By Bob Allen
Quentin Lockwood, 90, a longtime administrator with the SBC Home Mission Board, died March 20. He led the agency’s rural/urban department in an era marked by expansion into new work areas that transformed the Southern Baptist Convention from a geographic to national denomination.
A graduate of Georgetown College and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lockwood was pastor of four churches before leaving a comfortable pastorate in Georgia for appointment by the Home Mission Board as first director of missions for Nebraska in 1961.
Lockwood joined the staff of the agency now named the North American Mission Board in 1968 to work in the department of pioneer missions. The job included a comprehensive study of territories in which Southern Baptist work had been started since 1940, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, Idaho and Nevada. He retired as associate director of the associational missions division in 1988.
Afterward, he moved back home to Ashland, Ky. He was interim pastor for a number of churches in the region, earning the endearing title, “Pope of the Big Sandy.” He retired a second time in 2000 and in recent years moved with his wife, Mary Alene, to an independent living facility in Chillicothe, Ohio, to be close to their daughter for health reasons.
One of his ministry challenges came in 1983, when his daughter, Susan, became pastor of Cornell Avenue Baptist Church in Chicago, a 35-member congregation thought to be the first church in the Illinois Baptist Association ever to be led by a woman.
A sister Southern Baptist congregation withdrew fellowship from Cornell and another church that had licensed a woman to the ministry, viewing them “as we would a Methodist, a Presbyterian or other non-New Testament churches.”
The congregation survived ouster from the Chicago Metropolitan Baptist Association by a vote of 210-113. The Illinois Baptist State Association seated the church’s messengers with a 509-189 vote sustaining the convention president’s ruling that a motion to bar them for “scriptural heresy” was out of order.
George Bullard, who worked with Lockwood at the HMB, said in an ABPnews blog the story was told that Bill Tanner, HMB president 1976-1986 who died in 2007, got so tired of hearing about the controversy that he remarked if he received one more letter or phone call complaining about his daughter, Lockwood would be fired.
The only conversation the two men had about it supposedly occurred when they were alone on an elevator. Tanner reportedly turned to Lockwood and said, “Quentin, I’ve heard about your daughter.” Lockwood started to respond and his boss cut him off: “Shut up, Quentin, and let me tell you something. When all else fails, you gotta support your kids.”
Susan Lockwood posted on Facebook that her father “loved my mother dearly, felt deeply about the church and his faith, cared about the poor, was a tender and caring father, read voraciously, had a keen intellect and could tell a good joke.”
“He served faithfully as a minister of the gospel from 1945 until his retirement in 1988 and re-retirement sometime in the early 2000’s,” she continued. “He touched many lives, and I will miss him terribly.”
Other survivors include his wife of 70 years, Mary Alene, and two sons. One of them, Quentin “Chip” Lockwood Jr. of Syracuse, N.Y., worked 19 years for the Baptist Convention of New York before stepping down as editor of the New York Baptist in 1995.
One of his seven grandchildren, Quentin “Skip” Lockwood III, formerly worked for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and is now president and CEO of ZERO, an educational organization that promotes early detection and research of prostate cancer.
Funeral services are scheduled for 2 p.m., Saturday, March 23, at Steen Funeral Home Central Avenue Chapel in Ashland, Ky., with visitation from noon to 2 p.m.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Lockwood’s honor to the Alzheimer’s Association, 6100 Dutchmans Lane, Suite 401, Louisville, KY 40205-3284 or the Kentucky Baptist Fellowship, P.O. Box 7098, Louisville, KY 40257.
Online condolences may be sent to www.steenfuneralhome.com.