Adrian Rogers


Adrian Pierce Rogers was an American Southern Baptist pastor and conservative author. He served three terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Rogers was born in West Palm Beach, Florida. He entered Christian ministry at the age of nineteen. He graduated from Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Rogers was ordained by Northwood Baptist Church in West Palm Beach. His first job as a senior pastor was at Fellsmere Baptist Church, a small congregation in Fellsmere, Florida. He performed his first baptism in the C-54 Canal near Fellsmere. He was senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Merritt Island, Florida from 1964 to 1972. In 1972, he became the senior pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, where he remained until March 2005. During this period, the church's membership grew from 9,000 to 29,000, and the church moved into a new, megachurch facility. Rogers was named pastor emeritus after his retirement in March 2005.
Rogers was instrumental in the Southern Baptist denomination's conservative resurgence that began in the late 1970s, as he was elected president of the denomination during a theological controversy within the denomination. He was the chairman of the committee which produced the revised 2000 edition of the Baptist Faith and Message. He published eighteen books and his works are featured on the internationally available radio and television program, Love Worth Finding, which is broadcast in English and Spanish. Rogers was also the founder of the Adrian Rogers Pastor Training Institute for ministers, which is currently headed by his widow, two sons, and a granddaughter.
In November 2005, Rogers contracted pneumonia of both lungs as a complication of colon cancer treatments, and died following a period of mechanical ventilation at the age of seventy-four.

Southern Baptist Convention presidency

Rogers served three times as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest American Evangelical denomination with 16 million members. He was the first conservative elected to this post in 1979 on a platform of biblical inerrancy, and beginning under his leadership, the denomination went through a ten-year-long process of shifting to a theologically conservative stance. When conservative control of all SBC seminaries and agencies was finally complete, liberal and moderate seminary professors were dismissed, or replaced by theological conservatives in response to normal attrition. All employees of SBC seminaries and denominatIonal agencies were required to affirm their adherence to the Baptist Faith and Message. The denomination has remained conservative since Rogers' tenure as president.
Rogers's election as SBC president at the 1979 convention held in Houston, Texas, launched the conservative resurgence in the denomination, a movement pushed by the theologian Paige Patterson and the Houston judge Paul Pressler. In 2004, in a symposium at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Pressler said that the real movers in the Conservative resurgence who elected Rogers and the subsequent presidents were not he and Patterson but the independent-minded laypersons who came for years to the annual conventions to be heard.
Ed McAteer, a prominent member of Rogers' congregation, was a figure in the Christian right who in 1979 co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, Howard Phillips, and others. That same year, he established the Religious Roundtable, which in 1980 was active in the successful campaign to elect Ronald W. Reagan as the U.S. President.

On politics and social issues

Like many influential conservative pastors, Rogers participated in the advancement of a conservative political agenda in the United States. He stated that Christians have a duty to be involved in government.
Familial dynamics was a recurrent issue for Rogers. He focused most closely on fathers that he labeled "drop-out dads." According to Rogers, since the Bible emphasizes the paternal role in a family, the father should be the primary source of teaching in the home. He was critical of fathers who do not fulfill this role: "We have dads today that are interested in sports, business, and sex. They've forgotten their God-given assignments to teach the Ten Commandments ." He went on to say that social problems, such as gun violence, are the consequences of fathers avoiding this responsibility.
On the topic of pastoral endorsement of political candidates, he wrote that it is a pastor's duty to influence the political decisions of the members of the pastor's congregation. A pastor need not, however, endorse a specific candidate. He wrote that "f has done his job his members will prayerfully and correctly use the standard of God's Word to select the right candidate."
In May 2003, Rogers, along with twenty-four other religious leaders and persons of influence, signed a letter sent from Gary Bauer's conservative organization American Values to President George W. Bush. The letter criticizes President Bush's proposed Road Map for Peace initiative as being too lax towards the Palestinians. The letter states in part, "Mr. President, it would be morally reprehensible for the United States to be 'evenhanded' between democratic Israel... and the terrorist infested Palestinian infrastructure."
Cecil Sherman writes in his autobiography that he once questioned Rogers about biblical inerrancy with reference to New Testament passages that seem to support slavery. Sherman reports that Rogers replied: "I believe slavery is a much maligned institution; if we had slavery today, we would not have this welfare mess."
Rogers later signed a revised Baptist Faith and Message declaration stating that all races are equal before the Lord.
Rogers was an adamant supporter of the anti-abortion movement, had stated that the institution of capital punishment is spiritually ordained, and supported a boycott of Disney because of the company's perceived promotion of homosexuality..
As a traditional Baptist, he opposed the use of alcohol and tobacco, frequently telling stories to warn of their dangers. One particular story tells of a father who learned that his daughter had died while driving drunk, vowed revenge towards whoever had sold her the alcohol, only to discover that she had taken the bottle from his own liquor cabinet.
Rogers also preached against gambling. In one such message, he revealed he once witnessed to boxing champion Muhammad Ali in Paradise Island, Bahamas.

"You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

This quote appears frequently on the Internet and is often attributed to Rogers with an incorrect date of 1931. In fact, the quotation is part of a longer sermon by Rogers from 1984 in a larger series titled God’s Way to Health, Wealth and Wisdom, but it also appears as a passage in Rogers' 1996 work Ten Secrets for a Successful Family stating that "by and large our young people do not know either the importance or the value of honest labor".
Rogers did not originate the quote at all. In fact, he did not claim to have originated it. Instead, he was citing almost verbatim anti-Soviet propaganda that had circulated in many magazines in the early 1960s. The quote appeared before that in the Congressional Record of 1958, where it was appended to the record by U.S. Representative Bruce Alger of Texas' 5th congressional district. Alger had taken the words from Gerald L. K. Smith, who had written them first in his magazine, The Cross and the Flag. Since the quote was attributed to Rogers in 2009, it has been regularly attributed to him; however, Rogers was essentially quoting Smith at the time.

Selected works