KENNETH S. HEMPHILL

During the months following president Russell Dilday’s dismissal, Southwestern Seminary trustees named professor William B. Tolar as acting president of the seminary. They quickly took up the search, however, to find a replacement for Dilday. After several interviews with Kenneth Hemphill, director of the Center for Church Growth of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), trustees elected him as the seventh president of Southwestern Seminary. Hemphill took on the presidential office at Southwestern with a passion to further its evangelistic and educational goals. He also desired to bring peace and stability to students and faculty members amidst the controversy surrounding Dilday’s removal.

“Southwestern Seminary is known for its missionary spirit, its commitment to prepare men and women for effective service in the church, and its unswerving dedication to academic excellence built on the truth and reliability of the Bible,” Jim Henry, then president of the SBC, said after Hemphill’s election. “Ken Hemphill epitomizes that heartbeat in his personal life.”

Hemphill was born on April 17, 1948, in Morganton, North Carolina. Coming from a long line of preachers, including his father, who served as the pastor of Morganton’s Pleasant View Baptist Church, he heard and believed the Gospel at a young age. At age 9, Hemphill told his father he was ready to receive Christ as his Lord and Savior.

As an undergraduate student at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Hemphill had no intentions to enter the ministry. He instead desired to advance in college football, eventually playing for the National Football League, and glorifying God from this platform. He also wanted to earn a degree in engineering. At the time, however, he served as a youth minister and began to notice that his interests were turning away from football to the youth he was serving. God finally used Paula Moore, whom Hemphill married in 1969, to challenge him to consider ministry as a vocation.

With this encouragement, Hemphill’s eyes were opened to see how God had been leading him toward the ministry. He surrendered to God’s will and determined to stick by his calling even when others questioned it. “I don’t have any choice, because this is what God has called me to do,” he told one professor who criticized him for committing himself to the ministry. “And I don’t think there is any higher calling that I could have than to be obedient to God.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1970, Hemphill enrolled at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he earned his M.Div. in 1972 and his D.Min. in 1973. Four years later, he received his Ph.D. in New Testament at Cambridge University in England. During the next 17 years, Hemphill served as a pastor, teacher, lecturer, and denominational worker within the SBC. He gained prominence as a pastor from 1981 to 1992, when he led a struggling congregation in Norfolk, Virginia, to become a thriving, 6,000-member church. In a natural transition from this successful ministry, he became the director of the SBC’s Center for Church Growth. Hemphill served in this position for two years before Southwestern Seminary trustees approached him about serving as the seventh president of the seminary.

Despite encouragement from colleagues, Hemphill was reluctant to consider the seminary’s offer until a missionary confronted him during a Foreign Mission Board commissioning service. Through the missionary’s challenge, Hemphill recounted, the Holy Spirit convicted him of his unwillingness to go to the seminary, even though he had told others he would do it if God willed. After the commissioning service, he told the seminary’s search committee chairman that he would be willing to interview for the position.

During their interview, the committee convinced the still-hesitant Hemphill of the value of serving as head of a seminary by appealing to his passion for church growth. Instead of traveling around the nation to train Southern Baptist ministers, he could lead in training a new generation of ministers who converged on the campus of one institution. On July 28, 1994, trustees unanimously elected Hemphill as the president of Southwestern Seminary, and he was inaugurated on May 1 the following year.

With a pastoral heart, Hemphill entered his office both with the desire to foster peace and a sense of community, as well as to encourage the seminary in its long-standing purpose of evangelism and church growth.

“The major concern I had almost immediately was to try to make the whole campus more student-friendly, with a stronger sense of family and community,” he said. “A lot of the projects in my term have focused on that, whether they were building projects or curriculum projects or something more intangible.”

In order to do this, Hemphill said, he encouraged staff and faculty members at the seminary to be sensitive to the needs of students. He developed student housing, renovating both the J. Howard Williams Student Village and B. H. Carroll apartments. He also led the seminary to create a prayer plaza behind the B. H. Carroll Memorial Building in order to encourage both community and prayerfulness among students.

A background in church growth ministry also impacted Hemphill’s vision for the school. “When I talk about church growth,” he said, “I’m talking about a supernatural encounter, leading people to Christ, planting churches, and reaching the world. Southwestern has always had a focus on these areas, and I think the seminary will be strengthened as it continues that focus.” He hoped to educate both the head and the heart of Southwestern students by training “men and women who come out of our seminaries with an absolute passion for Christ, a passion for the church, a passion for the world, and a passion for reaching lost people.”

Hemphill launched several endeavors to develop the institution academically and financially. On the financial front, he initiated a $100 million fundraising campaign. Regarding academic life of the school, he launched an Islamic studies program. In 2000, the School of Church Music began to offer a Ph.D. in church music, the first degree of this kind to be offered at a Southern Baptist seminary. He also called together a committee of Southern Baptist ministers and lay leaders to determine how the seminary could improve to meet the needs of a new century. Among other proposals, the committee observed that three or four years of study was an inadequate period of time to prepare people for all ministry needs. For this reason, Hemphill led the seminary to construct the Ray I. Riley Alumni Center (Phase I). Housing provided by the center would be available to ministers who decided to return to the seminary for continuing education.

In his final year as president of Southwestern Seminary, Hemphill led the seminary to show its support for the Baptist Faith and Message (BFM) 2000. Since that time, newly elected faculty members have signed their names in a memorial book to show their agreement with this Baptist confession. “As we sign this document,” Hemphill said, “I am reminded of Dr. Carroll’s deathbed request that we keep the seminary lashed to the cross.” Before adopting the BFM 2000, Southwestern held to the 1963 version of the confession.

The same passion that convinced Hemphill to step into the gap as Southwestern’s president in 1994 also led him to submit his resignation nine years later. On April 8, 2003, he announced to the student body that he would be serving as the national strategist for the SBC’s Empowering Kingdom Growth initiative beginning that August. Hemphill continues to lead this endeavor and also serves as a distinguished professor of evangelism and church growth at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.