The Baptist History & Heritage Society: 1938-2013.

Gourley, Bruce T.

This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Baptist History & Heritage Society, a milestone in the life of a dynamic and evolving organization.

Organized in Richmond, Virginia and chartered in Kentucky in 1938, the Southern Baptist Historical Society (SBHS) elected three initial officers: president W. O. Carver, head of the Department of Comparative Religion and Missions at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; vice-president Rufus W. Weaver, executive director of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention (and instrumental in forming the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs); and secretary-treasurer Hubert I. Hester, head of the Department of Religion at William Jewell College (Hester remained secretary for thirty-eight years--until 1976).

As Carol Crawford Holcomb summarized in her essay, "The History of Southern Baptist History, 1938-1995" (Baptist History & Heritage, vol. 34 no. 3, Summer-Fall 1999), the society, housed in Louisville, had "virtually no funding, no staff, and with very little interest from the denomination at large." With meager resources, the society set out to assemble, make accessible, and generate public interest in Baptist historical materials. Steadily, the work of the society advanced.

A transitional period in the history of the SBHS occurred from 1947 to 1951, as the society operated as an official agency of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) under a new Kentucky charter. In 1951 office space was created at the Baptist Sunday School Board in Nashville for the society, but a disconnect between the society's charter and the SBC constitution and bylaws led the SBC to create a new entity, the Historical Commission, to which the work of the society was transferred. In response, the SBHS was reorganized as an auxiliary of the commission, and its responsibilities downsized to publishing (the founding of the Baptist History & Heritage took place in 1965, in conjunction with the Historical Commission) and holding an annual meeting.

The next major change in the life of the SBHS took place in the mid-1990s. Following the SBC's decision in 1995 to eliminate the Historical Commission, the society voted to become an independent Baptist history organization. At this time Slayden Yarbrough, church history professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, was serving as executive director of the society. During his tenure the Historical Commission was dissolved and its assets split between the SBHS and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives.

In addition to handing much of the commission's published materials to the society, commission trustees in 1997 transferred desktop publishing equipment, a set of office furniture, and various office equipment and supplies to the society, along with $1,500 to assist in the moving of the equipment to the organization's new home at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee. Yarbrough later recalled:

   I moved the inventory and equipment to Shawnee, Oklahoma, in a
   U-Haul truck pulling an added trailer. With this move, the Southern
   Baptist Convention no longer had an official agency to promote,
   communicate, and interpret Baptist history. What would be available
   to the churches and interested Baptists and their organizations
   would be provided by the SBHS, which was again an independent,
   voluntary organization committed to the cause of Baptist history.
   The "society" methodology had returned to Southern Baptist life
   again in the area of Baptist history. (1)

Yet another transition took place in 1999 when the society was moved to the Baptist Center of the Tennessee Baptist Convention and Charles Deweese was elected as the society's first full-time executive director. One year later the Fellowship of Baptist Historians was created as an auxiliary to the society and has since held an annual meeting in connection with the society's meeting. In 2001 the SBHS underwent a major transition by changing its name to Baptist History & Heritage Society, signaling the broadening of its work beyond the confines of Southern Baptist life. And in 2007 the offices of the society were again moved, this time to Mercer University's campus in Atlanta.

During the decade of the 2000s, the society produced a number of print publications and embraced the world of digital and online publishing. After Charles Deweese's retirement in 2009, the following year Bruce Gourley became the society's new executive director. Finally, reflecting the reality of the digital age, in 2011 the society's offices transitioned yet again, establishing presences in both Macon, Georgia and Bozeman, Montana, where they remain at the present.

From World War II to the second decade of the twenty-first century, the society has evolved with changes in Baptist life and the world at large. The Internet has revolutionized the world in as radical a fashion as did the Gutenberg printing press (of which the only exact replica, by the way, is housed in Bozeman's American Computer and Robotics Museum) of the fifteenth century. Riding the wave of this unfolding new age of communication is the Baptist History & Heritage Society.

Seventy-five years and counting, the evolution of the BH&HS continues.

Bruce T. Gourley

Executive-Director

(1) Slayden Yarbrough, "The History of Southern Baptist History: Restructuring and the New SBHS," Baptist History & Heritage, 34 (Summer-Fall 1999): 113.