Lynn Blue, minister of music at Poplar Springs Baptist Church near Richmond, is interested in his family’s history and shared with the Virginia Baptist Historical Society an overlooked story about one of his ancestors. Blue grew up in Richmond and…
HERITAGE: Perfect timing
Iris Ellen Wright Taylor of Waynesboro, Va., visited the Virginia Baptist Historical Society on a recent Wednesday. She came to present a second installment of papers and books related to her grandfather, James Henry Wright, who was a Baptist minister…
HERITAGE: The laughing fit
There are few calamities as destroying to a public speaker than for the speaker or the audience to be stricken with a case of the laughing fit. Herein is the report of an outbreak in Campbell County. Recently this columnist…
HERITAGE: On sailing: unfurling and taking in
The Baptist General Association of Virginia will consider its Governance Study Committee report at its annual meeting in Fredericksburg. The plan replaces a large board composed primarily of representatives of district associations to a small governing board of 15-20 persons…
HERITAGE: ‘The Column’ at 30
Thirty years ago this fall the editor and associate editor of the Religious Herald, Julian H. Pentecost and Tom Miller, respectively, invited this soon-to-be-columnist to lunch. They presented a proposition that their lunch guest begin to write a Baptist history…
HERITAGE: The secret behind the struggle
People today like to blog. They spill forth their innermost thoughts and share them on all forms of social media. In earlier times people did the same thing, only they wrote formal letters. In the 1860s one Richmond pastor wrote…
HERITAGE: Finding home
Two months ago Jonathan Cordell of Jacksonville, Fla., had never heard of Poplar Springs Baptist Church, the church of Slovakian heritage in the Richmond area. Interested in family history, he discovered the baptismal certificate of his great-grandfather, Martyn Gregor. In…
HERITAGE: Working the short row
Charles A. Moore, pastor of Warfield Baptist Church in Brunswick County of Southside Virginia, is a long-timer in pastoral ministry who admits, “Like they say in the country, I am working the short row now.” On Sept. 15, Warfield Baptist…
HERITAGE: My dear Doctor Mac
In 1979 when I began my work at the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, I discovered several large wooden packing crates, full of crumbling file folders. They were the papers of George White McDaniel, a prominent minister — pastor of First…