Messengers in Miami

The Southern Baptist Convention held the largest annual meeting in its 107-year history last week. Besides 11,063 "Messengers" (the official title of Convention delegates), an extra 10,000 out-of-town guests and spectators tried to squeeze into the daily sessions at Miami's Dinner Key Auditorium,* where the Messengers approved the well-prepared resolutions of the Convention's 43 reporting committees.

As usual, the Convention noted a big increase in Southern Baptists: up 293,659 from last year to a total of 7,373,498, double the membership a generation ago. Warned Convention President James D. Grey: "The glory of this achievement is greatly reduced when we consider that it took 19.6 of us working the whole year to bring one person to the confession of Christ as Savior."

After re-electing President Grey for his second one-year term, the Messengers discussed the problems of making new converts--especially in the North and West. The U.S. as a whole, said Dr. W. A. Criswell, pastor of Dallas' First Baptist Church, is "a vast, lost, pagan mission field." Out of 1,400,000 school children in New England, he reported, "1,100,000 of them are growing up without any religious instruction whatsoever. In the West the story is the same . . . This is a call to arms among our Southern Baptist people."

The delegates put on the record their "uncompromising opposition" to any ambassador to the Vatican. Said Dr. Grey: "Baptists will speak for themselves to every aspirant for the White House this year and every year. In conscience's sake, they cannot countenance any candidate, even one of their own number,* who does not make it crystal clear that he opposes any and all missions to the Vatican or to any other religious organization in the world."

Other resolutions urged a better program of race relations, denounced UMT, mixed marriages with Roman Catholics, corruption and other laxities in the U.S. Government. Said the Rev. James W. Middleton of Shreveport, La.: "One shudders to think of the delicately balanced policies and decisions of far-reaching moment to the world in an hour of crisis in the hands of Bourbonized judgment."

*By Miami convention standards, it was a quiet crowd. Business, grumbled a taxi driver, was "terrible. Them guys came to town with a ten-dollar bill and the Ten Commandments and they ain't busted one of them yet."

*E.g., Harry Truman.

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