6 Jesus *said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me. (John 14:6–7 Legacy Standard Bible)
In 1980 I moved from the Washington, D.C. area to a suburb of Oklahoma City to take a new job. I was 29 years old and thought I was a Christian because of my on again, off again religiosity. I was single and a political liberal. I was also very close to being a libertine….
Sometime during that year I remember reading in The Daily Oklahoman newspaper about a Southern Baptist pastor in Oklahoma City who was one of the leaders in a movement in the Southern Baptist Convention to bring in a more moderate stance on theology and Biblical inerrancy. His name was Gene Garrison. He was at that time the pastor of First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City.
I was not a Christian then, but for some reason I followed the news about the struggle in the SBC between the forces of liberalism and conservatism during the convention that year. When the convention was over, the coverage in the paper was very sympathetic towards Garrison and his liberal colleagues because they had been censured by the convention and literally blackballed from holding any committee leadership positions in the convention. Over the next several years Garrison and other liberals continued to try to gain control of the convention, but eventually gave up.