Word: baptiste
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Louie De Votie Newton, 54, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, a native, resident and leader in the South, might be expected to be somewhat anti-Soviet. But last week when he came home to Atlanta from a whirlwind trip through the U.S.S.R. he was brimming with enthusiasm for what he had seen and been told. In 25 short days, the Russians had made Dr. Louie Newton a booster...
...went to Russia at Government invitation to investigate the status of its 2,000,000 Baptists. For the visit the Russians rolled out the Red carpet. The visitor had two nice visits with onetime seminarian Joseph Stalin, to whom he gave a leather-bound copy of the New Testament and two pipes. He also got permission to preach hellfire-&-damnation sermons in churches in nine cities, from Moscow to Stalingrad. Before he was through, his hosts had even persuaded the alcohol-hating Baptist to try a sip of vodka. (His judgment: "It tasted like kerosene mixed with stump water...
...Overwhelming." During his stay, Baptist Newton said, he preached to "throngs of workers-Red Army men, professors, scholars." * Said he: "The reception to my sermons was overwhelming. I never saw anything like it before. Why, at the end of one of my sermons in Moscow, an Army captain in full uniform came to the pulpit and read a poem which he had dedicated to me. . . . The congregation cheered him. It was most impressive...
Against this backdrop, the status of the Russian Baptists looked fine to the visitor from Atlanta. Baptist missionaries had struggled hard since the 18th Century to break the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church, finally succeeded in getting a real foothold only 40 years ago. Their biggest boost came during the revolution, when the Reds used them to undermine Orthodoxy...
...Baptist chance lies ahead, says Dr. Newton, because there are many Russian young people to whom "the Baptist sense of freedom appeals." Already, he says, their churches are open seven days a week, carrying on highly active programs of religious instruction, culture and recreation...