Recruiting for missions: the Baylor volunteer foreign mission band, 1900-1906: the Protestant foreign mission movement in the United States began early in the nineteenth century, but as late as 1890, fewer than one thousand missionaries lived abroad

Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr, 2008 by Bill Pitts

The parallels between the Baylor Band and the SVM are numerous. Both had significant precedents--including organizations (Y.M.C.A. and SCA) and leaders (Mott and Tanner) devoted to foreign missions. The influence of a revival-like atmosphere sparked the actual formation of both movements with peer pressure and emotional appeals apparent in both cases. (49) Both had significant memberships of women as well as men. (50) The activities of the two groups are strikingly similar. The parallels are especially clear when the agendas and programs of the movement are compared with the local band meetings. They even shared similar periods of decline in the 1930s and dissolution in the 1960s, (51) thereby suggesting that external cultural factors helped to shape the success and the decline of both missionary organizations.

The evidence suggests that the early Baylor Volunteer Band was a mirror image of the SVM. The similarities are many, but the question of direct influence remains open. The SVM organized twelve years before the Baylor Band, and extensive borrowing seems evident, but strains of independence do appear in the Texas group. The language used by the two groups--"Band," "Volunteer," and "Student"--suggest borrowing; yet the Baylor Band did not call itself a band of the SVM until later.

The Baylor Band had ample opportunity to identify itself with the national body and did so in a variety of ways. Baylor students gladly heard the SVM secretaries' presentations and recorded favorable reports on their messages. They considered the possibility of sending a representative to the international convention of the SVM meeting in Toronto in February 1902, and the band gave their sponsor, Barrett, permission for any alliance that he might think proper with the SVM. (52) Moreover, the students themselves sent a representative to the Nashville meeting in 1906. (53) The 1905 band minutes indicate that "Mr. Davis gave us cards to be filled out and sent to the SVM." (54) At that time, Baylor band members were receiving the major publication of the SVM, Missionary Review of the World. (55) The Baylor Band studied Mott's The Evangelization of the World in this Generation and occasionally referred to the evangelization task, but they did not seem to have been as intent on promoting the famous motto as was the SVM. (56) In 1909, Baylor students changed the name of their organization from Foreign Mission Band of Baylor University to The Student Volunteer Band of Baylor University. (57) In 1935, a careful report on the band to the New York office dearly suggested an informal connection with the national body of SVM. (58)

Early in the twentieth century, Southern Baptists decisively rejected ecumenical cooperation. (59) Baptist historian Jesse Fletcher suggested, "Southern Baptists' aloofness from ecumenical organizations ... made their own [missionary] effort necessary." (60) The Baylor Band certainly maintained close loyalty to the denomination. Band members regularly attended the Texas Baptist state convention meetings, and roughly 90 percent of band members received their appointments to the mission fields from the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board. In a 1929 report to the SVM on the sister institution, Mary Hardin-Baylor, located in Belton, Texas, W. W. Parkinson despaired of full participation in the SVM by Baptists. He wrote, "The Baptist volunteer group is a good bunch. They are more than friendly to the movement. I did not make any effort to secure numbers because I felt it would undo this and get us no where. Though I did feel that they needed the movement and as students were ready for it." He further observed that there is "not much hope for the movement until leaders of the denomination change." (61) Leon McBeth concluded that Southern Baptists "preferred a more denominational approach to student ministry than was available through the earlier Y.M.C.A. and Student Volunteer Movement." (62) Whatever the developing lines of the historical relationship between the Baylor Band and the SVM, both organizations clearly had a common purpose of recruiting university students for foreign missions. Thus, Baptist students shared in the larger SVM vision of communicating the gospel worldwide at the beginning of the twentieth century.