Religion: The Baptist Invasion

The spacious, air -conditioned Des Moines Veterans Auditorium was jammed with 3,000 convention delegates and 5,000 visitors last week, but the burnished-copper ashtrays stayed empty. The assembled 8,000 were American Baptists (Northern), on hand for their 52nd annual convention and, as one official explained: “Some Baptists smoke, but never when they gather together like this.”

As president for the coming year, the delegates elected Dr. Herbert Gezork, 58, onetime leader of the German Baptist Youth Movement who fled Germany in 1936 just before the Nazis closed in on him, is now president of Baptist-run Andover Newton Theological School. Delegates went on record against:

¶ Recognition of Communist China “until such time as it proves itself worthy”;

¶”The practice of segregation, whether in country clubs, sororities, fraternities, service clubs, organizations of property owners or cemeteries”;

¶ Public subsidy for church-controlled schools.

Sensation of the convention was a speech by a Southern Baptist. Dr. Blake Smith, pastor of the University Baptist Church of Austin, Texas, whose topic was the sorest subject in Northern Baptism —the “invasion” by Southern Baptists (membership: 8,956,756) of what the American Baptists (membership: 1,536,276) regard as their territory. The convention press was kept busy running off 3,000 copies of his speech, which sold at 10¢ each.

Southern Baptists, Arkansas-born Dr. Smith pointed out, have 2,600 churches in areas which 20 years ago were looked upon as Northern’s private preserve—mostly in the Midwest and the Southwest. And it is in just these areas that Southern Baptism has been growing fastest. “Although the overall gain in membership for Southern Baptists in 1958 was only 2.7%, our gains in the ‘invaded’ states were from five to ten times as large as the average.”

Pastor Smith views the resulting friction as threatening “the unity of Baptists on this continent more seriously than the Civil War.” And he blames the cold uncharity of Northern Baptists for the situation in the first place. The 800,000-odd Southern Baptists who have moved north, he said, have not felt that they were wanted in the churches where they have gone. “They are simple people to whom forms and ceremonies are as strange as a foreign tongue, but they love the Lord. Have you been willing to gather with them in their home or perhaps in a crude storefront building and join with them in singing Bringing in the Sheaves, just because you love them in Christ?”