(RNS) — Morris Chapman, a longtime leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, died Monday. He was 84.
“In a world where so many have fallen, he was faithful to the end,” current SBC President Clint Pressley posted on social media in tribute to Chapman. “Southern Baptists like me owe men like him a debt of gratitude. Praying the Lord is close to his family and especially his widow Jodi in the days ahead.”
Chapman led the Nashville-based Executive Committee from 1992 to 2010, during a time when conservatives solidified their control of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Before that, Chapman served two years as SBC president during the tail-end of a long battle between conservative and moderate Southern Baptists.
James Merritt, another former SBC president, said Chapman helped the denomination get back on track after the end of that battle by focusing on the Cooperative Program, the SBC’s long-running program for funding missions and national ministries.
He referred to Chapman as a “Christian gentleman” who was devoted to the SBC.
“Morris came out at a very strategic time,” said Merritt. “Healing needed to take place. He struck a good chord, trying to bring people together.”
When he was elected in 1992, Morris said that he saw his role as rallying Southern Baptists together.
“I see myself as carrying out the will of the majority and carrying out genuine healing among Southern Baptists,” Chapman said after his election was announced during a February 1992 meeting of the Executive Committee, according to the archives of Baptist Press, a denominational publication.
As president of the SBC, he also emphasized the need for the SBC to focus on evangelism and prayer and called the church around the country to pray while he was SBC president.
“The desperate need for spiritual awakening in this nation has been ever present in my thoughts,” he said at the time.
A lifetime Southern Baptist, Chapman grew up in Kosciusko, Mississippi, then graduated from Mississippi College and attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He went on to serve as pastor of churches in Texas and New Mexico. Before being elected to the Executive Committee, he was pastor of First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, Texas.
In 1984, while at the church in Wichita Falls, he asked members of his congregation to pray for each of the denomination’s more than 30,000 churches, part of his commitment to denominational life.
