Whatever Became of Paul Debusman

Jerry Grace at the SBC Outhouse Weblog sent me an e-mail last week that compared and contrasted Paige Patterson's firing of Sheri Klouda with Al Mohler's firing of Paul Debusman.

Paul Debusman was reference librarian at Southern Seminary for 35 years.

He was terminated 10 months prior to his retirement for the "harm" he supposedly did to the Seminary in writing a personal letter to SBC President Tom Elliff. The letter advised Elliff that he erred in proclaiming that before the takeover Fundamentalists were not invited to speak at the Seminary Chapel. Debusman wrote: "Chapel as I remembered it from the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s was a time when we heard everyone. There was a deliberate strategy to bring in different points of view. That is no longer true." Eliff, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, registered a complaint with Southern Seminary President Al Mohler that resulted in the dismissal of Debusman.

The fundamentalist leaders of the SBC have had very thin skin for a long time.

Whatever became of Paul Debusman?

Jerry Grace has an answer. He wrote about the effect that termination had on Debusman in the e-mail that he sent to me. Here's what he says,

He is a man who is regularly on my heart and about whom I have done a lot of research.

If there is any situation in our history where someone more innocent was assassinated without any reason other than pure power politics, I do not know who or when. I cannot allow the passage of time to dim the brutal nature of what happened to this gentle and innocent man. Friends of his have told me that if you were in a room of people including ten clones of him, you would never notice one of them. I grieve for him and his family and I grieve for a seminary board who could have condoned this. Were the three high officials involved in this sad act, Mohler, Eliff, and Akin on my payroll, I would have fired all three of them. All of them have gone on to bigger and better things but have left this situation ignored and unrepented. Paul Debusman however has suffered enormously.

Al Mohler this past week called for a circling of the wagons in the SBC leadership for the character assassinations going so far to say that none of them will tolerate an individual attack on any of them. If that doesn't sound like someone drunk with power, and fearful of personal exposure I don't know what does.

My question to Al as he decries the criticism and character assassination of SBC leaders this question. What about the assassination of Paul Debusman? Who stood to defend him as you humiliated him and took his career away with only months to go?

What about Paul Debusman? For me he is the embodiment of the millions of humble men and women who have served God, their churches, and their denomination without need of recognition or any aspect of vainglory so evident in the good Dr. Mohler and those who assisted him. He is the man or woman who brings life to our churches in thousands of unnoticed ways. He's the guy who comes down to light the heater, or fill the baptistery, or mow the lawn, or paint the ceiling in the nursery. The one who is always there to serve as a greeter, always taking out the garbage at a social event without being asked, the one who brings his pressure cleaner down to clean the portico just because it was dirty. He's the lady who faithfully says yes everytime she is asked to fix something for a funeral, or decorate the sanctuary, or clean the kitchen, the toilets, scrub the floors till they shine, and never expect anyone to notice. Paul Debusman is my beginner teacher, my sword drill leader, my VBS superintendent, the man who cried for me when my father died and said he wished it had been him and meant it. he's my mother, my grandmother, my father, my aunts, my uncles and countless pastors just getting by. That's who Paul Debusman is and in allowing that decision to happen and stand is just as much an attack on every last one of the terrific, ordinary, invisible, unselfish, loyal, and committed men and women that breathe life and meaning into what the word Baptist means as it was to him. If we can't stand against what happened to Paul Debusman then we have a hard time standing for anything.

. . . Mohler, Eliff, and Akin need to make this right with a public apology to Debusman, an apology to the people of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the payment personally of sufficient damages to in some way acknowledge this very bad act. Until they do, the criticism Mohler says the leaders won't tolerate, will not end. And until they do their integrity deserves the questions that they have brought on themselves.

I agree.