[1]WAKE FOREST, N.C. (BP)–The Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary’s board of trustees honored outgoing President Paige Patterson and his wife, Dorothy, the evening of July 21 by naming two honors after them, as well as putting their family name on a planned campus center.
The Paige Patterson Faithful Servant Award and the Dorothy K. Patterson Visiting Professor of Women’s Studies position were announced at an appreciation dinner by trustee chairman Timothy Lewis. The awards were voted on earlier in the day during a special session of the board at the seminary’s Wake Forest, N.C., campus, as well as a recommendation by the board’s executive committee to name the to-be-constructed campus center the Patterson Campus Center.
“You will forever be linked to Southeastern,” Lewis told the Pattersons.
“Paige and Dorothy are God’s faithful servants,” Lewis told the dinner audience. “Like Barnabas and Saul who worked together to spread the Word of God [in the Book of Acts], God sent two faithful servants to change churches and the community.” Now, he said, “God has called them [the Pattersons] to work in another place [Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary].”
While the six Southern Baptist Convention seminaries do not give honorary doctorates, the Paige Patterson Faithful Servant Award will be the seminary’s highest award and “greatest honor given by the institution,” according to the award’s resolution.
The award will be given “in honor of Paige Patterson and to encourage all men everywhere toward faithfulness to Jesus Christ.”
[2]The Dorothy K. Patterson Visiting Professor of Women’s Studies will be given to a visiting professor who will come to Southeastern to teach courses in women’s studies, which Dorothy Patterson helped establish.
“This is not Dorothy Patterson’s program but Southeastern Seminary’s program,” she told the trustees earlier in the day. “There is no other program like this. This program is alive and well. It is a wonderful program. It is dependent on Southeastern Seminary to carry the flag and keep it going.”
Groundbreaking on the Patterson Campus Center is scheduled for 2004. Funds for the new building have come from Southeastern’s “Scholarship on Fire!” campaign, which began last year. The $50 million fundraising initiative will help in the construction of other capital projects and improvements, including a new library, fund endowments, acquire property near the campus, expand curriculum and faculty and increase student aid.
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(BP) photos posted in the BP Photo Library at http://www.bpnews.net. Photo titles: A SERVANT HONORED, ACADEMIC HONOR and DEPARTURE IN PRAYER.