W. A. Criswell


Wallie Amos Criswell, was an American pastor, author, and a two-term elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1970. As senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas for five decades he became widely known for expository biblical preaching at a popular level, and is regarded as a key figure in the late 1970s "Conservative Resurgence" within the Southern Baptist Convention.

Early life

Criswell was born in Eldorado in Jackson County in southwestern Oklahoma to Wallie Amos and Anna Currie Criswell. It was not uncommon at the time for boys to be named with initials, and he was simply called "W. A.". In later years when a full name was required for his passport Criswell supplied his father's first and middle names. Criswell grew up in Texline in Dallam County, the most northwesterly community in the Texas Panhandle, where his cowboy-barber father moved the family in 1915.
At age ten, young W. A. professed faith in Christ at a revival meeting led by the evangelist Reverend John Hicks. Two years later Criswell publicly committed his life to the gospel ministry. Criswell was licensed to preach at the age of seventeen and soon thereafter held part-time pastorates at Devil's Bend and Pulltight, Texas. While attending Baylor University in Waco, Texas, from 1928 to 1931 he ministered in Marlow, White Mound, and Pecan Grove, the latter in Fort Bend County, Texas. During his graduate and post-graduate years, including a Ph.D. at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Criswell was the pastor of Baptist churches in Mount Washington in Bullitt County near Louisville and Oakland in Warren County near Bowling Green, Kentucky. After completing his degrees, Criswell in 1937 accepted the pastorate of the First Baptist Church of Chickasha in Grady County in central Oklahoma. In 1941, he moved to First Baptist Church of Muskogee in eastern Oklahoma. In 1935, Criswell married the former Bessie Marie "Betty" Harris, the pianist of the Mount Washington church and an education graduate of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. Their daughter Mabel Ann was born in Chickasha in 1939. Mabel Ann possessed an exceptional operatic voice and recorded three albums of sacred music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two with the Ralph Carmichael orchestra. She died in 2002, some six months after her father's passing.

First Baptist Church of Dallas

In 1944 Criswell was called to replace George Washington Truett as the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas. He would spend the remainder of his life at First Baptist, preaching more than four thousand sermons from its pulpit. During his tenure membership grew from 7,800 to 26,000, with weekly Sunday School attendance in excess of 5,000. The church expanded to multiple buildings covering five blocks in downtown Dallas, eventually becoming the largest Southern Baptist church in the world. The popular evangelist Billy Graham joined the church in 1953, became a close friend of the Criswell family, and remained a member of the Dallas congregation for 55 years.
Criswell was an early pioneer of the modern megachurch phenomenon and introduced a number of innovations at First Baptist Dallas that became a model for growing churches all over the country. By the early 1950s he had hired professionally trained educational directors for each age group of the church, organized a sophisticated multi-level Sunday School program, added a full-time business manager to the staff, and broadened the church into a youth and family life center featuring a bowling alley, skating rink, and gymnasium with a track and basketball court. He greatly expanded the church's long-standing Silent Friends ministry, creating for the deaf their own Sunday School, Training Union, Vacation Bible School, and summer camp ministries. His vigorous outreach efforts to the community included sponsoring thirty-seven inner city missions, a crisis pregnancy center, the Good Shepherd and Dallas Life Foundation ministries for the homeless and disadvantaged, Spanish-language chapels, and extensive television and radio ministries. Church services were locally televised as early as January 1951 and eventually were carried on stations nationwide.
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Criswell's accomplishments include helping to engineer the conservative resurgence of the Southern Baptist convention, a transition which began in the late 1970s. He was awarded eight honorary doctorates in addition to his earned postgraduate degree. He published fifty-four books, including an annotated Criswell Study Bible, and founded both Criswell College with its radio station KCBI, and First Baptist Academy.
At Criswell's request in 1988 a search committee was formed to identify and call a new pastor. On Thanksgiving Sunday evening 1990 First Baptist called Joel C. Gregory as pastor, following the unanimous recommendation of the pastor search committee and the deacons. Gregory became pastor while Criswell took the title "Senior Pastor." At the Wednesday evening service on September 30, 1992, Gregory announced his resignation, indicating that the intended succession of Criswell had not taken place. Gregory subsequently wrote Too Great a Temptation describing his experiences during this period.
In 1993 First Baptist called O. S. Hawkins as pastor and Criswell entered semi-retirement as pastor emeritus. He continued to preach at conferences, First Baptist's annual pre-Easter series, Sunday school and college lectures, and occasional Sunday morning messages for the remainder of the decade.

Death

Criswell died quietly at the home of longtime friend Jack Pogue on January 10, 2002, at the age of 92.
His death made national headlines, and as a farewell honor the city of Dallas closed off the U.S.-75 North Central Expressway for the celebrated pastor's funeral cortege.

Influence

Well-known pastor and author Rick Warren recounts his call to full-time ministry as a 19-year-old student at California Baptist College, when in November 1973 he and a friend skipped classes and drove 350 miles to hear Criswell preach at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco. Warren stood in line to shake hands with Criswell afterwards.
Warren went on to found the Saddleback Church in California, one of the most recognized and influential churches in the country, with weekly attendance in excess of 20,000. In his book, The Purpose Driven Church, Warren referred to Criswell as the "greatest American pastor of the twentieth century."
Audio recordings of Criswell's preaching began in December 1953, and over 4000 of his expository sermons are available free of charge in audio, video, and searchable transcript form at the website, one of the largest online collections by a single pastor in the world. It is sponsored and maintained by the non-profit W. A. Criswell Foundation which also supports Criswell College.

Southern Baptist Convention presidency

Dr. Criswell served two times as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest non-Roman Catholic denomination in the United States, with some 16 million members. During the twenty years that followed he was perhaps the most popular preacher at evangelism and pastors' conferences in America, and also preached extensively in mission fields worldwide.

Theology

Criswell's theology is best described as conservative and evangelical. He believed in Biblical inerrancy, the eternal security of the believer, and Jesus Christ as the authority of spiritual truth and the sole path to salvation of sinful mankind. Unlike his predecessor George W. Truett, Criswell preached dispensational premillennialism and the pretribulation rapture of the church.

Politics

Segregation

While he never spoke in support of racial segregation in his sermons and was not opposed to integration in principle, Criswell was at first critical of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and of federal intervention against de jure southern segregation. In 1956 he made an address denouncing forced integration to a South Carolina evangelism conference, and a day later to the South Carolina legislature.
Taken aback by negative reactions to his remarks in the press, Criswell did not publicly address the issue again for over a decade, claiming he was "a pastor, not a politician." However, upon his 1968 election as president of the Southern Baptist Convention and the SBC's endorsement of racial equality and desegregation, Criswell announced to the press, "Every Southern Baptist in the land should support the spirit of that statement. We Southern Baptists have definitely turned away from racism, from segregation, from anything and everything that speaks of a separation of people in the body of Christ." Criswell's first sermon after his election as SBC president in 1968 was titled "The Church of the Open Door," emphasizing that his church already had many non-white members and was open to all regardless of race. He asserted publicly, "I don't think that segregation could have been or was at any time intelligently, seriously supported by the Bible.

Presidential elections

In 1960 Criswell published an article attacking the appropriateness of Roman Catholics to serve as president, titled "Religious Freedom, the Church, the State, and Senator Kennedy." The address, the text of which is available from the Kennedy Library archives, stoked the concern of some Protestants preceding the presidential election, to which Senator Kennedy responded in a speech on religious freedom and the separation of church and state. In 1976, Criswell supported the election of the Republican U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., an Episcopalian, rather than the Southern Baptist Democratic nominee, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

Abortion

Questioned in 1973 about the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade Criswell replied, "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." Criswell later became a staunch opponent of the procedure.

Quotes

To lift Him up, to preach His name, and to invite souls to love Him and to follow Him is the highest, heavenliest privilege of human life.

The word we preach from our pulpits ought to be like the Word of God itself--like a fire and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces.

After seventy years of expository preaching, I have yet to touch the hem of His garment.

When our trials come, when we feel pain and suffering, when our tears flow again, it is our joy and comfort to lift our faces heavenward and to go on, standing on the promises of God.

: Go shovel gravel. Sell popcorn. Work in a dime store. Don't contaminate the Word of God.

Never in my life did I believe in separating people on the basis of skin pigmentation. Racism was, is, and always will be an abomination in the eyes of God, and should be in the eyes of God's people. And where we who call the name of Christ have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to racism in any form, we have sinned and need to beg God's forgiveness.

Whenever there is a true prophet of God, he will preach judgment. These so-called ministers of God speak all thing nice... there is not any hell and there is not any judgment of God... In our enlightened and sophisticated day... we stand up and speak of the love of Jesus, and we speak of peace and we speak of all things beautiful. But remember... The same Book that tells us about good, tells is about the bad. The same Revelation that speaks to us about heaven, speaks about hell. The Bible that presents The Lord Jesus as Savior, is the same Bible that presents to us the devil as our enemy and adversary of damnation and destruction. The two go together, If there is not anything to be saved from, we do not need a savior.

Selected works