Heritage Column for May 26, 2005
By Fred Anderson
Miss Cora O'Kelley was my eighth-grade geography teacher. She was prim and proper and wore a cameo at her neck. She was soft spoken. And for a 13-year-old boy, she seemed to hold the secrets of the world.
Her classroom walls were lined with maps. She required us to assemble scrapbooks on different countries. The only magazine which came into our home was Royal Service, the WMU monthly and it contained stories of those Southern Baptist “stars,” the foreign missionaries. My scrapbook contained the missionaries' stories.
Miss O'Kelley also taught us to write the embassies for travel brochures. I remember the day that the big manila envelope arrived with colorful booklets on Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Canadian provinces.
Miss O'Kelley opened the world to me. She taught more than just latitude and longitude. She taught us to respect the cultures of other people.
Recently, I found my old yearbook and I tried to guess just how old Miss O'Kelley must have been at the time and then I added up all the years which have followed. If she is still among the living, she would have to be in her 90s. I wish that I could tell her that my scrapbooks and photo albums are bulging from trips to faraway places which she introduced to a young teen. And I wish I could tell her about what awaits this summer.
For my 25th anniversary at the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and my fifth with the Center for Baptist Heritage & Studies, I have been given a sabbatical. Numerous individual members and friends of the Society have provided a way that my wife and I can travel to faraway places. It is a munificent gift and we will treasure every moment. I also expect to fill my column space with reports from abroad.
First, we will place ourselves in the good care of the Italian Baptist Christian Union, with which Virginia Baptists are in a missions partnership. At the invitation of Anna Maffei, president, and her husband, Massimo Aprile, we will visit Rome where her office is located, and Naples, where Anna and Massimo are co-pastors. We also will visit the Baptist church in Florence, where Raffaele Volpe is pastor. Already he has extended an invitation to speak. I know only one subject-Virginia Baptist history-and fortunate it is for me that in the 1870s a Virginia Baptist missionary couple, Susan and George Boardman Taylor, pioneered Baptist work in Italy. I am preparing a message for the Italians on “Our American Cousins.” I want to share with them the heritage of Virginia Baptists which, in a sense, is part of their story through the Taylors.
We will spend several days in Chiavari on the Riviera with the Baptist pastor, Franco Scaramuccia. We are becoming acquainted via the miracle of email. He was born into a Baptist family which was “one of the first converted in Italian Baptist history.” He is a former president of the executive committee of the Italian Baptist Union. Keenly interested in history, he hopes to visit Virginia in the future and pursue research on the early history of Southern Baptist work in Italy.
We cannot leave Italy without visiting Venice, where we will be the guest of Pastor Carmine Bianchi.
We expect to tour Switzerland and Austria with a stopover to see other Baptist friends, Erika and Graham Lange of Salzburg. They are known to Virginia Baptists for “the strudel ministry.” During the partnership between Virginia and Austria, the Langes and others came to Virginia Baptist churches and made friendships through making the famous Austrian pastries. Graham is a remarkable man with a story which should be published in a book.
Already there is a house waiting for us in Oxford where this historian anticipates spending time in the library at Regent's Park College, the Baptist school. I want to examine the old church records from County Kent from which the early Baptists came to Southeastern Virginia. After the Centenary Congress of the Baptist World Alliance in Birmingham, we have reserved a week at a residential library in Wales. St. Deiniol's Library was founded by Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1889 and is filled with his collection of books on church history and theology. St. Deiniol's offers an environment where you literally can eat and sleep among the books!
One more jaunt will be a quick trip over to Amsterdam. It was to Holland in the 1600s that our English Baptist forebears escaped from persecution in England. I want to see where they found refuge.
In 1955 when Baptists from the USA headed for England for the BWA's Golden Anniversary, L.R. Elliott, librarian of Southwestern Seminary, offered a “difficult but most important” suggestion: “Be humble. Use eyes and ears more than the mouth. Remember that Americans abroad are newcomers in old civilizations rich in significant traditions. Beneath the surface of personality, they and we are the same human beings. Our ways are not necessarily better than theirs.”
I also learned those lessons in eighth-grade geography from Miss O'Kelley.
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies. He may be reached at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.