Maj. Gen. Douglas Carver, the U.S. Army’s chief of chaplains, received the 2008 Distinguished Alumnus Award June 11 at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary luncheon during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.
Attendees also heard a report from seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. and celebrated Mohler’s 15th anniversary as the school’s leader.
“There are those who salute him as Maj. Gen. Douglas Carver,” Mohler said. “We will do that now, but we will also salute him as a good soldier of the Lord Jesus Christ and one of our fellow alumni of The Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary.”
Carver was appointed the Army’s 22nd chief of chaplains last July. The Georgia native earned a master of divinity from Southern and has pastored churches in Kentucky, Colorado and Virginia.
In 1973, Carver was recognized as a distinguished military graduate and appointed as a regular Army officer in the field artillery branch of the Army. After serving on active duty for six years, he resigned his commission to enter the ministry. He subsequently was commissioned as an Army chaplain in 1984.
“I thank God for the opportunity to have attended a seminary and to have entered into the chaplaincy and ministry in the military wearing the cloth of our nation as a result of the tremendous learning opportunities I had at Southern Seminary,” Carver said. “It has travelled with me to this day, and I want you to know that.”
Carver urged Southern students, faculty and alumni to pray for the men and women serving in the military, noting that America is currently embroiled in the third longest war in the nation’s history.
“It is the longest war that we have fought as a nation with all volunteer forces,” Carver said of the Iraq war. “Our troops are doing extremely well. They are really part of the best trained, best equipped, best led military in the history of our nation. You can be very proud of these citizen-soldiers who have volunteered to raise their hand—yes, even to be sacrificial in their service to our great nation.”
He concluded, “My prayer for you as you continue to pray without ceasing for our service members and their families, who are tremendously loaded down with this particular burden, (is) that you and I would lead noble and courageous and holy lives as our nation is at a crossroads and indeed that we would ask for God’s anointing to come down and that we would see spiritual awakening in historical proportions.”
During Mohler’s report, he told about events, new faculty and new facilities on the Louisville campus. All Southern Baptists should consider visiting the campus during the 2009 SBC annual meeting in Louisville, he said.
“What we share is something those outside this room and outside this circle could not understand,” Mohler said to luncheon attendees. “Law schools have reunions. Medical schools have reunions, and I’m sure all of those are very meaningful. But we have a reunion with eternity on the horizon, and that frames everything we are and everything we think.”