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First Baptist employs a staff of two associate pastors, an assistant pastor and social-service director, a full-time child expert, an organist-music director, an assistant music director, a day-nursery director, a building superintendent, three janitors, a full-time hostess, four secretaries and assorted part-time help.
But the mainspring is Ted Adams—he is made of such finely tempered steel that he can work all day, seven days a week, and still be the most relaxed man in Richmond. His day begins at 7 a.m., in the Adams' comfortable red brick house on Matoaka Road. After a leisurely breakfast with his wife and her mother, Mrs.
Selma Hopf Jillson, Adams ambles upstairs to his study where he broadcasts over Station KRNL ten minutes each morning—a word on the news or the weather, a passage from Scripture, occasionally a poem on a religious theme.
If possible, he spends an hour or two on his sermon (he devotes his yearly six-week vacation to blocking out his sermons for a year in advance), then drives to the church in his 1953 Mercury, for a round of meetings, reports, pastoral counseling.
One appointment he keeps whenever he can is his 6 p.m. romp with his two-year-old granddaughter, Tedde, daughter of his 28-year-old daughter, Mrs. Frank Thompson. (His two sons, Ted in the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co., and Bob at Denison University, are unmarried.) After dinner there is more work: meetings at the church, civic committees and visiting ill parishioners. He has no hobbies—apparently he needs none. The gentle calm in his blue-grey eyes, in his slow, broad smile, in his unhurried passage through a 16-hour day, baffles those who know him only casually. Says he: "Calmness is rooted in faith in God, in yourself, and in the ultimate triumph of justice." Melting Pot. Richmond's First Baptist Church is not average: it is too big and too prosperous for that. But its energy and efficiency are typical of the Southern Baptist Convention today. From Kansas City, Mo., where Baptists have a $70,-ooo revolving fund to buy sites for new churches, to Texas, where they are adding an average of two new churches to their rolls each week, the denomination is ticking as busily as Ted Adams' own church. "If you see a new building going up," says a real-estate man in Little Rock, Ark., "you can be sure it's either a new supermarket or a Baptist Church."
Back-country preachers still thunder against the evils of rum, Romanism and romance on the dance floor, and even sophisticated city preachers go in for melodramatics; when Joseph Stalin died, Pastor Wayne Dehoney of Birmingham's Central Park Baptist Church hauled a coffin into his sanctuary and preached a sermon on the evils of dictatorship (in newspaper ads he labeled it "Stalin's funeral oration"). But, on the whole, it is the new facts rather than the old, familiar figures of Southern Baptism that are important.