The Ascendancy Of The Baptist Bible Union 1924-1926 -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Central Bible Quarterly
Volume: CENQ 08:1 (Spring 1965)
Article: The Ascendancy Of The Baptist Bible Union 1924-1926
Author: Anonymous


The Ascendancy Of The Baptist Bible Union 1924-1926

By the spring of 1924 the Baptist Bible Union was both an organization and a movement. The key issue in its protest against the Northern Baptist Convention was that of modernism in the foreign mission society. Its chief field of protest would continue to be the Northern Baptist Convention. The Bible Union did have programs in the South and in Canada during these years, but these programs were relatively unrelated to its main thrust in the territory of the Northern convention. In the South the key issue would be evolution; in Canada it would be the modernist control of McMaster. In the Northern Convention it would continue to be missions, but other issues were there. The matter of a declaration of faith had by no means been settled. The formation of the M. and M. Board had led to the liberals’ campaign for standardization of the ministry and the recommendation of a reading list for pastors who had not had seminary preparation. This reading list was heavily weighted with books by modernist writers; Riley was keenly interested in either changing it or else providing an alternate list. The voting privilege of the salaried servants was still a grievance of the fundamentalists, as was the convention support of and participation in the Federal Council of Churches.

To prepare for the 1924 convention, four members of the executive committee met in Chicago on March 4; these were Shields, Norris, Riley, and Van Osdel. They agreed on, a tentative program for a pre-convention conference. They then discussed various mission works that might merit endorsement. Riley and Van Osdel agreed to send information of their respective mission work locally, and the latter volunteered to investigate the work of certain cooperating churches he knew of. They were prepared to recommend the Southern convention foreign mission board, the Canadian foreign mission board, and the Grand Ligne Mission. As soon as the information should be complete they would recommend these works to anyone asking what Baptist boards to support. They further agreed to submit a summary of the confession of faith as a resolution to the Milwaukee convention, and they instructed the president to put all these decisions in a bulletin and send it to the Baptist Bible Union mailing list.

Riley reported this meeting in “The Baptist Beacon, “adding that the dates of the Bible Union meetings in Milwaukee would be May 26-27, and June 3-4. He followed this information with two paragraphs to answer Massee’s recent call to a large general prayer meeting. He held that prayer meetings were all very well, but that large ones never impressed him as being spiritually powerful, and that furthermore it appeared to him that a prayer meeting instead of a ...

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