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."