About W.A Criswell

Wallie Amos Criswell (December 19, 1909 – January 10, 2002), was an American pastor, author, and a two-term elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1970. As senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas for five decades he became widely known for expository biblical preaching at a popular level, and is regarded as a key figure in the late 1970s "Conservative Resurgence" within the Southern Baptist Convention.

Criswell was born in Eldorado in Jackson County in southwestern Oklahoma to Wallie Amos and Anna Currie Criswell. It was not uncommon at the time for boys to be named with initials, and he was simply called "W. A.". In later years when a full name was required for his passport Criswell supplied his father's first and middle names. Criswell grew up in Texline in Dallam County, the most northwesterly community in the Texas Panhandle, where his cowboy-barber father moved the family in 1915.

At age ten, young W. A. professed faith in Christ at a revival meeting led by the evangelist Reverend John Hicks. Two years later Criswell publicly committed his life to the gospel ministry. Criswell was licensed to preach at the age of seventeen and soon thereafter held part-time pastorates at Devil's Bend and Pulltight, Texas.[3] While attending Baylor University in Waco, Texas, from 1928 to 1931 he ministered in Marlow, White Mound, and Pecan Grove, the latter in Fort Bend County, Texas. During his graduate and post-graduate years, including a Ph.D. at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Criswell was the pastor of Baptist churches in Mount Washington in Bullitt County near Louisville and Oakland in Warren County near Bowling Green, Kentucky. After completing his degrees, Criswell in 1937 accepted the pastorate of the First Baptist Church of Chickasha in Grady County in central Oklahoma. In 1941, he moved to First Baptist Church of Muskogee in eastern Oklahoma. In 1935, Criswell married the former Bessie Marie "Betty" Harris (1913-2006), the pianist of the Mount Washington church and an education graduate of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. Their daughter Mabel Ann was born in Chickasha in 1939. Mabel Ann possessed an exceptional operatic voice and recorded three albums of sacred music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two with the Ralph Carmichael orchestra. She died in 2002, some six months after her father's passing