Skeptics say we live in times devoid of divine miracles, but I believe I recognized one in the fact a 14-member presidential search committee and 10-member presidential search advisory committee voted unanimously to make a former judge with a Church of Christ background the president of the world’s largest Baptist university.

That flies in the face of a basic truism — that Baptists can’t agree on anything. Especially if they’re Baylor Baptists.

And yet, it’s come to pass in the selection of former Whitewater prosecutor, former judge and distinguished Pepperdine University School of Law dean Ken Starr as Baylor University’s 14th president, approved a week ago today and announced this past Monday.

I’m not sure which is more astounding — that Baylor’s board of regents, many serving on the search committee, agreed on something crucial, right down to the last member, or that the search advisory committee did likewise, especially considering it represented university staff, faculty, students and alumni.

So much for the suspicion expressed by many doubters that members of the advisory committee wouldn’t have any real input. Fact is, a member of the advisory committee was actually responsible for Starr’s first meeting with Baylor officials.

Granted, it was one heck of an advisory committee member.

Tom Phillips, a Baylor alumnus who served as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, ran into Starr at a judicial conference at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., shortly before Thanksgiving last year and told him about the Baylor vacancy. Phillips is quick to dismiss any notion he was ultimately responsible for Starr’s appointment.

“Our conversation could not have exceeded two minutes,” Phillips told me, “so I was not the convincer.”

Nonetheless, Starr showed immediate interest. Within a day regent Joe Armes, chairman of the presidential search committee, was on a flight to D.C. to talk with Starr about the 16-month-old vacancy. Armes tells me that he had trouble containing his excitement when he later spoke to the chairman of the advisory committee.

“Ken Hall says when I called him from the airport in Washington, D.C., he said he heard something in my voice that he hadn’t heard in a long time.”

Starr’s appointment has shocked some and left them joyful; shocked others and left them glum. Hall, the Buckner International CEO who as chairman of the advisory group met regularly with regents, says everyone realized they had soul-searching to do about two key points — Starr’s non-Baptist background and his controversial reputation as the special prosecutor who bedeviled the Clinton administration.

Starr’s role as a politically polarizing investigator was dismissed by most early on.

“You look at his body of work, that’s a very small piece of his work,” Hall said, adding that Starr told him he was tapped for duty by the government and that it was his job to prosecute “with the full fervor of the law.” The president of the United States lied under oath, Starr said, “and that’s an impeachable offense by law.”

Advisory committee members — some of them non-Baptist — had an easier time accepting Starr’s religious background than Baylor regents did.

“That was something the regents struggled with and I did and the preachers on the regents board did,” Hall said. “We spent a lot of time talking about it and praying about it. It was not as big an issue to advisory committee members as it was to me. They were representing other constituencies. But to the regents it was a very important issue.”

Hall tells me that regents surveyed the advisory committee, one by one, before taking action — and because the decision was so strikingly original, brimming with potential controversy, they called Hall back before last week’s vote, just to ensure no one on the advisory committee had any second thoughts.

No one did.

Regents then followed that advice and voted unanimously to make Starr the next president. And so begins another exciting chapter in Baylor’s colorful, accomplished and often tumultuous 165-year history.