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WINSTON-SALEM — In Southern Baptist life, Bill Leonard has been a proverbial thorn in the side.

The longtime Baptist historian has spent much of his professional life providing analysis of the denomination at its best — and most controversial.

“He knows the strengths but also understands our peculiarities,” said the Rev. Ken Massey of First Baptist Church in Greensboro.

When the conservative-led group known for boycotting Disney World began excluding more moderate members from leadership and disengaging “gay-friendly” churches, Leonard predicted the outcome and the numbers proved him right.

“When you narrow the boundaries for 30 years, you’d expect that sooner or later people are going to take you at your word and stay away,” Leonard said of the emptying pews.

Retiring this year as the founding dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School, Leonard, 64, plans to spend more time writing about Baptists in the full-time role of professor of church history. He delivers the baccalaureate address for the university’s graduating students this morning.

“There’s a very famous leader of the Southern Baptist Convention still that’s quoted as saying if you have to have a church historian who is a liberal Baptist, Bill Leonard is about as good as you can get, which was a wonderful left-handed compliment,” Leonard said.

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When fundamentalists gained control of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., in the early 1990s, nearly 80 percent of the faculty, including Leonard, then faculty president, eventually left.

“Louisville became the centerpiece for unending conflict in the Southern Baptist movement,” said Leonard. “It wasn’t just that I was fighting particular battles; it was doing something to me.”

Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the world, with hundreds of churches in the state.

Leonard, a lifelong Southern Baptist, landed in Birmingham, at Samford University as a teacher and chairman of the department of religion and philosophy.

“I will always be in debt to the people of Samford ... for giving me a place to go out of that struggle,” he said. “It was also in Birmingham that something else changed me.”

Invited by the pastor John Porter to Sixth Avenue Baptist, a historic African American congregation, Leonard found healing.

“We were coming out of church one day and this elderly African American woman said, 'Well, reverend, I see you’ve been coming to church every Sunday.’ She said, 'Don’t you think it’s about time you 'walked’ — which meant 'walk the aisle’ to join.’ ... The preacher in me said that was the Holy Spirit. The next Sunday ... we 'walked the aisle’ and joined.”

He is now a member of the predominantly African American First Baptist Church on Highland Avenue in Winston-Salem.

“With the worship and with the choirs and his sermons, I’ve always said, grace just washed over me,” Leonard said. “I expect that sounds hokey in a way, but it’s actually what happened, and I started letting go of some anger and some defensiveness of my own Baptist identity.”

With it came another calling. His academic work had always been in American religious studies.

“I never intended really to be a specialist on the Baptists, but this controversy compelled me to ask — 'Who are Baptists and what are they doing in the world?’ ”

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As he readies for his move into an office in the steeple of Wait Chapel, Leonard asserts he’s going back to the best job he’s ever had.

“I have to tell you — all I ever wanted to do from college on was to be a professor of church history,” Leonard said.

He’s taking his vast collection of religious icons and the more than century-old “The Lord Will Provide” needlepoint with him.

Not that the last decade wasn’t fulfilling. Leonard, as founding dean, assembled sought-after instructors and a diversified student body.

“With a gleam in his eye and a saucy Baptist history quote on his lips, he assured me that I would be my own person and pave my own path at Wake Forest,” graduate Emily Hull said.

Hull is now the young adults minister at Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky.

“There’s not another man in America who could have done what he’s done,” said Wake Forest professor James Dunn, a noted scholar and friend.

A member of the accrediting committee told Dunn the school was already comparable to the Ivy League schools.

“There were no asterisks, no recommendations in their report — and that’s nothing to sneeze at.”

Leonard is more humble.

“I would say I was here when a lot of us built it,” he said.

Leonard was also a supporting planner of the historic New Baptist Covenant meeting in Atlanta in 2008, which brought together about 17,000 people from across the country for the largest interracial gathering of Baptists ever. The follow-up Southeastern region meeting was held at Wake Forest.

Leonard’s upcoming sabbatical takes him to Oxford University as a visiting scholar. Book projects include editing the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Religious Controversy in America.

“I am interested in Southern Baptists as a case study in transitions in American religious life and denominational life, and in that, they continue to be fascinating to me.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com