Accreditation at ‘warning’ level

Fort Worth | Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) has one year to respond to the criticisms that have placed its accreditation at warning level by its accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC).

SWBTS was notified June 15 of three areas of failure of compliance related to its governing board characteristics, financial resources, and financial responsibility. Within two years, accreditation could be downgraded to probation or removal.

The warning comes after reports that under previous President Adam Greenway, the seminary had engaged in unfettered spending resulting in $15 million loss in net assets from the prior year, according to a 2022 audit, and an $8.7 million deficit in cash operating expenses for the year. The seminary reported Greenway spent $1.5 million on furnishings and renovations of the president’s home at a time the school was cutting faculty and staff.

Over the past two decades, SWBTS has had a cumulative deficit of $140 million dollars that dates to Greenway’s predecessor, Paige Patterson.

David Dockery, who succeeded Greenway in April, stated that the board is “fully committed to take all necessary steps to address concerns related to the July 31, 2022 financial audit and financial decisions that led to it.” It falls to Dockery, who previously headed Union University and Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, and former Guidestone President O.S. Hawkins as Chancellor to fix the problems.

At the SBC Annual Meeting in June, Dockery pledged “to continue the best of Southwestern Seminary’s Baptist and evangelical heritage, sharing the foundational convictions regarding Scripture and the gospel initiated by our founder, B. H. Carroll, and carried forward by dozens and dozens over the past 115 years—doing so with an unapologetic commitment to the truthfulness, authority and sufficiency of Scripture with an unflinching conviction regarding the faith once for all delivered to the Saints and our shared Baptist distinctives.”

Dockery also told messengers “we recommit ourselves to institutional stewardship with a high priority given to this each and every day.”