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RELIGION THE ROCK OF AGES

W.A. Criswell marks 40 years at First Baptist
By W. L. Taitte |

W. A. CRISWELL celebrates his 40th anniversary as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas in October. From the beginning of his ministry there, the church has borne his own stamp. The man and the institution together have left their mark on the city of Dallas, on the Baptist denomination at large and on the nation. During these past 40 years, it would be hard to say which has experienced the most dramatic development: First Baptist Church or W.A. Criswell.

If anything, age has added luster both to the century-old red brick Victorian/Gothic sanctuary of the church and to its venerable pastor. Someone who has only seen the First Baptist Church and Dr. Criswell on television cannot begin to understand their effect when seen in person. On television, the auditorium seems vast, the preacher sometimes artificial. Without the interposition of the camera, the auditorium-for all the publicity about this church being the largest of its denomination in the world-seems homey, unpretentious, old-fashioned. It’s not some sort of Baptists’ Vatican nor a storm center of controversy, but just a church, getting on with its perennial business of recruiting new members, praising the Lord and passing out the weekly bulletin.

Criswell, too, is reassuringly human as he sets out to preach. He says of himself, “To me, it seems like I am still driving in the same direction, with the same mission. Maybe I don’t preach as loud as I used to.” Not that the sense of a grand occasion is lacking as he begins a sermon. The music of the mighty choir and orchestra hush impressively, the lights dim, and there is a sense of high theater in the air. The silvery white hair of the septuagenarian pastor, his baby-pink skin and the cannily chosen light-colored suit (beautifully cut but with a tie too wide to be fashionable) all stand out against the darkened surroundings. The voice of this trained orator, who can move at will from formal elocution to the distinctive vowels of a pronounced Southwestern twang, recalls-like the building itself-another, more leisurely century.

But in person, the oratory seems more appropriate to the style and the scale of the room than it does on television. Public speaking before a live audience is almost a lost art today, and Criswell is one of the few surviving masters. The deep tones of his voice are miked, but they don’t need to be. When he steps away from the podium to make a point, the natural, unamplified sound is even more impressive.

Criswell, a great performer, knows every trick in the book. He gives a 45- minute sermon a musical shape as sure as that of a Bruckner symphony. Even in a private conversation, each word in every sentence is carefully placed and sonorous; in the pulpit, the sounds could be coming from the organ pipes behind him. Criswell typically begins a sermon quietly and builds slowly from one crescendo to the next. “I preach like a Holy Roller,” he warned the pulpit committee that recommended him to the church in 1944- meaning that at high moments his voice may go out of control, that emotional fire may erupt into emphatic gesture, hands violently shaken to the side to express rejection or clapped together to emphasize a repetition.

But if Criswell clearly knows how to impress an audience and thrives on the effort, he is apparently sincere about what he is saying. He earned a doctorate in a generation in which that accomplishment was rare for a Baptist preacher. Criswell loved studying Greek and Hebrew and loves to throw in a repeated reference to one or the other as he preaches to thousands in person and on the air.

His preaching system is simply to read and explicate a passage of Scripture. (During his years at First Baptist he preached right through the Bible, and it took him nearly two decades.) He will use any means to make his passage come alive for his listeners: big words or jokes, linguistics and etymology, ancient history or modern historical illustration, transposition into modern terms. In a sermon on Lazarus and the rich man, he will bounce back and forth from an explanation that the “crumbs from the table” were actually crusts of bread used as spoons or napkins and then discarded, and an elaborate description of the funeral of the rich man as it would be today, with black hearses and funeral wreaths and polite eulogies (“the stockmarket wavered when they heard the news”). When you have heard Criswell, you have heard a preacher.

There is a certain irony in Criswell’s message that Dives “didn’t go to hell because he was a rich man-there are many glorious rich men in the Bible,” since so many of the members of the First Baptist Church are rich and famous. “Zig” Ziglar, the prophet of positive-thinking prosperity, teaches Sunday school to a group numbering 350 to 600 in the sanctuary every Sunday between the two formal preaching services. Mary Crowley, Dr. Kenneth Cooper and Rafael Septien are among the stalwarts of the church, and even evangelist Billy Graham keeps his official church membership with this church.

The First Baptist Church itself is the largest owner of real estate in downtown Dallas. Its annual budget is more than $12 million, and the staff has grown from 12 to 350 members during Criswell’s tenure. Although the growth in church membership has been fairly steady during this century, the growth in property owned and people employed has been explosive only during Criswell’s time.

The pastor who preceded Criswell was George W. Truett, who was as prominent in his day as Criswell is now. And Truett lasted 47 years, which means that since 1897, First Baptist has had only two pastors.

Truett took over a church that had been struggling to gain a foothold during its first decades of life. It may seem unbelievable today, but Baptists were a rare and unpopular breed in frontier Dallas just after the Civil War. By Truett’s day, the First Baptist Church of Dallas had become a part of the city’s Establishment, and his dignity and skill as a preacher gained himself and the church national prominence.

But Criswell took over a church that seemed to be past its prime. Families were moving farther away from downtown, and it was taken for granted that a center-city church would have to be satisfied with an aging, shrinking congregation. “In the days of Dr. Truett,” Criswell remembers, the idea of a church was some kind of a building in which a preacher stood up there preaching the Gospel-just a square box with a pulpit and a preacher.”

Criswell had a different vision of what a church should be. “I believed we ought to be the center of the life of a whole family, the center of a whole community. You need space to do that. That’s why I wanted to buy property. I struggled to get it, year after year after year.” And in Criswell’s vision, the church needed to be actively involved downtown. “I believe that downtown, where Satan has his throne, business is king, money is Lord, where the pulsing heart of the whole financial world is found, there ought to be a tremendous witness for Christ.”

So he persuaded the members of his church to expand. Those who opposed him left straightaway, and those who joined seemed to catch his vision; there are presently 25,000 of them, although only 6,750 of them are likely to attend the various services on a typical Sunday. There is a ministry to the deaf, a ministry to the Chinese. There are a couple of gymnasiums and classrooms galore-the First Baptist Academy offering kindergarten through high school, a four-year Bible college and an FM-radio station, as well as a large number of missions to other, poorer parts of the city.

W. A. Criswell, 40 years ago, might have seemed an unlikely begetter of all this. Born near the Red River in Oklahoma and raised in Texline and Amarillo, he was a child of the Dust Bowl and the Depression. (Although given only two initials for a name at birth, Criswell later expanded them to Wallie Amos.) As a child, Criswell displayed both a talent for preaching and a determination to use it, much to the chagrin of his mother, who, though pious and protective of her son, hoped he would take up a more lucrative and prestigious career.

Criswell worked his way through Baylor by preaching in country towns on Sundays, and majored in English rather than in religious studies. He was a prot?g? of Professor A.J. Armstrong, the well-known Browning scholar; and the literary, if homespun, bent of his sermons still reflects his interest in literature. His technique of going through a Biblical passage verse by verse is simply the scholar’s explication de texte, and Criswell says that if he had had another life to live, he would have been a college professor.

For his graduate work, Criswell chose to go out of state to Southern Baptist Seminary in Kentucky-he just wanted to see a bit more of the world-and there, met and married his wife Betty. He took a job at a smallish Oklahoma church (he had pledged to himself that he would take the first position offered, as a sign from the Lord) although he had a chance for a grander one. After a few years he moved up to the First Baptist Church in Muskogee, Oklahoma. During his tenure there, he was compiling a good record but was still not widely known. He wasn’t even on the short list of candidates that the pulpit committee had drawn up when charged with finding a successor to Truett. But a prominent out-of-state layman the committee had gone to for advice insisted that they hear Criswell. The adviser felt strongly that Criswell was the man for the job, although he had only heard the young minister preach once and under adverse conditions.

WHEN CRISWELL took over the First Baptist Church of Dallas at 34, he brought with him an agenda for rapid physical growth and a family and youth-oriented program. He established in Dallas the concept of the church as a big business.

The First Baptist Church of Dallas has always been the center of his life. He studies and works on his sermons (which have found their way into more than 40 books of compilations) every morning in the Swiss Avenue home the church provides as a parsonage, and which the Criswells have filled with paintings and antiques. Six days a week he works out (at the YMCA adjoining the church, not in the church’s own gymnasium facilities-his flock won’t leave him alone to exercise). He spends afternoons in his office (every young person who wants to be baptized must come in for a personal conference) and evenings in meetings. He has a daily radio show, and his Sunday services appear on four local radio stations and one television channel.

But Criswell’s influence, of course, has gone far beyond his own church. Partly because his is the largest Baptist church in the nation, he has been a standard-bearer for his denomination. But also because he is so intellectually combative, he has taken stands with forthright dogmatism and has defended them. It may seem odd to label Criswell “intellectual,” since many of the people who claim that distinction in America scorn him and those who believe as he does. But unfashionable as they may be, Criswell’s stands are carefully thought out. “I was never hostile or caustic in preaching the doctrines I believed in,” he says. But he has taken unpopular positions and fought for every inch of ground, which has given him his reputation of being combative.

Within his own denomination, for instance, he declined the honor of its highest office, the presidency of the Southern Bap-tist Convention (SBC), until there was a cause that he felt would be furthered by accepting the position. That cause was the doctrine of the verbal inerrancy of the Bible -the belief that every word of the Bible is literally true. He had written a book to that effect that had been formally denounced by an association of professors of religion-his own religion-and he became president of the SBC in order to defend his own conservative, fundamentalist understanding of the Bible against the liberal theologians he still fears are making inroads among Southern Baptists.

He was also perhaps the first prominent modern Baptist preacher to espouse pre-millennialism: the belief that the world must end in Armageddon and the second coming must occur before Christ can reign in glory on this earth. Pastor Truett (indeed, most Baptist preachers and all of Criswell’s teachers) believed instead that God’s kingdom could be brought about on earth with just a bit more effort, that things would get better in the natural course of human events.

Criswell thinks that the two world wars destroyed that kind of optimism. “They opened to view the abysmal depravity of humankind. Look at Germany. It was the great intellectual and educational center of the world, the most magnificently advanced culture of any nation that ever lived. But I went to Dachau shortly after the war and saw the human experiments that the Nazis-who were the products of that culture-contrived.” The return to an expectation of the imminent end of the world, and especially a tendency to read the modern history of the Middle East as mirrored in prophecies in the books of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation were rare tenets when Criswell started preaching them. Now they are commonplace, and not just among Baptists.

Criswell has also been singularly outspoken on public issues. It is a common oc-curence for the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas to be interviewed on national television. (CBS recently asked him to appear on a news special on politics and religion.) Criswell is forthright in insisting that the two are not merely compatible but necessarily linked: “It is impossible to separate politics and religion because you can’t separate the man himself. Citizenship is a part of the whole of us. The Constitution says that Congress shall make no law establishing a religion. That’s all. The separation of church and state in the way that that is understood today is a figment of somebody’s imagination.”

Criswell’s support of conservative causes, especially on a national level, is well-known. He dined with President Nixon, supported Ford over Carter from the steps of his church and pronounced the benediction over the nomination of President Reagan at the recent Republican Convention here. He claims to have no regrets about any of this, except, he says, “I was mistaken about the election of President Kennedy. I was afraid that the country would be ruled by the Vatican, but I was wrong about that.”

Although Criswell is obviously as convinced as ever that he has truth on his side-“dogma” and “dogmatic” are positive, not negative, words in his circles-he does seem to be more tolerant of other people’s beliefs than he used to be. The man who was so violently suspicious of Catholics a quarter-century ago now says, “Catholics believe every fundamental doctrine we do, they just add some others.” The man who wrestled for years with the issue of Pente-costalism and who preached vehemently not only against such manifestations as speaking in tongues but even against the possibility of miracles in modern times now has a close relationship with the South Korean church of the Rev. Paul Yonggi Cho, a charismatic. “We have so many things in common and such a small area of difference,” Criswell says. Criswell is clearly influenced by Cho’s success in evangelization. “Their church has more than 250,000 members,” he says. “That makes us look like a pipsqueak church.”

Having seen the Vatican and its treasures, he is now almost pleased by a comparison of his land holdings to that other church fief-dom in Rome-and his love of art makes him disparage his own church’s possessions. “If we had only one-jillionth of what they have. . .” he says wistfully.

Most of Criswell’s interests outside his own church have been severely curtailed since he suffered a minor heart attack a few years ago. His secretary says that he accepts invitations to preach at events outside of Dallas far less frequently than he used to. But at First Baptist itself, he is still the omnipresent force he always was, preaching at nearly every service, outlining the grand master plan and leaving the details to his massive staff and his even larger board of deacons.

Does he hope to equal or surpass the 47-year tenure of his predecessor? “I don’t know what to do,” he says, “so I’ll just leave it with God. We’ve got so much to do.” The church is about to embark on yet another $20 million project: the Sanctuary Center, which will provide a fellowship hall and more educational units. Pastor Criswell plans to stay busy working on that. He says, “I guess I’ve got so much going that I can’t bow out now.”

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