Leon McBeth: students everywhere.
Weaver, Doug
Michael Williams' editorial about Leon McBeth is a good
reminder of the value of Festschrifts. At minimum, they remind us that
one generation of scholars (in our case, historians) has usually been
impacted by significant mentors.
That was surely the case with our first recipient of a Festschrift
BH&H journal issue last year, Wayne Flynt, and that is surely the
case again with this issue. Dr. McBeth helped train and mentor a great
group of historians who help us all understand and remain committed to
our Baptist identity. The articles in this issue remind us not only of
Dr. McBeth's good work but also of his legacy.
Dr. McBeth, however, also had an impact on historians (and others)
beyond his own classroom. Students of Glenn Hinson, Buddy Shurden, and
Bill Leonard from the old Southern Seminary, for example, will attest to
the formative influences of their mentors. (Who could have had a better
trio/trinity of teachers than I had!?) But we were also mentored to
value the work of the colleague "down in Texas," Leon McBeth.
In fact, when many of us were starting teaching careers in the mid- to
late eighties, it was to the "big blue book" of Dr. McBeth
that we turned for the textbook in our own Baptist history courses.
McBeth was indeed the master storyteller (and legend has it that the
publisher of the "big blue book" had to cut pages because Dr.
McBeth couldn't stop telling good stories!).
Beyond the "big blue book" survey of Baptist history,
however, historians everywhere recognized that Dr. McBeth was a leader
or pioneer in other kinds of Baptist historical writing. Back in the
nineties when Buddy Shurden suggested to me that I write a local church
history because historians have far too long undervalued the story at
the local level, we could point to Dr. McBeth having written the
centennial history of First Baptist Church in Dallas way back in 1968.
Many of us remember when Dr. McBeth's history of the Baptist
Sunday School Board was censored and seemed to disappear like a banned
book in centuries past. But one book that didn't disappear-good
thing it was published in 1979--was McBeth's Women in Baptist Life.
I actually developed a lecture from the book when I first started
teaching. The stories were simply compelling, and there was no other
place that highlighted the stories of women such as Dorothy Hazzard of
seventeenth-century England.
I think it would be a mistake to say that the book was simply a
sign that Southern Baptists wouldn't accept a woman historian as
the author of such a book. We can indeed say that or something like it.
Baptists then--and in many places now--had no women professors teaching
Baptist studies in seminary. (I can recall in the late seventies/early
eighties when women were accepted into our doctoral programs--that was
considered huge progress in our attempt to enter the twentieth century.)
It might be correct to surmise that if Women in Baptist Life was written
today, Dr. McBeth might choose not to be the one to write it.
The fact that Dr. McBeth wrote the book, however, tells me
something else. Our mentors "got it." Hinson, Shurden,
Leonard, and McBeth (you can name a few others north, south, east, and
west) "got it." In this case, Dr. McBeth saw the need for the
book and that no doubt it was overdue. He saw the need to tell the
stories of Baptist women (and not just Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong,
important as they were to the story in the South) that most Baptists had
never heard anything about. And the book, with its positive references
to women's ordination, can rightly be included as a part of the
moderate movement toward promoting gender equality in all parts of
Baptist life.
In this issue we, students of his work, salute the teaching and
writing ministry of Dr. Leon McBeth, whether or not we ever sat in his
actual classroom.
Doug Weaver
Festschrift General Editor
