“The ripest field for Southern Baptist work in the U.S.A.”
That’s how Ray Roberts, who would become the first executive secretary of the State Convention of Baptists in Ohio, described the Buckeye state in 1952. Over the next six decades, Roberts and other Ohio Southern Baptists proved the ripeness of their field by planting hundreds of churches, establishing three other Baptist state conventions in pioneer areas, building a network of Baptist ministries and leading untold thousands to faith in Christ.
As Southern Baptists converge on Ohio this summer (June 16-17) for the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Columbus, current SCBO executive director Jack Kwok said they will find a mission field that’s riper than ever.
“We’re not the only people here preaching the Gospel, but Southern Baptists take the Great Commission seriously, that we’re to go to every people group,” Kwok told Baptist Press, noting that “well over 50 percent” of Ohio’s 11.5 million residents do not regard themselves as affiliated with any faith group.
“People are lost here, and Southern Baptists are taking the Gospel to everybody,” Kwok said.
The history of Southern Baptists in Ohio dates to the 1930s, when Baptists from the South began to migrate north across the Ohio River. Many felt “ill at ease in the Ohio churches they attended” because “worship was not as ‘warm,’ the invitations as frequent and fervent, the sermons as simple in the presentation of the Gospel as they were accustomed to back home,” historian L.H. Moore wrote in “The History of Southern Baptists in Ohio.”
So transplanted Southern Baptists began to establish churches.
In many cases, those churches cooperated with Baptist associations in Kentucky. Then in 1940, churches in Indiana and Ohio founded the White Water Baptist Association. The association engaged in aggressive church planting in Ohio, erecting buildings in towns where no Baptist church existed and then finding workers to establish missions. The association urged congregations to give 25 percent of their undesignated receipts to the Kentucky Baptist Convention for investment through the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists’ unified method of funding missions and ministries in North America and across the globe.
The number of Southern Baptists in Ohio increased through the early 1950s, but some worried that ministries funded by the SBC would violate so-called comity agreements of the late 1800s stipulating that only Northern Baptists could sponsor home missions in the Buckeye state.
In 1951, however, the SBC adopted a recommendation from its Committee on Relations with Other Religious Bodies that “the Home Mission Board and all other Southern Baptist boards and agencies be free to serve as a source of blessing to any community or any people anywhere in the United States.” Northern Baptists likewise had expanded their ministries nationwide and changed their name to the American Baptist Convention.
The SBC’s shift in home missions strategy set the stage for 39 churches to establish the SCBO in 1954 with financial support from the HMB, a precursor organization to the North American Mission Board, and the Baptist Sunday School Board, which later changed its name to LifeWay Christian Resources. The Ohio convention’s first president, John Kurtz, told BP Ohio Southern Baptists committed to “stand on the Gospel and preach the Word.”
Early Ohio Southern Baptists “just wanted to preach the Gospel as it is and preach Christ as the Savior to all who would trust Him,” Kurtz, 94, said from a retirement home in Nashville.
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SOURCE: Baptist Press
David Roach
