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When many evangelicals at points north, east, and west think about seminaries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the first one that usually comes to mind is Dallas Theological Seminary. The school has played a Texas-size role on the national map of conservative American Protestantism in recent decades. It has been the longtime bastion of premillennial dispensational theology, in a line of succession stretching from professor Charles C. Ryrie and alumnus Hal Lindsey back through presidents John F. Walvoord to seminary founder and C. I. Scofield disciple Lewis Sperry Chafer.

The prominence of DTS (which does not stand, as some wags have joked over the years, for Dispensational Theological Seminary) comes not only from sales of the Ryrie Study Bible or Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth. In recent decades, through the conciliatory work of DTS theologians like Darrell Bock and former president (and current chancellor) Charles Swindoll, its dispensational theology has moved into the background. These days its influence is felt mostly through the national ministries of alumni such as Ken Taylor (The Living Bible), Tony Evans (the Urban Alternative), Joseph Stowell (Moody Bible Institute), Bruce Wilkinson (The Prayer of Jabez), and the late J. Vernon McGee (Thru the Bible Ministries).

But there is another important institution of evangelical theological education in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with longer, more purely Texan roots, which is relatively unknown in evangelical circles outside the Southwest. And it happens to be the world's largest Protestant seminary: the Southern Baptist Convention's Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

The world of the Southern Baptist Convention and its relationship to the larger evangelical subculture is analogous in many ways to the relationship between Texas—the huge state that was once its own republic—and the rest of the United States. Both share many of the qualities, characteristics, and attitudes of their larger counterparts. But both the SBC and Texas are something apart. And both are so big (the SBC has an estimated 16 million members, and the Texas population is nearly 21 million) that they have an inherent tendency to forget that there's actually another world outside their borders.

In the realm of theological education, Southwestern has fit nicely into both the Texas and SBC paradigms for decades. It has occupied the top spot in Protestant seminary enrollment since the late 1940s, when it surpassed the denomination's old flagship, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. With more than 3,300 full-time students, it is larger than Fuller Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School combined.

Southwestern's army of graduates has filled Southern Baptist pulpits across Texas and the Southwest, and it has long been the dominant source of SBC missionaries. But the SBC's infighting of the last 25 years, and the resultant partisan maze that is Texas Baptist life in the early 21st century, means that the school may be emerging from its relative invisibility outside of Southern Baptist circles.

Southwestern traces its roots back to B. H. Carroll, a rough-and-tumble pastor of First Baptist Church of Waco, who founded the school as Baylor Theological Seminary in 1905. An imposing Confederate veteran who stood over six-foot-four and weighed 250 pounds, Carroll parlayed his fame as a preacher and Methodist-whipping polemicist into a central role in state Baptist circles.

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May 21 2002, Vol. 46, No. 6