W.A. Criswell
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Wallie Amos Criswell, Ph.D. (December 19, 1909 – January 10, 2002), was an American pastor, author, and a two-term elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1969. Supporters have described him as the patriarch of the "Conservative Resurgence" within the SBC.
Criswell was born in Eldorado, Oklahoma, and felt a divine call to enter the Christian ministry as a teenager. Criswell was licensed to preach at the age of seventeen and soon thereafter held student pastorates at Devil's Bend and Pulltight, Texas. He would also serve as pastor of First Baptist Church Mt. Washington (near Louisville, KY), First Baptist Church of Chickasha, Oklahoma, and First Baptist Church of Muskogee.
In 1944, he became the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, where he remained until semiretirement in 1995. During this period, the church's membership grew from 7,800 to 25,000. The church expanded to multiple buildings in downtown Dallas, and becoming a well-known Southern Baptist megachurch. The popular evangelist Billy Graham has been a member of the Dallas congregation.
Criswell was instrumental in the rightward shift of the Southern Baptist denomination that began in the late 1970s. He published fifty-four books, including an annotated Criswell Study Bible. He received eight honorary doctorates. He founded Criswell College, First Baptist Academy, and KCBI Radio.
In 1974, First Baptist called the minister James T. Draper, Jr., to become associate pastor, with the intention of preparing Draper to succeed Criswell as full pastor at some point in the future. Draper soon concluded that Dr. Criswell was not yet ready to retire. So Draper accepted the pastorate of the nearby large First Baptist Church of Euless, a suburaban community near Fort Worth in Tarrant County, where he served until 1991.
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[edit] Southern Baptist Convention presidency
Dr. Criswell served two times as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest American Protestant denomination with 16 million members. Draper also served two terms as the SBC president.
[edit] Theology
Criswell's theology is best described as conservative and evangelical. He believed in Biblical inerrancy, the eternal security of the believer, and Jesus Christ as the authority of spiritual truth and the sole path to salvation of sinful mankind.
[edit] Politics
Criswell sometimes got involved in political campaigns. In 1976, he urged from the pulpit the election of the Republican U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, Jr. (1913-2006), an Episcopalian, rather than the Southern Baptist Democratic nominee, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. Carter nevertheless won the electoral votes of Texas, the last Democrat to have done so.
In the 1980s, he continued to support Republican presidential nominees Ronald W. Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.
[edit] Criswell quotations
"God sends people into our lives just when we need them, to say the right word, His word, just when we need it."
"When our trials come, when we feel pain and suffering, when our tears flow again, it is our joy and comfort to lift our faces heavenward and to go on standing on the promises of God."
[edit] Selected works
- Why I Preach the Bible Is Literally True
- Criswell's Guidebook For Pastors
- Standing on the Promises: The Autobiography of W. A. Criswell
