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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 (SBC) from 1968 to 1970. Supporters have described him as one of the 20th century's greatest expository preachers,[1] and the patriarch of the "Conservative Resurgence" within the SBC.
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Criswell was born in Eldorado, Oklahoma[2] to Wallie Amos and Anna Currie Criswell. It was not uncommon at the time for boys to be named with initials and he was simply called "W. A.". In later years when a full name was required for his passport Criswell supplied his father's first and middle names. Criswell grew up in Texline in Dallam County, the most northwesterly community in the Texas panhandle, where his cowboy-barber father moved the family in 1915.[3] At age 10 he professed faith in Christ at a revival meeting led by the evangelist Rev. John Hicks, and two years later he publicly committed his life to the gospel ministry. Criswell was licensed to preach at the age of 17 and soon thereafter held part-time pastorates at Devil's Bend and Pulltight, Texas.[2] While attending Baylor University 1928-1931 he ministered in Marlow, Pecan Grove, and White Mound, Texas; and during his graduate and post-graduate years at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary he pastored Baptist churches in Mt. Washington and Oakland (near Louisville, Kentucky). After completing his degrees he accepted the call to First Baptist Church of Chickasha, Oklahoma in 1937, and then to First Baptist Church of Muskogee in 1941. Criswell married Betty Harris, the pianist of the Mount Washington church, in 1935; daughter Mabel Ann ("Anne") was born in Chickasha in 1939. Anne possessed an exceptional operatic voice and recorded three albums of sacred music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two of them with the Ralph Carmichael orchestra.
In 1944 Criswell was called to replace George W. Truett as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas. He would spend the remainder of his life at First Baptist, preaching more than four thousand sermons from its pulpit. During his tenure membership grew from 7,800 to 26,000, with weekly Sunday School attendance in excess of 5,000. The church expanded to multiple buildings covering five blocks in downtown Dallas, eventually becoming the largest Southern Baptist church in the world. The popular evangelist Billy Graham joined the church in 1953, became a close friend of the Criswell family, and remained a member of the Dallas congregation for 55 years.
Criswell was an early pioneer of the modern megachurch phenomenon and introduced a number of innovations at First Baptist Dallas that became a model for growing churches all over the country. By the early 1950s he had hired professionally-trained educational directors for each age group of the church, organized a sophisticated multi-level Sunday School program, added a full-time business manager to the staff, and broadened the church into a youth and family life center featuring a bowling alley, skating rink, and gymnasium with a track and basketball court. He greatly expanded the church's long-standing Silent Friends ministry, creating for the deaf their own Sunday School, Training Union, Vacation Bible School, and summer camp ministries. His vigorous outreach efforts to the community included sponsoring thirty-seven inner city missions, a crisis pregnancy center, the Good Shepherd and Dallas Life Foundation ministries for the homeless and disadvantaged, Spanish-language chapels, and extensive television and radio ministries. Church services were locally televised as early as January 1951 and eventually were carried on stations nationwide.[4]
Criswell's accomplishments include helping to engineer the rightward shift of the Southern Baptist convention which began in the late 1970s. He was awarded eight honorary doctorates in addition to his earned postgraduate degree. He published fifty-four books, including an annotated Criswell Study Bible (in later editions the Believers Study Bible and Holy Bible, Baptist Study Edition, Thomas Nelson Publishers), and founded both the Criswell College with its radio station KCBI and First Baptist Academy.
In 1995 First Baptist called Dr. O. S. Hawkins as pastor and Criswell entered semi-retirement as pastor emeritus. He continued to preach at conferences, First Baptist's annual pre-Easter series, Sunday school and college lectures, and occasional Sunday morning messages for the remainder of the decade. Criswell died quietly at the home of longtime friend Jack Pogue on January 10, 2002, at the age of 92. His passing made national headlines, and as a farewell honor the city of Dallas closed off the U.S.-75 North Central Expressway for the celebrated pastor's funeral cortege.
Well-known pastor and author Rick Warren recounts his call to full-time ministry as a 19-year-old student at California Baptist College, when in November 1973 he and a friend skipped classes and drove 350 miles to hear Criswell preach at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco.[1] Warren stood in line to shake hands with Criswell afterwards.[1]
| “ | When my turn finally arrived, something unexpected happened. Criswell looked at me with kind, loving eyes and said, quite emphatically, “Young man, I feel led to lay hands on you and pray for you!” He placed his hands on my head and prayed: “Father, I ask that you give this young preacher a double portion of your Spirit. May the church he pastors grow to twice the size of the Dallas church. Bless him greatly, O Lord.”[1] | ” |
Warren went on to found the Saddleback Church in California, one of the most recognized and influential churches in the country, with weekly attendance in excess of 20,000. In his book, The Purpose Driven Church, Warren referred to Criswell as the "greatest American pastor of the twentieth century."
Audio recordings of Criswell's preaching were made beginning in December 1953, and over 3,300 of his expository sermons are available free of charge in audio, video, and searchable transcript form at the W. A. Criswell Sermon Library website. It is the largest such collection by a single pastor in the world, and is sponsored and maintained by the non-profit W. A. Criswell Foundation which also supports the Criswell College.
Dr. Criswell served two times as president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1968–1970), the largest American non-Roman Catholic denomination with 16 million members. During the 20 years that followed he was perhaps the most popular preacher at evangelism and pastors' conferences in America, and also preached extensively in mission fields worldwide.
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.
Criswell's theology and ethics reflected the era in which he lived. Unlike his predecessor, George W. Truett (1876–1944), at First Baptist Church of Dallas, Criswell preached dispensational premillennialism from the pulpit.[5] Truett had reflected a postmillennial approach to eschatological questions, whereas Criswell drew upon the theology of C.I. Scofield. A comparison of the beliefs of Truett and Criswell illustrates how American conservative Christianity changed sociologically during the 20th century. Postmillennialism, popular around the start of the 20th century, expressed an optimistic expectation for the social transformation of this world by Christ in the present day through the missionary work of his Church; but the two World Wars dealt this view a near-fatal blow. Premillennialism offered a more pragmatic view of the limited scope of possible social reform, looking ahead to the rapture in which Christians are removed from the world before the end-time judgments of the tribulation and Armageddon, after which Christ himself returns to transform the world and establish his kingdom.
Criswell's preaching also reflected his culture as societal attitudes evolved on the issue of racial integration. While he never spoke in support of segregation from the pulpit, Criswell was at first privately critical of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and of federal intervention in Southern segregation. In 1953 he made an address denouncing forced integration to a South Carolina evangelism conference, and a day later to the South Carolina legislature. Taken aback by negative reactions and distorted accounts of his remarks in the press, Criswell did not publicly address the issue again for over a decade, claiming he was "a pastor, not a politician." However, upon his 1968 election as president of the Southern Baptist Convention and the SBC's endorsement of racial equality and desegregation, Criswell announced to the press, "Every Southern Baptist in the land should support the spirit of that statement. We Southern Baptists have definitely turned away from racism, from segregation, from anything and everything that speaks of a separation of people in the body of Christ." Criswell's first sermon after his election as SBC president in 1968 was titled "The Church of the Open Door," emphasizing that his church already had many non-white members and was open to all regardless of race. He asserted publicly, "I don't think that segregation could have been or was at any time intelligently, seriously supported by the Bible.[6]
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.[7] 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 H. W. Bush.
"To lift Him up, to preach His name, and to invite souls to love Him and to follow Him is the highest, heavenliest privilege of human life."
"The word we preach from our pulpits ought to be like the Word of God itself--like a fire and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces."
"After 70 years of expository preaching, I have yet to touch the hem of His garment."
"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."
"Start low, stay slow. Raise higher, bring fire." (on sermon delivery)