Robert T. Ketcham - General Association of Regular Baptist Churches

General Association of Regular Baptist Churches

Although Ketcham did not attend the first meeting of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARBC) in 1932, he was elected vice-president in 1933 and president in 1934. Ketcham successfully campaigned for a looser fellowship of churches rather than a reestablishment of the boards and agencies of the Northern Baptist Convention. He also successfully insisted that membership in the GARBC be open only to churches who first severed their ties with the Convention.

By this time Ketcham had assumed the pastorate of the Central Baptist Church of Gary, Indiana, and in 1934 he pulled the church out of the Northern Baptist Convention by emphasizing its ties to both religious and political liberalism.

Ketcham served as president of the GARBC from 1934 to 1938 and then restructured the organization to place control in a Council of 14. Nevertheless, "for the next 30 years, he shaped the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches." He served as national representative of the association from 1946 to 1960, and he edited the denominational organ, The Baptist Bulletin (1938–1945, 1946–1955) while pastoring the Walnut Street Baptist Church of Waterloo, Iowa, the largest Baptist Church in the state. In 1944, Ketcham was elected president of the fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches, which he believed might be an effective counter to the Federal Council of Churches of Christ (later the National Council of Churches), which claimed to speak for all of Protestant Christianity in the United States.

During the 1930s and '40s, Ketcham was dogged by repeated attacks from J. Frank Norris, an influential fundamentalist from Texas with a reputation for making vicious personal assaults. Norris was miffed that he had not been allowed to join the GARBC, which Ketcham and other leaders thought he might try to manipulate for the benefit of his own programs and eccentric personality. In the pages of his Fundamentalist, Norris even attacked Ketcham's daughter, Lois Moffat, for having left the mission field, although she had arrived in the United States near death and remained hospitalized and gravely ill for months. Eventually Ketcham's Waterloo church offered to put all its resources at his disposal so that he could sue Norris for libel and slander. Ketcham replied, "I cannot take a man into court whom I have been taking to the court of high Heaven now for several years."

Read more about this topic:  Robert T. Ketcham

Famous quotes containing the words general, association, regular, baptist and/or churches:

    Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
    Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)

    They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.
    Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

    While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

    I am perhaps being a bit facetious but if some of my good Baptist brethren in Georgia had done a little preaching from the pulpit against the K.K.K. in the ‘20s, I would have a little more genuine American respect for their Christianity!
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
    My woods the young fir balsams like a place
    Where houses all are churches and have spires.
    I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas trees.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)