W. A. Criswell

Wallie Amos Criswell (December 19, 1909 – January 10, 2002), was an American pastor, author, and a two-term elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1970.

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.

In 1935, Criswell married the former Bessie Marie "Betty" Harris (1913–2006), the pianist of the Mount Washington church and an education graduate of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

After completing his degrees, Criswell in 1937 accepted the pastorate of the First Baptist Church of Chickasha in Grady County in central Oklahoma.

Their daughter Mabel Ann was born in Chickasha in 1939.

In 1941, he moved to First Baptist Church of Muskogee in eastern Oklahoma.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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 (in later editions the Believers Study Bible and Holy Bible, Baptist Study Edition, Thomas Nelson Publishers), and founded both Criswell College with its radio station KCBI, and First Baptist Academy.

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.

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.

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.

Gregory subsequently wrote Too Great a Temptation (Summit Group, 1994) describing his experiences during this period.

She died in 2002, some six months after her father's passing.

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.