By Bob Allen
Justice Anderson, who often introduced himself as a “sometime Baptist pastor, a longtime Baptist foreign missionary and an even longer-time professor of missiology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas,” died Dec. 29 of a heart attack. He was 83.
Anderson and his wife, Mary Ann, were Southern Baptist missionaries to Argentina from 1959 until 1974, where he served as professor of church history and homiletics at the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Buenos Aires.
He then joined the faculty of Southwestern Seminary and founded the seminary’s World Missions Center in 1980 to train future missionaries and engage students and faculty in mission trips. After retirement, he taught at Dallas Baptist University, B.H. Carroll Theological Institute and George W. Truett Theological Seminary.
Anderson was a member of Agape Baptist Church in Fort Worth, a congregation started in 2005 that is affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Baptist General Convention of Texas and Baptist World Alliance.
In 1990, he published his three-volume magnum opus in Spanish, Historia de los Bautistas. On retirement in 1998, he resolved to write a history of evangelicals and Baptists in Latin America that he felt had been neglected by former works in English. The result was An Evangelical Saga: Baptists and their Precursors in Latin America, a 637-page tome published in 2005.
Known to family and friends around the world as “Uncle Justo,” Anderson is survived by his wife of 63 years and four children: Sandi Phillips and husband, Thomas; Timothy Anderson and wife, Aurora Pulido; Brad Anderson and wife, Ann; and Suzie Person and husband, Kirk. Other survivors include 11 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and a brother, Gene Anderson.
Gifts in Anderson’s memory may be given to CBF Global Missions, 2930 Flowers Road South, Suite 133, Atlanta, Ga., 30341; or Agape Baptist Church, 3954 Southwest Blvd., Fort Worth, Texas, 76116.