Booming Baptists

The American (Northern) Baptists are establishing new churches at the rate of one every seven days. This note of boom set the tone for the American Baptists' 46th annual convention last week, as 3,311 delegates and 5,841 visitors gathered in Denver's Municipal Auditorium to hear the good word about their 1,550,000-member denomination.

There were good words in abundance. Convention President John Dawson, a Chicago investment broker, announced that for the first time in seven years the convention had raised more (by $250,000) than the amount of its budget ($6,800,000). American Baptists, the delegates heard, gave 9% more in church contributions last year than the year before. In a special ceremony, the convention dedicated 71 home and foreign missionaries, the largest group in recent history.

Sharpest debate of the session came over a proposal to raise $8,000,000 in 20 months for the construction of 300 new churches by 1956. Chief questions: 1) Could local churches stand their shares of the strain? 2) Once they were built, would the new churches be sure to stay in the denomination, or would they drift away from total-immersion baptism into open membership, or become "community" churches? The fund was voted, after delegates were assured, by an amendment, that the new congregations will be "definitely related to the American Baptist Convention."

First-ballot choice of the nominating committee for new president of the convention was spectacled, Nebraska-born Winfield Edson, 45, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Long Beach, Calif. A low 80s golfer, camera fan and chinchilla breeder on the side, Winfield Edson has boosted his church's membership from 1,500 to 3,724 since 1939, has averaged a speech a day to do it. Not content with expanding, his church has pushed members out to form ten new churches in the Long Beach area.

"Folks give me credit for that," says Edson. "But shucks sakes, it was my people who did it."

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