In a driving rain, which they called Baptist weather (because it immersed instead of sprinkling them), the Southern Baptists gathered last week in Houston. It was the biggest convention ever for the big (7,373,498 members) U.S. denomination; 30,000 "messengers" (voting delegates) and nonvoting visitors packed into the Sam Houston Coliseum for seven days of fast-moving business and budgeting.
True to the good Baptist tradition of unpredictability, they elected a dark-horse candidate as president of the convention for 1954. Dr. James Wilson Storer, 67, onetime Oregon cowboy, author of five books, and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Tulsa since 1931, was...