By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor
SHREVEPORT, La. (LBM) – When most mention the name Monroe Elmon (M.E.) Dodd, it likely is in context of his leading the development of the Cooperative Program, the primary funding channel for the cooperative missions and ministries of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Some might recall also that he:
— served two terms as SBC president;
— founded the SBC Pastors’ Conference;
— led the historic First Baptist Church in Shreveport, Louisiana, to become the first church in the world to own and operate a radio station;
— chaired the important Convention Lessons Committee (which was formed seven years earlier to ensure Baptist doctrinal purity of graded Sunday school lessons produced for use of all denominations by the International Sunday School Association); and
— drove the establishment of the Baptist Bible Institute, later named the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
But lost in the discussions about his impact on Southern Baptist life is the fact that Dodd was a committed soul winner.
To be sure, Dodd’s contribution to the development of the Cooperative Program is no small thing. Since 1925, the first year of the stabilized system of funding for the joint missions and ministries of Southern Baptists, contributions have grown from $4.1 million for state and national causes to more than $450 million at the end of 2022. Meanwhile, cumulative CP contributions during the 97-year life of this unique resourcing system have exceeded $20.5 billion.
But it would not be presumptive to suggest that even Dodd would agree that the success of the Cooperative Program only has value for the ways it has helped make known “Jesus Christ, and Him crucified,” the focus of Dodd’s first sermon in 1900.
GOSPEL DRIVEN
Dodd became a Christian at the age of 14, according to Louisiana Pastor Austin B. Tucker, who wrote an extensive history about Dodd, “The Life and Legacy of M.E. Dodd (1878-1952): Louisiana Baptist Leader.”
At the age of 20, Tucker noted, Dodd volunteered to fight in the Spanish-American War, finding the army camp “a splendid place to study the Bible” and “to sow seeds of the Gospel.”
Coming to Louisiana in 1912, Dodd preached a revival during his first month with the First Baptist Church of Shreveport, adding 98 members to the congregation which previously numbered 600. Tucker also noted that Dodd made 1,500 visits during his first year (walking 1,000 miles for some and using street cars for others). As a result, the church bought a car for him, and his visits doubled the next year.
During WWI, Dodd volunteered to be a U.S. Army chaplain, but was detoured to serve as a camp religious worker with the YMCA at Camp Beauregard in Pineville, Louisiana. After six months he was sent overseas. On the trip over he officiated several burials at sea, according to Mike Miller in “A History of Louisiana” (by Henry E. Chambers). In Paris, he was assigned to YMCA work at the front, ministering to soldiers in the field as well as in hospitals. After peace was declared, he went on a speaking tour to all the overseas camps.
Tucker reported that Dodd witnessed “more than 5,000 professions of faith and recorded 500 volunteers for Christian service in that year” during his year of service at home and abroad.
The state records for baptisms are incomplete for 1912-1926, but from 1927 until his retirement in 1950, his congregation led the Louisiana Baptist Convention in baptisms six times (including one tie) and was second or third another five times. Meanwhile, Dodd conducted hundreds of revivals that resulted in baptisms by other congregations in the state, across the nation and around the world.
In 1924, alone, Dodd preached 127 sermons in 32 cities of 11 states before a combined audience of 150,000, Miller documented.
Dodd also was credited by Tucker for launching among Southern Baptists the five-month south-wide simultaneous revival crusade of 1923.
PASSION FOR THE LOST
Tucker summed up Dodd’s ministry by noting the 18,000 sermons he had preached (an average of one per day for 50 years), the 2,118 marriages he had officiated and the 500,000 miles he had traveled. But what really stands out among the records of Dodd’s ministry is that “he had baptized 7,000 converts.”
In 1919 Dodd delivered the Convention sermon in Atlanta, a mere six months after the end of World War I, which had wrought unprecedented carnage on the battlefields which often encompassed small towns and great cities. Moreover, there were numbers of issues that gripped the world in the aftermath, especially the Southern Baptist community of faith.
Funds were needed to retire debt and to stabilize resources to meet the growing needs of Southern Baptists’ cooperative state and national ministries. Moreover, 1919 was the year Dodd was charged with finding a way to extend the previous $75 Million Campaign — and led to the launch of the Cooperative Program.
But key to Dodd’s message, the framing thought he shared, was not about how to retire debt or build resources, but to reach the lost.
“We have arrived at the moment in our history for which our forefathers toiled and sacrificed and prayed; for which they suffered and bled and died. The Baptist hour of all the centuries has sounded. To waver now would be traitorous; to give up here would be a crime against all the martyred blood of the heroes of the past. …
“We have seen in the tragic and trying times through which we have just passed the utter failure of imperialism; we have seen the total collapse of militarism; and we have seen furthermore the absolute failure of mere intellectualism, divested of the Christian redemptive principles, in its efforts to bear humanity onward to its highest hopes. …
“The New Testament democratic ideas prevail, in part at least, and personal and political freedom is the heritage of the world. But unless democracy has as her handmaiden a spiritual religion which demands first of all personal regeneration of each individual, it is a question whether the political victory will be a blessing or a curse. …
“There will never be a perfectly successful democracy until each democrat is an aristocrat, born from above with royal blood from heaven’s highest in his heart. At exactly this point is the imperativeness of the Baptist message for this day, “Ye must be born again.”
M.E. Dodd was a statesman, a visionary and an accomplished preacher who was gifted in his presentation of the Word. Moreover, he worked tirelessly for the Baptist cause. But most of all he was a faithful disciple who reflected the character of the Master who came “to seek and save that which is lost.”
