Helen Emery Falls personified missions. As the daughter of a pastor, she early learned the Christian message, but it was her mother who inspired her about missions. As a teenager she felt called to full-time Christian vocation. She spent the greatest part of her working life teaching missions to seminary students as well as to countless laypeople through her writings and in church programs. She visited numerous missionaries, counted them as personal friends and captured their stories to retell before congregations. She was a gifted and constant writer, especially about missions heritage.
Fred Anderson
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Virginia figured prominently in her life’s story. It was her father’s home state and she reveled in the family’s Bedford County roots. It was the place she spent her college years. In retirement, she recaptured some of those college years by living in Richmond and enjoying activities at her alma mater.
But Helen Falls’ life began far from her beloved Virginia. She was born in Bay City, Texas, on April 17, 1916. Her father, a Baptist minister, was soon called to a church in Florida, and infant Helen traveled by train from Texas to Florida in a clothes basket.
Her mother was the person most instrumental in her early missions education and she enrolled her young daughter in Sunbeams. In due time, Helen moved into the Junior and Intermediate Girls’ Auxiliary. She was receiving rudimentary missions education.
Helen’s father, O.B. Falls Sr., was one of “Hatcher’s boys,” attending Fork Union Military Academy in 1898, the year of its founding by William E. Hatcher. His native Bedford County was a nursery of Baptist ministers, including Hatcher and J.B. Jeter. Falls came out of old Mount Hermon Baptist Church, which also claimed Hatcher and Jeter. His Virginia pastorates included Immanuel Baptist Church in Richmond, Ebenezer Baptist Church at Naruna and Farnham Baptist Church.
Helen Falls
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Helen’s mother, Glennie Parker Falls, was born in Nova Scotia, graduated from Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts and served on the staff of a Baptist church in Washington, D.C. The parents married in 1910.
The Falls children excelled in education. Helen marveled at the triumph of her parents in educating five children: “My father was at the height of his ministry during the [difficult times of the] Thirties and Forties,” she stated, “yet each of the five [Falls children] graduated from college during that period. We were taught to help ourselves, but Daddy always saw that the bills were paid for our education. He often said to us, ‘There will not be much money to leave when I am gone, but I will have given you something no one can take away.’ ”
His sons, Howard and O.B. Jr., graduated from the University of Richmond. Catherine attended Harrison Teachers’ College and received a degree from the Medical College of Virginia. Margaret attended Mary Washington College and earned a master’s in education.
Helen graduated from Westhampton College of the University of Richmond in 1936. She also studied at the Woman’s Missionary Training School in Louisville Ky., where she earned a master’s degree in religious education. She earned another master’s degree and a doctorate in education from Columbia University in New York. She was the first woman awarded an honorary doctor of divinity degree from the University of Richmond. As she delighted in telling people, she was “double doctored.”
She served in various education—especially missions education—positions. After a brief period as a public school teacher, she served as young people’s secretary for the Woman’s Missionary Unions in Maryland and Kentucky.
Helen’s crowning work was as dean of women and professor of missions at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary from 1945-82. There she taught several generations of ministers, opening their eyes to a world beyond the pulpit and instilling within them an appreciation for missions. She frequently was on the staff at Ridgecrest and Glorieta, the two Southern Baptist assemblies. Both for pleasure and work, she visited some 80 countries. It is no wonder Westhampton College presented her its distinguished alumna award, recognizing a life devoted to Christian missions.
In 1982, Helen retired from the seminary and made her home at Lakewood Manor in Richmond. She became active in First Baptist Church, teaching a Sunday school class. She continued to be in demand as a public speaker and in her early 80s volunteered in the archives of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, where she transcribed the board’s minutes from original manuscript volumes. It was estimated that she worked some 2,000 hours reading aloud into a recorder 2,671 pages of official minutes.
Helen Falls credited her father for her “intense loyalty” to Southern Baptists. She frequently attended meetings with her father. The SBC world was like family in the 1940s and ’50s and Helen appreciated its culture. While she remained an SBC loyalist, she maintained relationships with persons on both sides of the denominational aisle. She kept abreast of the latest happenings in the denomination and was not timid about offering opinions. She died in Richmond on June 11 at age 96.
She appreciated Baptist history. Addressing the Strawberry Baptist Association on its bicentennial, she stated, “Though we can live and act only in the present, both the past and the future have claims on us, the past for its lessons and the future with its opportunities and obligations.”
Helen Falls understood each dimension—appreciating and understanding the past, planning for the future and engaged in all ways in the here and now.
Fred Anderson ([email protected]) is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies.