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"Give Us Time." Today, with 20,500,000 members, the Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., and within that denomination the Southern Baptist Conference accounts for nearly half—9,500,000.* In the last ten years, more than 1,000 new members were baptized every day, and today the Southern Baptists have 31,906 churches worth more than $2 billion, run six seminaries, 51 colleges and universities, twelve academies and Bible schools. Most of the schools are conservative, but most also offer increasingly broad training, e.g., the theological seminaries at Mill Valley (Calif.), Kansas City (Mo.), Wake Forest (N.C.) and Louisville, the universities of Baylor (Texas), Stetson (Fla.) and Wake Forest College (N.C.). The Southern Baptists operate 113 student centers, 40 hospitals, 14 old people's homes and a nationwide news service. They publish 28 weeklies with a total circulation of 1,400,000, scores of monthlies and quarterlies.
Southern Baptist missionary zeal is unrivaled. Some 1,500 foreign missionaries are currently doing medical, education and evangelical work in 44 countries, with their best achievements registered in Japan, Nigeria and Brazil (1,470 Baptist churches). In Nigeria, five Cabinet ministers in the Western Region are mission-trained Baptists. In Ghana, a Baptist mission hospital treats some 2,400 patients a month. In Kenya, Moslems and Christians, Arabs and Negro tribesmen attend Sunday school by the hundreds, and women flock to weekday sewing classes. In Beirut, Lebanon, last week, the Southern Baptists' 36th foreign seminary opened with 22 students from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon.
Both foreign and home missions are enthusiastically financed by Southern Baptist churches and heavily tithing members. Typical example: the First Baptist Church in Decatur (Ga.), operating on a $407,114 yearly budget, spends $173,557 of it to support a Jordan hospital and other mission work, though its own building loan is not yet paid. In 1959 alone, gifts to the Southern Baptist Conference ran nearly $500 million.
Not long ago, the Christian Century persuasively summed up Southern Baptism thus: "There are some striking inconsistencies. Fervent for missionary work among peoples of all races, it yet has to come to terms with the racial problems in its own dooryard. Pouring millions of dollars into education, it yet has made no effort to recommend ministerial stand ards to its cooperating churches. While loudly proclaiming its zeal to win the world for Christ, it yet bans any official relationship to national or world ecumenical movements. As they invade new territories, domestic and foreign, their cultural and social presuppositions are being challenged the more. The denomination is gradually becoming more cosmopolitan.
"The day when demagogues could sway the great Southern Baptist Convention may be over, although the fear of the demagogue is still strong in official circles. The convention's greatest resource is in its increasing abundance of intelligent, well-trained young lay and clerical leadership. This group is sensitive to national and world opinion of Southern Baptists, and mindful of Baptist weaknesses as well as strength, it says, 'Give us time.' "