by Keith Bassham
A few days after the Egyptian protests, a friend asked me about a Noel Smith essay, “The Shaking of the Nations.” I remembered it just a little, and after checking the archives, I found it. The essay was a version of a sermon preached by Tribune Editor Noel Smith during the 1956 Thanksgiving National Mission conference held that year in Tyler, TX.
In those days, the missionary program of the Baptist Bible Fellowship received a large offering at the Thanksgiving meeting, a tradition held over from the World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship. The 1956 meeting had a couple of twists, however. While the rest of the nation would celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November (as designated by law in 1941) the governor of Texas proclaimed the last Thursday of the month the date for “Texas Thanksgiving.” The Texas legislature changed the state observance to coincide with the national observance the next year.
The Thanksgiving meeting was separate from the Fellowship’s fall business meeting, held two months previously in Akron, OH. There, David A. Cavin was reelected as BBF president, and more than $34,000 was raised for Baptist Bible College, then in its sixth year.
Meanwhile, the modern state of Israel was less than a decade old, relatively new national boundaries had replaced older traditional tribal-based geographies in that part of the world, and millions of barrels of Middle East oil were flowing toward the West. One year earlier, Britain, France, and Israel had all declared war on Egypt after that country nationalized the Suez Canal. And though the war was brief, it was a glimpse of things to come. Today again, our eyes have turned toward Egypt.
This was the background for Smith’s message, “The Shaking of the Nations,” of which we offer a portion on page 30. Editor Smith spoke to the Fellowship mission conference, not about missions per se, but about an alternative glimpse of things to come. And while all such messages, dealing as they do with interpretive details of not-yet-seen events, will have room for later correction and restatement, Smith’s larger building blocks are sound. God, not man, is in control of this world’s destiny. God, not man, knows what is best for His creation. God, not man, will have the last word. And before that last word is spoken, the nations will be shaken.
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I am writing this column just days before I travel to the Philippines for a historic meeting of the Baptist Bible Fellowship International, and in this case the emphasis is on that last word, International. In the next issue of the Tribune, we will carry a full report and photographic essay of that meeting. In that report you will see what the founders of the Baptist Bible Fellowship could only imagine — nations once the recipients of missionaries who are now the homes of fully functioning and mature missionary senders. Perhaps this is also a type of Shaking of the Nations.