Sunday, April 9, 2006
We are fast losing the giants.
Yesterday I received my copy of the newsletter of Texas Baptists Committed and learned of the deaths of two of the giants in the struggle to preserve religious liberty and uphold the separation of church and state. Earth has lost two men whose name were household names all my life, two of the men (to use someone else’s metaphor) who belong on the Mount Rushmore of Baptist heros of the twentieth century: Phil Strickland and Foy Valentine.
I sincerely doubt that anyone reading my blog regularly (if there are any of you out there, be sure to let me know!) will recognize either of those names. Southern Baptists are not common heros to most people I know. But these two men, plus a few others, including in particular James Dunn, their close colleague, and Bill Estep, who passed on in 2000, are the reason I remain proud of my strong Baptist heritage. They are examples of the reason so many Cherokee, of those who became Christians, became Baptist Christians, not Methodist or Presbyterian or anything else. Read the rest of this entry »