It does not take long for the most active and involved, even high-profiled, denominational servant or church person to be largely forgotten. If illness or old age or unemployment sidetracks, the person is removed from the mainstream and quickly becomes unknown to the upcoming generation. It is a loss when newcomers never know oldtimers simply because their paths don’t cross.
About 20 years ago Elmer and Betsy West of Richmond journeyed back to his hometown of May’s Lick, Ky., accompanied by his sister and her husband. The brother and sister were then in their 70s. They visited the home church where they grew up, where their parents were so active, and found only four people who still remembered them.
Fred Anderson
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Today, Elmer and Betsy West remain well known within certain circles: the old guard of former employees of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign (now International) Mission Board where Elmer once held key administrative positions, the new vanguard of Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond graduates who look upon the Wests as founding parents of the seminary, and church friends, especially at First Baptist Church of Richmond where they are long-time members. But because they are unable to attend large Baptist gatherings, they are little known by the larger Baptist community. Both of them are good folks to know.
There was a time and not too long ago when Elmer West addressed issues on the floor of a Baptist General Association of Virginia meeting. He possesses one of those voices which must be similar to that of God, and whenever he spoke, people listened. There was a string of pastorates: Glen Allen, Ravensworth, Ginter Park and Calvary (Richmond) in Virginia and Mars Hill in North Carolina. His denominational service included director of program development for the SBC’s Christian Life (now Ethics & Religious Liberty) Commission and two stints with the Foreign Mission Board in the areas of missionary personnel and ministries. In recent decades, West has concentrated his attention upon the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, serving for awhile as a state coordinator for Virginia.
The Wests have maintained their interest in Baptist life even if they are now observing it rather than shaping it. And they both keep their finger on the pulse of all things Baptist.
Throughout their period of highest involvement, racial reconciliation and social justice were hot button items. In his Glen Allen pastorate in 1949 he invited a black professor at Virginia Union University to speak in the church on a Sunday, and he thinks the pulpit guest was the first black to preach in a “white” Baptist church in the Richmond area. A member at first objected and later, after hearing the guest, said the preacher could come back anytime.
Elmer and Betsy West
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While at Ravensworth Church in the 1960s, the Wests were active in the open housing campaign for Northern Virginia. As chairman of the BGAV’s Christian life committee, Elmer brought recommendations on opening church membership to blacks, open housing and race relations programs.
The BGAV meeting of 1964 was “stormy” during debate regarding the CLC’s report calling for positive racial relations. When the call for the question was entertained, by only two votes the question was defeated and debate continued. Elmer West was among those who spoke and he said that for Virginia Baptists to spend “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on foreign missions and fail to adopt the report was “schizophrenic.” He maintained that to reject the report with its recommendations for racial reconciliation was undermining the worldwide Baptist missions effort. The recommendations finally prevailed.
Social issues and life in general are full of changes. When Elmer came to Virginia in 1947 as pastor of Glen Allen Church, he was 24 and Betsy was 20. At the time, like other good Baptist women, she wore hats and answered the telephone with “Mrs. West speaking.” Now, there are no hats and she’s “Betsy” to everybody. Age, women’s fashion and telephone etiquette are just three things that have changed for the Wests.
Earlier this year Elmer West, at 90, voluntarily gave up driving and the couple sold their car. After nearly 30 years of giving book reviews for the community, he continues to read but keeps his reviews largely to himself. After nearly 70 years of preaching and public speaking, it is rare to catch him behind a speaker’s stand. She has stopped teaching a Sunday school class at their church.
But this does not mean that the Wests have surrendered to advanced age. Their minds are as sharp as ever and their spirits are kindled by staying close to younger members of their far-flung clan and by keeping current on happenings in the world about them. They have an abundance of wisdom and sound advice to offer based upon experience and observation. They are treasures.
They also exhibit little apprehension about the future. Over four decades ago, Elmer West wrote: “The most reassuring thought concerning the future is that God is still at work in his world. He is forever at the core of things, working in all events for good to those who respond to his saving love. This is his world. In Christ, he calls us to full manhood and womanhood, not to escape the world, but to engage the world with compassion and with hope.”
Elmer and Betsy West are still engaging the world “with compassion and with hope.”
In 2007, in a charge to the graduating class of BTSR, he said that over six decades before he had been one of them — a new seminary graduate — but he was frank: “My future was not at all clear. I wish I had heard Thomas Merton’s prayer then.” He read the prayer to them: “I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following you does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
Fred Anderson ([email protected]) is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and Center for Baptist Heritage & Studies.