0.11 3.1 sending the light: the organizing of texas baptist women  (Page 5/11)

Following the depression and isolation of wartime and the erratic restructuring of society and government that ensued, Baptists reacted to the relative stability and prosperity of the late 1870s with a transitional mixture of unification and dispersion. There was a frenzy of organizing, but it was uncoordinated and repetitious. The protection of local interests, rather than evangelical outreach, was often the goal of the "wheels within wheels" that were manufactured and set turning, yet often failed to mesh and prove effective. Carroll characterized the spirit of the times as "centrifugal" and cooperation within the denomination as spasmodic and based on individual whim or sectional bias. In his analysis, the changed conditions signaled growth, but

[s]o rapid was the growth that our people became restless and hurried. They wanted to grow faster. They became impatient with the tardiness and seeming inefficiency of all the old general organizations, and it seemed to them that the quickest remedy was to have new and more numerous organizations. Ibid., p. 515.

The two existing state cooperative bodies, the State Convention and the General Association, regrouped and tried to enlist support for their programs, but their appeals were weakened by three new groups organized to serve the needs of east, central, and north Texas. In addition, two Sunday school conventions, two ministerial conferences, a deacons' convention, two statewide women's organizations, twenty-nine district associations, and another newspaper, The Texas Baptist , published in Dallas by S. A. Hayden, were formed.

This organizing fervor, however, did not generate much revenue for state missions nor for the struggling Baptist state schools. The impetus for the two largest state conventions to rekindle their interest in missions came from the Home Mission Board of the southwide Baptist cooperative body, the Southern Baptist Convention (hereafter, abbreviated SBC), and a wing of the northern Baptist organization, the Home Mission Society of New York, both of whom proposed matching-fund arrangements with the Texas groups. By the mid-1880s the State Convention and the General Association were supporting numerous missionaries in conjunction with those bodies, although there was controversy over the involvement of a northern Baptist society in the project.

The schools did not fare as well. After President Burleson and a group of graduating seniors left Baylor in 1861 for Waco University, the jurisdiction of the male and female departments of Baylor was formally divided. The female segment, which became known as Baylor College, continued to progress slowly, although it had always been a step-sister to the male department. The male school, Baylor University, carried on for nearly twenty-five more years, but with each year the dream that it would be the great central Baptist university dimmed. The loyalties of the Texas Baptist General Association gradually formed around Waco University, while the Baptist State Convention struggled vainly to keep both Baylors solvent. Finally, it was neither rivalry nor debt that ended the Baylor/ Independence chapter of Baptist history, but the fact that the railroads and main roads bypassed the town. A cyclone that damaged several university buildings in 1882 and the death of the president, William Carey Crane, in 1885 brought that forty-year phase of that Baptist educational enterprise to a close.