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"Yes," she said quietly, "I've known it since yesterday." Success in Richmond. In the 19 years and nine months since Adams preached his first sermon in Richmond, the First Baptist Church has come far and fast, Membership has grown from about 1,600 to almost 4,000—and these are not occasional Sunday worshipers. About 3,500 of them attend Sunday school, more than 3,000 regularly pledge specific portions of their income, nearly 1,000 tithe. The building debt has long since been paid off, and First Baptist has become one of the biggest givers in the entire Baptist world, contributing to, among others, the Red Cross, the YMCA World Service Fund, Korean Relief. When Pastor Adams arrived, contributions to First Baptist totaled approximately $71,000 for 1936.
This year Ted Adams asked the congregation for a cool $300,000, and last Sun day they raised it.
This is how First Baptist ran the yearly "every-member canvas." In aisle seats at the beginning of the 9 a.m. service sat some 300 male volunteers, each respon sible for half of two pews. At a signal from Pastor Adams, each volunteer rose and distributed pledge cards. While the congregation was filling in its cards, the volunteers and Pastor Adams filled in theirs (Adams' salary: $15,000). Then, marching two by two down the aisle in step, the workers brought the cards to the "Lord's Table." The process was repeated at the 11:00 a.m. service.
As the last service ended, the volunteers gathered in the church basement for a quick lunch, while other workers continued to sort the pledge cards alpha betically, matching them with file cards for every church member, coded to show their location in Richmond. By 1 p.m.
each volunteer was out in a Richmond district rounding up those who had not been reached, and by 3 o'clock the only members of First Baptist who had not been tapped were the sick, the out-of-town or the out-of-pocket. Pastor Adams never knows any figure but the total. "I don't know what any member of my church gives," he says. "That's something they have to settle between themselves and the Lord. It's a wonderful thing not to know who your church's biggest contribu tors are." The Watch. Richmond's First Baptist, the Christian Herald once wrote, "is a church that seems to have everything; it ticks like a ly-jewel watch." Spreading out from its air-conditioned "sanctuary," the actual place of worship, is a steadily expanding network of 150 hard-worked rooms. Here Sunday school is conducted on what is virtually a cradle-to-grave basis. An antiseptic 20-bed nursery, staffed by volunteer registered nurses, cares for infants, and in the toddlers' playroom a loudspeaker softly plays hymns. By the time a youngster is three, he is an old hand at Sunday school, and in the classroom next door his mother and father may be studying the application of the Bible to child-rearing, and next door to that his grandmother may be studying the problem of missionaries in Korea. A well-equipped gymnasium is in constant use by local teenagers, and the lights burn late each night for meetings, discussion groups and social services.
To keep the watch ticking smoothly.