was getting off course. Never laid my body across the railroad track to “stop that train” or chose “to die on this mountain.” Whether it was from a lack of courage or a failure to see issues as clearly as some, I’m not sure. I suspect it was rather a lack of certainty of my own viewpoint and an unwillingness to pay the price for taking an unpopular position.
My hunch is that one’s personality and temperament come to play in such matters. Some people not only color outside the lines, they live there. As someone once said of the atheist Madalyn Murray-O’Hair, “If everyone in the world was an atheist, she would have been a believer.” Some people delight in standing to the side and carping.
Any healthy movement — religious, political, social — not only welcomes dissent, but encourages it. That is often the only way the organization can stay on mission.
The next time we encounter the maverick in our organization or church, particularly if we are the presiding officer having to deal with his/her motions and protests, let us remember to treasure the benefit they bring us. They help to keep us honest.
Anything that does that is an asset; anyone who does that is my friend.
While at FBC Ruston, Avery wrote a weekly column in the Baptist Message entitled “Thus Saith the Preacher.” One week he wisecracked to the effect that those who must fish on Sunday could drop their “tithe” in the freezer on his back porch. That created a firestorm of letters protesting his “encouragement” of Sabbath-breaking. One letter triggered my first letter to the editor. That writer took the Message to task for even publishing it. As a college student athirst for freedom, I responded that censorship was anti-Baptist (etc) and copied the letter to Dr Lee. Got a nice reply, altho he could take care of himself. The next week he mused that he had discussed multiple major issues: race, war, alcohol, and the like. None of these topics produced nearly the flurry as his tongue-in-cheek crack. In addition to being “outside the lines,” he was also a trenchant observer of our times. We’ll miss him.