SBTS Trustee Whistleblower on Al Mohler

The Burden of a Shorter Week and the State of the Program

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're gonna do a few episodes this week, I think. They're gonna be shorter. So we're gonna do more of them, but they're gonna be shorter.

I hope that's okay with you guys. I know some of you like the longer ones. You tell me, John, that was too short. Others of you don't like it when I do a long one. You want shorter ones. So we're gonna make the people that like shorter ones happy this week.

And part of it is I'm just short on time. There's a few subjects I wanna get to, but I was thinking about this this morning. 2020 has had more cancellations. I mean, there's no Christmas parties. There's no, well, there's no office Christmas parties.

Hopefully you're still doing Christmas. I know in some states that's controversial now, but outdoor activities like concerts and county fairs have been canceled this year. And yet somehow in the midst of that, it's still been, I think, the busiest year.

And I'm not joking about this. It really has been, I think, the busiest year of my life. And I'm just, I feel like I'm traveling all over the place. I got like 1 ,500 things going on in my head. And a lot of projects, many of which I, or some of which at least I haven't even mentioned on this podcast yet because I know better than to do that.

I don't wanna, certain things I'll tease and I'll tell you if I'm sure that they're gonna happen, relatively sure. But other things I wanna make sure that things are falling into place before I announce them.

Anyway, there's just a lot going on. And that's a good thing. But at the same time, it does make my schedule very nuts. And so anyway, it was just more convenient for me to give you some short episodes.

Why Tom Rush's Whistleblowing Video Matters

And we're gonna do one right now. This is the first one of the week on Tom Rush, a trustee at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, because he just put a video out last week, a whistleblowing video that I think is actually very significant.

And it's gotten a lot of views. I haven't looked, I think I looked yesterday and it was over 8 ,000 or so. But it's interesting that the usual suspects have not really said anything about it. It's just been kind of organically making its way into the hands of people that are conservative in the Southern Baptist Convention.

And let me explain something to you, because if you're not a Southern Baptist, this is still important. So the Southern Baptist Convention has five, I think it's five major seminaries. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is the flagship one in Louisville, Kentucky, meaning it's the one that kind of unofficially sets the theological course for the denomination.

Al Mohler, who if you believe some of the whistleblowers that have come out, Al Mohler sets basically the political direction for the entire convention. He is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

And now he's running for president of the convention. So significant in those ways if you're a Southern Baptist. If you're not though, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the country.

It very much affects the larger evangelical culture. And so for that reason, it's good to pay attention to kind of what's going on. And what's going on there has not been good the last few years. This year, there's been some things that I would consider to be honestly encouraging in some ways, because the truth is starting to make its way to the surface.

It's kind of percolating. And in some ways, maybe some of you think, this hasn't taken place soon enough. Why are these people coming out now? They should have done it earlier. I understand all that, but we just praise God that the truth is starting to come out.

And this has been good for someone like myself, who I did a whistleblowing video on Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I didn't even think of it in those terms at the time. It was just my experience, because I was concerned, hey, people are gonna go there and not realize what they're getting into.

It's becoming a progressive place that churns out progressive pastors. And so I did an hour and a half walking through my experience. Well, that now was, what, two years ago, I guess, something like that, that I went through all of that.

So now we're two years afterward. We're two years past the MLK, two and a half years, I guess, past the MLK50 event, the Dallas Statement. I think we're over two years past the Dallas Statement. And now we're starting to see more people come out and say, hey, this is what was going on.

And it's what many of us suspected. It's what many of us, well, I speak for myself, it's what I was told by a lot of people. And people that say, John, I can't say anything publicly. Please don't disclose my name, but this is what's happening at my institution.

And now that stuff is finally starting to make its way to the surface. And primary sources, people who are eyewitness accounts, that kind of thing, are coming forward and they're saying, yep, it was going in a liberal direction.

It is going in a liberal direction. Here's what's happening. So I think this is a very good thing. I mean, the first part of helping any issue, trying to resolve it, trying to correct it, trying to confront it, means you have to recognize that it even exists.

You have to know kind of where it is. So here's a significant video. This is a, I'm just gonna give you my opinion and I'm gonna walk through kind of the, what I think are the major points of this video from Tom Rush.

And if you wanna look at the original source, if you wanna see Tom Rush in his own words, talking about the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, talking about Al Mohler, then you wanna go to the link in the info section.

It's the first one. And you can just click on it. It'll take you right there. But I wanna point out, so as we get started here, that there have actually been four, that I know of, major whistleblowers in the year 2020 in the Southern Baptist Convention, four.

You have Russell Fuller. And if you remember, those who are patrons of mine, those who pray for this particular program and what we've been doing and accomplishing and exposing and answering, we were very much part of that.

I did the interviews with Russell Fuller and he was a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Go to the info section if you wanna see that three-part interview. Forrest Davis, who's a Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary student, also came out.

And he made his own video on his Facebook page. You can go to the info section. I have it linked there. And he basically whistleblew on Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and what he experienced there as a student.

Then you have Jacob Johnson, who was, I guess, a North American Mission Board employee of some kind. I believe he was in pastoral planting or pastoral staff, rather, out in Kentucky. He does actually an excellent job.

I'm trying to remember some of the details. It's been a few weeks, but he really ties a lot of things together and exposes some of the corruption. He makes you feel like with everything going on in the government, there's a Southern Baptist Convention deep state that's paralleling what's going on in the CIA.

It's wild. And then, of course, now we have Tom Rush. And Tom Rush is a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary trustee, meaning he's on the board that makes decisions that is the representative, really, of the people that fund the institution, the pew sitters and the institution itself.

So all that to say, those who have prayed for this program, patrons, those who have given financially, everything else, obviously, I was involved with the Russell Fuller stuff. But I just wanna let you know, to encourage you, because you're part of this.

I have to be vague a little, but it wasn't just Russell Fuller. You see the four names here. It was more than just Russell Fuller that I was involved in helping to create either a strategy or to get talking points down or whatever the case may be.

I'm not gonna go into any more details than that. We were part of this, guys. You helped with this. You helped encourage people to, through what I'm doing, to gain a backbone, to say what needs to be said.

You helped also strategize kind of how best to relay this information with some of these particular individuals. So let's talk about, though, the one that we're gonna talk about today, which is the latest one, which is Tom Rush.

Al Mohler, Sam Albury, and Saying One Thing While Doing Another

In my opinion, what he did was extremely brave. He has a reputation in the Southern Baptist Convention, and that's a hard thing to jeopardize or put at risk. And he says in the video that his purpose is to sound the alarm about false teaching because of the love for the convention that he has.

And I do think that it's genuine. It sure seems that way. And I know that the motives of these individuals, because I've felt it myself, often get questioned. And it's hypocrisy when people do that. The same people that say that are the same people that say you shouldn't question any of the motivations of the people that they're trying to correct or whistleblow on.

But they will be the first to question the motivations of those who bring some of these evil deeds of darkness to light. And I have no reason to think that Tom Rush is not being genuine here when he says he wants to sound the alarm about false teachings because of love for the convention.

And his basic explanation seems to be at the beginning, he says this, that the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has put less emphasis on the sufficiency of scripture over the past few years. And I'm putting little timestamps in my presentation.

If you're a patron, you're gonna have this presentation. I upload my PowerPoints to Patreon. But that's the little 240 is where you can find this section in the video. So every time you see that, you can go to the video that Tom put out and you can see kind of what I'm talking about.

There's evidence of a downgrade. And this is the word that Tom Rush uses. And I'm gonna show you a few instances of this that he highlights. He highlights first Sam Albury and the platforming of him. Sam Albury has an organization called Living Out.

And he promotes this idea of same-sex attracted Christianity. I think I've talked about him before on the podcast. And he said, and this is the key thing. Sam Albury is really not the key thing. The key thing is the corruption at Southern Seminary and mainly Al Mohler and his corruption.

So this is what Tom Rush claims that Al Mohler was defensive of Albury initially, then agreed that a same-sex attraction view was a problem. Then Albury was featured in an interview at the seminary. Then Albert Mohler said it would be taken down and it wasn't.

So this is what Tom Rush is saying. And this is very similar, if you remember the Russell Fuller videos to what Russell Fuller said about Al Mohler. There's a lot of corroboration that ends up going on in this video and what Russell Fuller said.

And Russell Fuller was called a liar by all kinds of people. And Tom Rush is coming out now and saying, look, this tendency in Al Mohler to say one thing and do another, I've seen it too. That's what he's saying.

So this is one situation where he says he's seen it. And here's what Tom Rush says.

I'm gonna play it for you. Dr. Mohler and I had some conversations about using Albury's material and using Albury as a speaker. Initially, he was very defensive of Sam Albury. Later, he said that he agreed with me that some of his positions were problematic and that he could no longer commend his ministry or recommend him as a speaker.

And yet, sometime after telling me that, there was a podcast put out by Southern Seminary where one of the professors interviewed Sam Albury, essentially extolling his ministry and encouraging it. And when I questioned Dr. Mohler about that, he asked essentially, well, what do you want me to do?

Remove the video? And I said, yes, I think that would be appropriate if you would do so. And although it was indicated to me that that video would be taken down, it never was. So that's the significant part.

Al Mohler said one thing and then did another, according to Tom Rush. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I brought up multiple examples of things like this, and Russell Fuller being the biggest one but this is not insignificant, guys.

This is a man who's running for president of the convention now. And if you're a Southern Baptist, especially, you're gonna have to think through, do you wanna vote for this guy? When now you're having multiple people say, he's not trustworthy on some level, and he hasn't even publicly responded to these kinds of things.

And you know what he has said, and I probably should have included this in this discussion, but again, for the sake of time, you can go look it up. Just recently, I think it was Baptist Press that put this out last week.

Al Mohler, essentially what he said was that those who, on Twitter specifically, he said Twitter, those on Twitter, so discernment bloggers, et cetera, who are claiming that critical race theory is being taught in any of the Southern Baptist seminaries, are, they're wrong.

Basically, Al Mohler says they are lying. That's not happening anywhere. Well, that's what Al Mohler just said. Well, this is a day, two days later, this is what Tom Rush says. A trustee at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary directly contradicts what Al Mohler just said.

He cites Jarvis Williams' class notes as evidence of the teachings of critical race theory, and I have discussed this further in another video. Go to the info section, and you can click on the link where I have Jarvis Williams' name, and it'll take you to my discussion of this, because I've read those class notes.

But Rush cites that and says, yeah, Jarvis Williams was teaching aspects of critical race theory. When asked in a trustee meeting about it, Al Mohler claimed, we're not teaching critical race theory, we're teaching about it.

So Tom Rush says he's in a trustee meeting, and he asks Al Mohler, hey, what's going on here? I've seen these class notes. Is critical race theory being taught here? And Al Mohler said, we're not teaching it.

We're teaching about it. So Al Mohler's been consistent over the course now of probably a year or more saying, no, that's not going on here. And Russell Fuller says, yeah, it is. Tom Rush is saying, yeah, it is.

And I'm saying, yeah, it is, because I've read Jarvis Williams. I've seen videos of Matt Hall, who's the provost at the school, and I've also looked at one of their former professors there who is Curtis Woods, who was the chairman of the committee that gave us Resolution 9.

And these guys have all taught aspects of it on the campus. And Al Mohler's claimed, no, that's not happening. That's just lying on Twitter. Well, here's a trustee saying otherwise. Rush claims that this is the same response, interestingly enough, that the pre-conservative resurgence president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he went, gave on the issue of using historical critical method of interpretation.

Meaning, there's a bad hermeneutic called the historical critical method, and it was being taught, because Tom Rush was there, on the campus of Southeastern, and the president said, this is before the conservative resurgence, right?

He said, oh, no, we're just teaching about it. So he's saying that Al Mohler is using the same exact talking points that were used before the conservative resurgence to hide the liberalism. That's scary, guys.

He also points to, as for evidence of the downgrade, Matt Hall and his unrepentant demeanor. This is very important that I say this. It's not Matt Hall saying, I am a racist, or all the other things. I'm gonna peel back the veil and show you how racist everything that you love is, your family, your denomination, et cetera.

Matt Hall, there's a lot of things Matt Hall said that are total critical race theory, and it's not that Matt Hall said these things. It's that when he was confronted, this is the interesting part, guys, it's so key.

Please don't miss this. When he was confronted about it, he didn't back down from it. And this is important because Matt Hall has put an article out, and there's a video that's been out where Matt Hall's saying, oh, no, Christians can't use critical race theory, basically because, well, it's Marxist, and Marxism is atheistic, and we're theists.

I'm summing it up. And what he's saying is that, hey, hold on a minute, though. Tom Rush is saying, okay, whatever, but you have not retracted any of the statements you have made yourself. And I've never seen any public retraction.

Matt Hall's just saying, taking shots against critical race theory, which a lot of these guys do now. It's the popular thing to say we're not critical race theorists, and we're not woke, we're not social justice, but then to promote those ideas using different names for them, that kind of thing.

And so Tom Rush is calling Matt Hall's bluff. He's saying, okay, well, are you gonna repent? Are you gonna retract what you said before? And he's saying, no, Matt Hall didn't do that. So this is his testimony.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's one sample. This is Matt Hall in, this is less than two years ago, okay? This is December of 2018, this is what Matt Hall said.

Some point, we gotta get to the spot where we're able to look in the mirror and be like, yeah, I'm probably a racist. I'm telling you, I'm a racist because I have a heartbeat, and until I receive my glorified, completely sanctified body, soul, and mind, I'm gonna be doing battle with sin.

All right, so Matt Hall, there's like three videos where Matt Hall says this. I'm a racist, I'm benefiting from a system that allocates privileges to white people, therefore I'm racist. So that's kind of the controversy.

And here's the video here that you can see. Tom Rush is saying, Matt Hall said this, and he's never backed down from it. That's the problem. He's never said, you know what, when I said that three times, I was wrong to say that.

I'm not a racist, but he's never done that. So he says that's further evidence of the downgrade. And that's the ability to, the humility and ability to correct oneself is necessary for keeping any institution orthodox.

And when you lose that ability, you're free falling. You're in trouble. So that's what he says about Matt Hall. He also says, this is really interesting to me, Tom Rush says, he suggests that the school should adopt, in a trustee meeting, I'm assuming, we should adopt the Dallas Statement here at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Dallas Statement on Social Justice, which John MacArthur signed, and Tom Askell, and Michael O 'Fallon, and a bunch of guys, more conservative guys.

And Al Mohler said the document wasn't well vetted and he had issues with some of the things it said. So Tom Rush says that professors were telling him that Mohler forbade them from signing the statement.

This is significant because this was something that if you remember, I think it was like two years ago, it was like right after the Dallas Statement, a few months later, I think it was Pulpit and Pen was reporting that they were saying Mohler's forbidding professors from doing this.

But there wasn't any primary source. They couldn't really point to anything. They were just saying, we're getting this. Well, now you have someone who's a trustee at the seminary backing that claim up and saying, yep, that's what I was hearing from professors at the time.

That is extremely interesting, especially because Russell Fuller is the only one who signed it. So he's saying professors plural. That means there's professor, or a professor at least, who wanted to sign it, who didn't, because Al Mohler forbade him, or he felt like Al Mohler was forbidding him from doing it.

Mohler's excuse, he says, for doing this. So it sounds like Tom Rush and Al Mohler had a conversation. He says, Mohler's excuse was that it came from outside the seminary, but Tom Rush points out that the Chicago and Nashville statements also came from outside the seminary.

And he insinuates that Mohler is an arrogant academic. He doesn't say Mohler directly. He starts talking about the problems of arrogant academics. You can watch the video. So I think he has an idea of why he might think Al Mohler, maybe Al Mohler wasn't part of the process, and because of that, of drafting the Dallas statement.

But whatever the case is, Mohler didn't like the statement and didn't want professors signing it according to Tom Rush. Now here's something interesting. This is a reforming Catholic confession, right?

Totally outside of the Southern Baptist Convention. And sure enough, there's Dr. Greg Allison, a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor who signed it. So there are people who sign other things that are not within the Southern Baptist Convention or Southern Seminary, statements outside, and there's not a problem with it.

But there does seem to be with the Dallas statement. Why is that? Why is the statement on social justice and the gospel such a problem? Further evidence of the downgrade. So there's a lot of evidence Tom Rush is bringing here.

Terminations, Separation Agreements, and 1 Corinthians 6

He says, the termination of conservative professors. Tom Rush claims that Al Mohler overstated the alleged financial trouble in order to get rid of certain professors. So during COVID, when it first started, Al Mohler said, we need to fire some professors, financial issues.

But Tom Rush is contradicting that. He's saying, I'm a trustee and that ain't what happened. Mohler overstated that, we're not in financial trouble. Rush stated that the new professors were hired after the firings and separation and release agreements were used in violation of 1 Corinthians 6.

So what Tom Rush is trying to get across is that, if it really was a cost-cutting thing that you fired Dr. Russell Fuller and Dr. Jim Orwick and some of the others, if it was really about cutting costs, then why did you start hiring new professors?

And he says, he believes it's a violation of 1 Corinthians 6 to have them sign the separation and release agreement. And that was called, I even called it an NDA. It's not technically an NDA. It's basically though, it is a muzzle, it's a gag order.

It's saying that if you wanna receive benefits after being fired for the next few months, residual pay, then you must sign this, but you can never say anything bad about the seminary. So he says, hey, that's in violation of 1 Corinthians 6.

Because what does 1 Corinthians 6, one through six say? Does any of you, when he has a case against his neighbor, dare to go to law before the unrighteous and not before the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world?

If the world is judged by you, are you not competent to form the smallest law courts? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more matters of this life? So if you have courts dealing with matters of this life, do you appoint them as judges who are of no account in the church?

I say this to your shame. It is so that there is not among you anyone who, a wise, who will be able to decide between his brothers and sisters. But brother goes to law with brother and that before unbelievers.

Now, I think he's onto something here, to be honest with you. I'm not saying there's no time or place to sign something like that, but it's presuming that in the case of conflict, you wanna protect yourself.

Why else would you have someone sign something like that? So, if that's the case, why aren't you bringing in Christian counselors? Why isn't this something, if you're a brother in Christ, I'm a brother in Christ, why would I be afraid of that?

Unless I had something to hide, right? So this is Tom Rush's concern over this. Rush introduces a motion in a trustee meeting to pay Fuller and Orwick because they refused to sign. They're the two that said, we're not gonna sign this separation release agreement.

And he introduced a motion to stop, to pay them, and then to also stop using separation agreements that muzzle former employees. And both motions failed for lack of a second. In other words, in the trustee meeting, and this is the thing that should concern all you Southern Baptists right now, who are funding this institution.

He couldn't get another trustee to second his motion to say, yeah, we shouldn't be muzzling professors like this. To say, yeah, we shouldn't be withholding back pay that is really owed to these guys. They're working for free because they love the students, but because they wouldn't sign this separation agreement.

That means the board, I don't know who these men are, but really not even one person would second those motions. Who's on these boards? And that should give pause to those who want to take back the Southern Baptist Convention.

If you wanna take it back, meaning if you want to go back to conservatism, theologically, if you want to get back to the sufficiency of scripture, then how are you gonna do it with boards like this? It's a good question.

But Tom Rush wants that to happen. I mean, he has a clarion call here to show up at the convention next year and to vote in conservatives. Tom Rush, and so here's the conclusions. Tom Rush believes Al Mohler wants to live in both worlds, he says, conservative and liberal.

In other words, Mohler is a politician. So Tom Rush is saying, Mohler's a hypocrite. Mohler's dishonest. Al Mohler, you can't believe what he says. I mean, I know many of you were shocked. I wasn't because I've been watching Mohler, but he endorses Donald Trump, right?

And then as soon as Trump loses, he comes out with this big statement against, or basically saying, assuming Biden is the president-elect and going down that whole vein that the entire mainstream media is going down.

Someone had sent me something the other day, I guess, where Mohler had also kind of condemned or spoken out against those who would be fighting the idea that Biden's the nominee, et cetera. And some of you are wondering, well, how can he do that?

Well, this would be a paradigm for explaining it. What Tom Rush is telling you, Mohler's a politician. He likes to play both sides. And that's what I've been pointing out for now over a year. I've said, actually, I think the video that I'm thinking, that where I first said that was January of this year, if I'm not mistaken, and I pointed that out.

I said, this is what Mohler, his pattern is. And so Tom Rush says that. He says that, Tom Rush also, this is another significant conclusion, he publicly corroborates Russell Fuller's account of Mohler taking different positions, of enabling the liberalism to continue on campus, to make inroads.

And here's something important for you Southern Baptists who will always say, because of the 11th Commandment, well, public sin, did you go to that person privately? Which isn't really the standard, but your answer is yes.

Tom Rush has privately confronted these things. And he's telling us the answers he got. More than one source also has accused Al Mohler of dishonesty on the same issues. And I kind of just mentioned that, but that's one of my conclusions here.

You got Russell Fuller corroborating with Tom Rush. And then Southern Seminary has conservative professors who cave under the pressure of a threat. Because you have professors who wanted to sign the Dallas Statement, and they won't do it because they were threatened by Al Mohler, except for Russell Fuller.

What does that tell you about those men? According to Tom Rush, I mean, this is what he's saying. So this was very good. I encourage others who want to do this kind of thing. If you have courage, because you want those funding these institutions before God who are accountable, if you want them to know what they're funding, it is a very wise and good thing to let them know if you have that information.

That's what Tom Rush is doing. You're just informing them. This is what's happening. And he's frustrated, it seems like. He's talking about things that have happened over the course of years. He's confronted these things and he's not getting anywhere.

And so he's taking it to the pews. He's taking it to you guys to let you know this is what's happening. And he's saying at the end, basically the solution isn't to do something with the trustees, to tweak something here or there.

You gotta come to the convention and vote these bums out. You have got to put conservatives in the committees who can then appoint other conservatives, or else it's gone. And that is a noble thing. That's a noble thing that Tom Rush is doing.

And I know it's a risk to himself, but more people need to do this. If you want to do it, I would look to this video for inspiration. He did this very well. This was done extremely well, in my opinion.

It's concise, it's relatively short. It's like half an hour. And he gets to the point and he tells you it's, I mean, and it's done in a very nice way as well. It's aesthetically pleasing and everything.

But you feel like you're having a conversation with him. So for those who have been curious about, hey, I want to whistleblow on something, and I've gotten a lot of these emails now, more so than ever, I think because of what's happening in the country, this is a way that you can do it.

Follow the example of people like Tom Rush. So really appreciate Tom Rush. If you want to check out the video, go to the first link in the info section. It's right there. And we will be back very soon for more conversations that matter.

I went to a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, another Stop the Steal rally, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about that in some of my observations. So you can look forward to that, and we will connect then.

God bless.