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 and a supporter of segragation of the races in the 1960s. 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 convention 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 suburban community near Fort Worth in Tarrant County, where he served until 1991. On Thanksgiving weekend 1990 on Sunday of that weekend the church unanimously called Joel C. Gregory (B.A., summa cum laude, M.Div, Ph.D.) as pastor of First Baptist Dallas. Dr. Criswell assumed the title "Senior Pastor" with the clear understanding that he would cooperate with a short transition. Dr. Gregory resigned the church on Wednesday, September 30, 1992, citing the unwillingness of the senior pastor to complete the transition. The story of this two year period is reviewed in Joel Gregory's best-selling 1994 memoir, Too Great a Temptation (Fort Worth: The Summit Group, 1994). This memoir was subsequently adopted as the basis of the script for the play God's Man in Texas by David Rambo. This play became one of ten most performed plays in America over the next several years.
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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 advocated against desegregation. During a speech in South Carolina at their Baptist convention, Criswell segued into a heated attack on the forces of desegregation. He expressed astonishment at the cowardice of ministers “whose forebears [sic] and predecessors were martyrs and were burned at the stake” but who themselves refuse to speak up about “this thing of integration.” True ministers, he argued, must passionately resist government mandated desegregation because it is “a denial of all that we believe in.” Later, after election to the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention, Criswell apparently had a change of heart, some think due to the fact that integration was a "fate accompli" by declaring, “I don’t think that segregation could have been or was at any time intelligently, seriously supported by the Bible."
Criswell sometimes also 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
[edit] Sources
- About W.A. from W.A. Criswell.com
- [1]
- BP New Release and Tribute upon Criswell’s Death Article on Church History and W.A. Criswell
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