In 2015 I had a long conversation with Voddie Baucham, on a cruise ship, off the coast of Cuba.
Really.
We were both guests of the religious liberty law firm Alliance Defending Freedom. When I found out he was on the cruise, I asked if we could find a time to talk. He readily agreed. I wanted to talk with him about race relations in America. Were they getting better? Worse? Had efforts regarding “racial reconciliation,” which had been an evangelical buzzword since the 1980s, had any impact. Early in the conversation, I used the term “African American.”
Baucham interrupted me. “First of all,” he said, with a forceful that took me aback. Baucham was a big man, and he could be intimidating. He was, after all, a college football player, playing at New Mexico State University and Rice University before completing his undergraduate degree at what was then Houston Baptist University.
“I’m not African American. I’m Black. I’m an American, and I’m Black.” But his tone softened, and he answered the question.
“Things are incredibly better,” he said. “They’re not turning dogs on Black people and fire hoses on Black people. Things are better, for sure, but I think there are people who have a vested interest in things not being better, or at least a vested interest in not allowing people to acknowledge the fact that things are getting better. The racial-grievance industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry.”
I found the conversation I had with Voddie that day to be blunt, challenging, clear and direct, refreshing, one that has stayed with me in the decade since. That’s why the news hit hard that he died this week at age 56. And I am not the only one who acutely felt the loss.
“We are saddened to inform friends that our dear brother, Voddie Baucham, Jr., has left the land of the dying and entered the land of the living,” the Founder’s Ministries announced Thursday. Baucham had been leading the ministry’s new seminary in Florida.
The Rev. Tom Buck, pastor of First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas, called Baucham “as a dear friend, a faithful brother, and a lion in the pulpit.”
It is true: he was a lion, but he was a lion whose lambs felt safe around. I was struck by how quickly Voddie could pivot from a clear, direct, forceful declaration to a tone and posture of tenderness.
During our conversation, he spoke often about boys and girls, and how to raise them to be godly men and women. That is one reason he became an early and staunch advocate of homeschooling, homeschooling his own children at a time when Black homeschoolers were rare.
He said that when he started homeschooling his nine children, “I didn’t know anything about homeschooling. I was on staff at a church in Sugarland, Texas, and there was a strong homeschool group there. Our older two children were the only two children we had at the time, and they had started school at the Christian school that was part of our church. I met these homeschoolers, and I was intrigued, mainly because I hadn’t heard about it.
“As I investigated and as I just understood and grasped the concept of taking full ownership of that discipleship mandate, it just became more appealing to me. When I found out what was happening in the home-education community … the idea of being able to tailor education to the needs of our children and to the specific desires of our family just became more appealing to me. The idea of not being burdened down by someone else’s schedule and agenda and even curriculum, those things just became more appealing to me. Those are the things that began to lead us in that direction.”
Voddie Baucham was also well known for calling men to “step up” to their responsibilities as leaders in the home, in the church, and in the culture.
He told me, “If you’ve been in pastoral ministry more than 15 minutes, you know that the No. 1 prayer request for married women in the church is that my husband will be the spiritual leader of our home. There’s a dearth of leadership in Christian homes in terms of men doing and being what they’re called to do and be. That’s connected to a real lack of understanding among men of what that job description looks like, connected with some elements of the feminist movement that have demonized even the very word patriarch itself. You bring all these things together, and you’ve got men who don’t know what to do, don’t know how to do it, and aren’t too sure that it’s okay to do it. Of course, the result of that is homes that aren’t being led by fathers.”
Access to MinistryWatch content is free. However, we hope you will support our work with your prayers and financial gifts. To make a donation, click here.
But Voddie did not stop with a diagnosis of the problem. He had a solution.
“I boil it down to the four Ps: priest, prophet, provider, protector. [He should be] the spiritual leader, the one who is the priest or intercessor for his family; the one who’s the prophet, the one who’s the instructor in his family; the provider, the one who sees that his family has what they need; and the protector, the one who puts himself between his family and anyone or anything that would do them harm.”
When I interviewed Voddie ten years ago, he was in his prime and appeared healthy. He may not have been in the football playing form of his college days, but he kept fit with Brazilian jui-jitsu. In 2015, though, he was preparing to go to Africa for what would end up being six years as the president of a seminary there. He even opened a BJJ academy in Zambia in 2019.
But while he was in Africa that health problems emerged, bringing him home to the U.S., where he had heart surgery, and his health deteriorated.
But those health problems were ahead of him when we spoke in 2015, so I honestly felt a bit awkward asking him what I have come to call “the legacy question”: How do you want to be remembered? After all, he was in his mid-forties then. Didn’t he have many years, even decades, of life and ministry ahead of him? We now know, of course, that the answer to that question is “no.”
But Voddie was not awkward about that question at all. He had clearly thought about it, and he had a ready answer: “That I made much of Christ. That’s what I want the judgment to be, that I made much of Christ.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: To read a transcript of my 2015 conversation with Voddie Baucham, click here.