nineteen hundred and forty-six - Amazon Web Services

PROCEEDINGS 149
any such tribute would glow with the light of her interest not only in them but
in their and her neighbors, their communities and hers, their churches and
hers. If this tribute were being paid by her state it would recount with justifiable
pride that she was a capable teacher in her county before marriage, that
she belonged worthily to benevolent and patriotic organizations, that in addition
to her intelligent leadership among the women and young people in her own
church she was gratefully recognized as a promoter of W.M.U. work in her
association. The unfolding story would stirringly tell how she became the
state college correspondent in the promotion of College Young Woman's Auxiliaries,
then president of the state Woman's Missionary Union, a member of the-
Executive Board of the Missouri Baptist Convention and then a member of
the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.
For at least twenty-two of those eventful years I knew Mrs. Armstrong and
increasingly I marveled at her ability, her devotion to an accepted responsibility,
her loyalty to the denomination, her vision of the possibilities of God's
use of Woman's Missionary Union, her consecration to Christ as her personal
Savior. Always shall I want to remember that the first • and the last times
that I saw her she was definitely active: in 1923 at the annual meeting of
Woman's Missionary Union she was the attractive advocate for increased interest
in College Y.W.A.'s; at the April 1945 meeting of the W.M.U. Executive Committee
she was the promoter of W.M.U. personalized interest in behalf of
suffering Baptists in Italy. All in between these vivid memory-pictures of our
great leader I can also see her in conferences whose countless details were
stimuli to more intense thinking by her; I can see her in state and southwide
and international meetings where she spoke or presided with edification to the
many; I can see her in the building project of the W.M.U. Training School
when many of us could not see the victory until it was actually achieved; I can
see her in the handling of other projects and problems that were decidedly
simplified because of her legal mind; I can see her in her regular and occasional
writing of articles for W.M.U. and other Baptist publications; I can see her in
her welcome to Baptist visitors from other lands; I can see her in her sympathetic
reactions when on tours to mission fields and in her consistent concern
for the promotion of the Baptist World Alliance. Truly, the closer one got to
Mrs. Armstrong the more one marveled at her many interests, each vital to
her, each kept in its own setting and yet correlated with her evident purpose
to serve as much and as widely as possible the missionary program of the Christ.
From 1927-1945 she had a privilege such as no other woman for so many
years has had, in that for those eighteen consecutive years she was a member
of the very responsible Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The fact that this session of the Convention is memorializing her, a tribute
unique in Southern Baptist history, is gratefully considered a proof of the
Convention's and its committee's recognition of her long and worthy service.
Any historian of the Convention's committee will surely reveal that she recognized
the fact that her membership on that committee was not due to the fact
that for the first six years she was president of the Missouri Woman's Missionary
Union and for the last twelve years the president of the southwide Woman's
Missionary Union but that she had a personal responsibility even as every other
member had. However, I dare to affirm that during all of those years Mrs.
Armstrong never lost sight of her opportunity thus to learn more about the
program of Southern Baptists so that she might promote it more faithfully not
only as a member of its highest ranking committee but also as the leader of
W.M.U. forces in her state and then of the Southland. Also I believe that she
must have steadily remembered while serving on that committee even as I know
she convincingly reminded our Union that its relationship is definitely that of
an auxiliary to the Convention, even as the following quotation from her first
presidential address to the Union attests:
"Whatever may be the Christian activities of its members in varied fields,
Woman's Missionary Union in all of its plans and program has sought to guard
its primary purpose to be an auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention.
Now and then there may have been misunderstandings or even criticism that
the Union has refused to express itself on certain issues seemingly vitally Christian
or to engage in the promotion of activities undeniably Christian but entirely
outside the Union's distinct field. It has deemed it far better to bear misunderstanding
and criticism than to deviate from its one purpose, the promotion