Tag Archives: Missionaries
Christians at War: Retrospect and Prospect
It’s been a busy fall, too busy to permit for much Bethel at War blogging past sharing my reminiscences of 9/11/01 on 9/11/14. But as the Bethel of 2014 settles down for a few weeks, I’m ready to get back to the Bethel of 1917-18 and 1941-45. (Fletcher, meanwhile, is spending the term in Oxford. If he spends more […]
Letters To (and From) Bethel: Chaplains as “Spiritual Pillars”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the letters sent back to Bethel during World War II by former students and members of its denomination who were serving in the military, it’s this: complaining about one’s pastor is as common in war as in peace. I did attend both Protestant chapel services, and my first impression was […]
Christian Service Brigade
I’ve noted in a previous post how the Baptist General Conference retreated from debating the Vietnam War in 1968, a quiescence which would persist to the end. Part of that retreat included what I termed an “invasion of the domestic.” Here’s how I described that shift as it related to the chaplaincy: Whereas in previous years […]
A College’s Denomination: The BGC and the Vietnam War, 1970-1975 (Conclusion)
This is the last of a five part series on the Baptist General Conference during the Vietnam War era. You may find it helpful to begin reading from the beginning. ❧ Writing this post feels a bit like an unnecessary repetition. The themes covered in the previous installment continue, unaltered in content and purpose: the military […]
Tweeting a Visit to the Archives
As our #bethelatwar work continues, I'm up in the archives of @BethelU and @convergeww. http://t.co/fBvIpykQQo — Chris Gehrz (@cgehrz) August 5, 2014 As the summer continues, I’ve become increasingly interested in integrating social media into our digital history project, as a way of breaking down some of the barriers traditionally separating scholar and audience. Not just to share […]
A College’s Denomination: The BGC and the Vietnam War, 1968-1969 (Part 4)
This is part four of a five part series. If you haven’t yet done so, you may find it helpful to read parts one, two, and three of this series for context. Today, we’ll look at the years 1968-69 in the Baptist General Conference. Those two years saw sustained, often violent protest in America’s campuses and cities – and […]
The “Spanish Flu”
One of the more curious sections of Windows of Memory, the 1961 memoir by Henry Wingblade (Bethel president from 1941-1954, after having taught at the Academy and Junior College for many years), is his chapter on Bethel and world missions (no. 25). Instead of simply telling the stories of five Bethel alumni who entered the missions field, […]
Signe Erickson: A Bethel Martyr
One day after their attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces began their invasion of the Philippines. In December 1941 that commonwealth hosted twenty-one American Baptist missionaries, mostly working in hospitals and schools on the island of Panay. By April 1942, with American and Filipino defenses collapsing, only eleven of those missionaries remained at liberty. With the help of a […]
Where Did Early 20th Century Bethel Students Come From?
Next week I’ll have lots more to say about how the people of Bethel and other Swedish-Americans experienced World War I, in light of the “100 percent American” nativism of that time. But while I was working on those posts, it occurred me that I could pretty easily visualize just how much of an immigrant […]
Bethel at War 1914 - 2014 