LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) — A pioneer in the Baptist peacemaking movement died July 11 while visiting his daughter and granddaughters in Asheville, N.C., ending a long battle with cancer.
Robert Broome, 66, of Louisville, Ky., is credited with coming up with the idea for a journal on peace issues written from a Baptist perspective. The Baptist Peacemaker is now in its 29th year and published by the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.
Glenn Hinson, first editor of the Baptist Peacemaker, remembered Broome as "a gentle, peaceable soul who tried to live consistently a peace witness."
"I've always thought of him as a Quaker bearing witness in a Baptist world," said Hinson, senior professor of church history and spirituality at Baptist Seminary of Kentucky.
Robert Broome
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An upholsterer by trade for more than 35 years, Broome became interested in peacemaking efforts of the Society of Friends while working at a Quaker high school in Tennessee during the late 1970s.
He was a member of Deer Park Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., when that congregation was host for a landmark peace convocation in 1979. In a subsequent meeting of leaders talking about next steps, Broome suggested launching a publication patterned after Seeds, a magazine on hunger issues published by Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga.
According to a Baptist Peacemaker account of the event written in 1990, the idea met with skepticism. Carman Sharp, Deer Park's pastor at the time, who died in 2005, recalled it as a "rather disturbing idea."
Glen Stassen, an ethics professor and longtime Baptist peace activist, said he didn't encourage the idea, because he didn't think "it would fly."
"Some thought the Wright brothers couldn't fly either," Stassen, now a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, said of his initial skepticism.
Using surplus funds from the peace conference, the group hired a printer, compiled a mailing list of about 6,000 and published the first issue in December 1980. Soon letters and donations began coming in, and Deer Park Baptist Church provided the newspaper an office.
Stassen said there was already an American Baptist peace fellowship in 1980, but it did not have a publication. In 1984 the two groups met and decided to merge, creating the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, an organization of Baptist churches in the United States and Canada. The Peacemaker staff turned the journal over to the BPFNA in 1989.
Born in Oakway, S.C., Broome received a bachelor's degree from William Carey College in Hattiesburg, Miss., and a master's degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He was ordained to the ministry by Antioch Baptist Church in Sevierville, Tenn., where a memorial service for him is scheduled at 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 18.
Broome is survived by his wife of 44 years, Rosanne Broome; daughters Lisa Broome-Weathers, of Lexington, Ky., and Heather Kabat of Asheville; two sons-in-law, four grandchildren and seven siblings.
The family requests that in lieu of flowers donations of time or money be given to the peace organization of the donor's choice.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.