by Keith Bassham
In 2007, representatives of Baptists from across the country gathered in Charleston, SC, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Philadelphia Baptist Association. Not all, but most Baptists in the United States, whether independent or associated, have roots that run through that association and its influence.
As one who was on the organizing committee for the Charleston meeting, and as a representative of the Baptist Bible Fellowship (joined by Thomas Ray, John Waldrip, and Tom and Gail Gritts), I was asked to make a presentation about Baptists and publishing. That presentation had two parts, including a short sketch of the life of Noel Smith, founder and editor of the Baptist Bible Tribune until his death in 1974. The definitive biography for Noel Smith is contained in the now out-of-print book, The Best of Noel Smith, by Mrs. Norma Gillming. A shorter version of that biography is available online in the Classics section of the Tribune website. For this article, I will be quoting extensively from Mrs. Gillming’s invaluable work. As a close personal friend of Mr. Smith, and in her teacher’s role at Baptist Bible College, she saw things up close.
In many ways, Smith was the prototype of the preacher turned editor, something I noted as a common occurrence when I studied Baptist publications. The editors tended not to be journalists turned preacher, as one might expect. They were preachers who put words on paper and transformed printing presses into pulpits. As Dickens emphasized that you had to get it nailed down that Jacob Marley was dead in the opening lines of a Christmas Carol, I maintain you have to know something of Noel Smith if you want to understand the Baptist Bible Tribune and the Baptist Bible Fellowship. It is a story I never tire of telling.
I will just briefly review some items from Mr. Smith’s early life as we have published it before. If you want more details, see Mrs. Gillming’s article on the Tribune website. Smith was born in Tennessee on August 7, 1900. He loved his native state, and he hoped to have his body laid down there. He died January 12, 1974, in Springfield, MO, but his wish for a Tennessee burial was fulfilled with his interment in Mount Olive Cemetery, Knoxville, TN.
His education was limited to what he received in the Murfreesboro Public Schools, where he attended through the eighth grade. Those who knew Smith in the classroom and in his latter years might have assumed his brilliance and pinpoint logic and the ability to weave long and complex sentences were consequential to a formal education. They were not. Rather, when he was ten, he went out to work, for times were extremely hard, and Noel’s parents were struggling to earn a living during those years.
Smith became a Christian when he was 15 in the Sunday school of the First Presbyterian Church in Murfreesboro. However, not long after the death of his mother, he left home and became a railway express agent, working out of Nashville. Those years between his leaving Murfreesboro and his establishing himself in Chattanooga were years of wandering and sin for Smith. He often wrote of those times with great regret. He says: “My mother died young, modest, retiring, and sweet. I put out on my own. The money was good. The years were bitter, and the bondage was great. How bitter the years and how great the bondage, none but God and I shall ever know.”
He worked for the Southern Express Company on the Nashville-Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway (NC&STL) between Nashville and Atlanta. In addition to the Nashville- Atlanta run, he was a messenger on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad (LN) between St. Louis and Nashville, Bowling Green, KY, and Memphis, and Clarksville, TN, and Nashville. This 15-year association accounted for his lifelong love affair with trains.
In 1918, Smith was living in Chattanooga, TN, where he was “converted.” By that expression he does not mean that he was saved, but that his life was changed, his direction was totally different — that he would never be the same again. He eloquently explains what happened:
I was converted (not saved, but converted) in November, 1918. I was converted in Billy Sunday’s tabernacle, in Chattanooga, near the post office, a few days before Mr. Sunday was 57 years old. … After Mr. Sunday had finished his prayer, I told the Lord that if He would help me to find the shore, I would preach the Gospel as long as I lived. The thought of preaching had never before entered my mind. Nobody had ever mentioned it to me. I had never mentioned it to anybody. The Lord helped me to find the shore. He brought me back to the hope and warmth and satisfaction I first knew on the steps, on that bright Sunday in March.
After his change, he began to study the Bible and to read widely in the works of I. M. Haldeman, James M. Gray, Reuben Archer Torrey, and C. I. Scofield. He also read Charles Finney, Henry Ward Beecher, Philip Brooks, T. De Witt Talmadge, Dwight L. Moody, and Sam Jones. Soon he was holding meetings all over the South. Some of those revival meetings revolutionized whole communities. Often he preached in a tent. He records: “I would go out and put up the tent myself, then go back to the room, change clothes, go back to the tent and preach — twice a day for four or five weeks.”
While living in St. Louis, Smith constantly held noon shop and factory meetings and open-air meetings sponsored by the evangelistic department of the Metropolitan Church Federation. He also was very active in the work of the Sunshine Mission of St. Louis.
In the fall of 1930, Smith resigned his job with the railroad and was ordained to the ministry by the Second Baptist Church of Clarksville, TN. Somewhere in his meetings, probably in Dixon, TN, he had met the girl who was to become his wife.
When he married Mattie Linda Stuart, it was during the depths of the Depression. He had previously baptized the young lady in May of 1932 in Dixon, TN.
We were married on a cold February night, in those lean and hard depression years. A lawyer, hard up himself, lent us his Chevrolet coupe to drive 25 miles to get married. I managed to get up $2 to give the preacher, which he seemed glad to get. I was holding meetings — at places where they could get nobody else. She was teaching school.
However, the new Mrs. Smith lost her teaching job because married women were not allowed to teach in those days. Then the family existed on only what offerings were given to the itinerant preacher.
But I was paid, mostly, with congratulations. I would get enough money to get back home, pay the rent, and put in enough groceries to do her until I could come back again. We sold everything we had. I sold my library, cashed in all my insurance. She cashed in her insurance. We sold her watch. I sold my gold belt buckle. The last thing we sold was her fountain pen. It brought $ 1.25, which with some chickenfeed in my pocket, was enough to buy a bus ticket to Waynesboro, Tennessee.
A short time later, things began to improve for the young couple. Smith’s route into the world of independent Baptists began in the 1940s and his making the acquaintance of J. Frank Norris and the World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship based in First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, TX. Smith recounts:
Following the St. Louis convention, J. Frank Norris invited me to come to Fort Worth to make an address or two at one of his Fellowship meetings. At the time some of the most hard-working successful men in the country were members of that Fellowship.
I went. As a result of my addresses, I received a number of invitations from ministers from here and there. I was able to accept some of them.
I was in Vicksburg, Miss., where I had gone for two or three addresses. While there I received a telegram from Norris asking me to succeed B.F. Dearmore at the Bible Baptist Seminary.
I didn’t want to go back to Fort Worth; I wanted to go back to Clarksville, Tennessee. But I asked myself whether I had a sufficient reason not to accept the Fort Worth work.
Right or wrong, I accepted that position at Fort Worth. Right or wrong I believed that God had opened that door for me. (Incidentally, I haven’t changed my mind.)
Smith went to Fort Worth in the winter of 1947, and he continued to teach in the seminary until May of 1947, when he resigned his position and went to Nashville. His stay in Nashville was rather short, for in July, Norris persuaded Smith to return to Fort Worth as the editor of Norris’s paper, The Fundamentalist. And thus Smith became an editor, and he served as the editor of the paper and as a teacher in the seminary until the split came in the World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship that formed the Baptist Bible Fellowship in May 1950.
The details of that controversy continue to be the subject of books and papers. In the overall scheme of things, the organizing of a hundred or so churches and pastors in the middle of the 20th century for a shot at worldwide evangelism efforts should not have been more significant than any of hundreds of other disagreements among Baptists. For Smith and his spiritual descendants, however, and I am one of those, the move was pivotal.
During the organizational meeting in May 1950, Smith rose to his feet and said, “Let’s have a Fellowship paper, and let’s call it the Baptist Bible Tribune.” And about eight weeks later, the first Tribune came off the press.
Mrs. Gillming writes, “In the days and months following the split between the groups, Norris engaged in a type of pamphlet warfare that would do credit to John Milton in the 1640s.”
The references to the problems in Fort Worth diminish with time. Even as early as July 7, 1950, Smith was assuring his readers that they would not be fed a steady diet of the internecine wars. He kept his promise, and although he criticized The Fundamentalist and J. Frank Norris on and off the next three years, the main part of the Tribune focused on the positive achievements of the Baptist Bible Fellowship.
As the years went on, Smith’s references to Fort Worth virtually ceased. He became caught up in the phenomenal growth of Baptist Bible College, the ever-increasing number of new missionaries being sent out around the world, the growth of new churches all over America, and the rising dangers of materialism in the nation. These themes were expounded in his editorials, and the problems that he once had with Norris faded from his view.
His focus changed to issues of local church autonomy, national and world politics, theology, social trends, and occasionally the offbeat and even whimsical. He reported and editorialized about the growing apostasy in the church, the weakening strength in the nation, and the rising turmoil in the world. These stories, of course, did not comprise the total picture of the Tribune. Each issue contained news of new churches in the Baptist Bible Fellowship, reviews of profitable books, new missionaries, pastoral changes, revival meetings, summer camps, news from the missionaries, lists of contributors to the Fellowship, sermon outlines, reports from Baptist Bible College, and a host of other items.
Smith and the Tribune acquired prestige and a following both inside and outside the Fellowship. By 1974, in the year of his death, circulation was 27,000. Current circulation is about the same today. A short time before his death, he reminisced in an editorial.
And preaching the Gospel during the “Hoover” depression were not easy years. Mostly, I was paid with God-bless-you’s instead of the shekels of the sanctuary. ‘Brother Smith, this has been the greatest meeting we have ever had in this place. All these precious souls saved and added to the church. Brother Smith, I wish I had $5,000 to give you as a token of appreciation for this great work.”
I would have settled for $5.
And more than 20 years on the Tribune haven’t been easy years. In addition to the work on the Tribune I have always carried a full teaching load. I do all my research, and most of what I write is pecked out on my personal typewriter. It is hard work. And the hours are long, day and night. And it’s lonely work. Most all my work, from my childhood, has been lonely work. But I have no complaints. And my work has had, and is having, its rewards. I choose to do what I am doing. And because I know it is worthwhile.
Editor Smith was succeeded, in turn, by Wendell Zimmerman (1974-1982), James Combs (1982-1995), Mike Randall (1995-2002), and myself (2002 to the present). We are all preachers, and we all shared Mr. Smith’s vision and work of producing a publication about and for the Fellowship. Computers have replaced typewriters, and the yellowing newsprint has given way to glossy color pages, but each issue of the Tribune is published with the hope that the men and women associated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship will be helped and strengthened by contact with the publication. We have known the work, and the rewards. And we have chosen to do what we do because we know it is worthwhile.