The Birth of the Baptist Bible Union
I. The Birth of the Baptist Bible Union
A. For a year Fundamentalists had been endeavoring to create an effective organization of their forces.
1. Finally, in a huge tent rented from a lay Fundamentalist Bible teacher, Walter L. Wilson, MD., an estimated thirty-five hundred to five thousand people assembled in Kansas City, Missouri, May 10-15, 1923, to complete the organization of the Baptist Bible Union (BBU).
2.the new BBU elected Thomas Todhunter Shields (1873-1955), pastor of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto, Ontario, as its president. a)He would soon be traveling as much as forty thousand miles a year for the BBU, often arriving in Toronto by Pullman on Sunday morning just in time to go directly to his pulpit for the services. b)To the offices of vice president, North and South, the BBU elected William Bell Riley (1861-1947) of First Baptist in Minneapolis and J. Frank Norris (1877-1952) of First Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas. c)The BBU originated with the conviction that the Fundamentalist Fellowship was directly cooperating with some of the very evils against which it protested. d)The Fellowship did not experience a revival until it finally separated from the denomination.
3. At the BBU’s inception, great interest centered on the question of whether belief in premillennialism should be a test of membership. They finally altered their confession of faith so as to remove all ambiguity on this point, adopting the following resolution: Inasmuch as it has been widely stated that fellowship in the Baptist Bible Union is restricted to premillenarians; therefore be it Resolved, that we here declare that the Baptist Bible Union welcomes to its membership all Baptists who sign its confession of faith, whatever variation of interpretation they may hold on the millennial question, consistent with belief in the personal, bodily second coming of Christ, according to the Scriptures
B. The resemblance between the Union and the Fellowship was that each refused to practice a strictly separatist position.
C. The similarity between the two groups is that each ultimately became the matrix of a separatist organization, the Fellowship finally becoming the present-day Fundamental Baptist Fellowship and the Union finally giving birth to the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches.
D. However, in three important ways, the Baptist Bible Union contrasted sharply with the Fundamentalist Fellowship.
1. First, while the Fellowship included only Northern Baptists (with occasional guest speakers from other groups), the Union included Northern, Southern, and Canadian Baptists.
2. Secondly, the Union had an official, recorded membership; the Fellowship did not. (Most of the Union membership consisted of individuals, not churches.)
3. Thirdly, the Union was far more militant than the Fellowship. The Union’s confession of faith, for instance, rings a clarion note of conviction that the original Scripture manuscripts were "free from error."
E.members of the BBU executive committee 1.the big three-Shields, Riley, and Norris-other included 2.Oliver W. Van Osdel (1846-1935) of the Wealthy Street Baptist Church in Grand Rapids;
3. Amzi C. Dixon (1854-1925), pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London and editor of the early volumes of The Fundamentals;
4. Robert E. Neighbor (1872-1945) of the First Baptist Church in Elyria, Ohio;
5. and William L. Pettingill (1866-1950), dean of the Philadelphia School of the Bible and a consulting editor of the Scofield Reference Bible.
F. The leader of the BBU’s governing body was John Roach Straton (1875-1929).
1. The Baptist Bible Union grew to some thirty thousand members by 1925 and peaked about 1926 with some fifty thousand.
2. In an era of great pulpit oratory, the BBU provided some distinguished preaching.
3. It found a publishing outlet in the Union Gospel Press in Cleveland, Ohio, which also published Sunday school literature for many early fundamental churches.
4. The fall of the BBU came fairly rapidly as a result of two distressing incidents that will be recounted later (the shooting of D. E. Chipps by Norris in 1926 and the Des Moines University fiasco under Shields), but for a few years it showed impressive strength, and it laid the foundation for a more durable Baptist Fundamentalism.