Messenger of Grace, by R. A. Coppenger

Michael Haykin was a visiting speaker at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in my day in the late 1990s. When we were sharing notes, he learned that my father had done work on a man of keen interest him, Abraham Booth. From that conversation emerged this book, published by the Canadian press with whom Michael worked. As it turned out, they were able to ship seventy-five, newly-published copies in time for his hundredth birthday celebration at his church. And equipped with a new fountain pen, he signed virtually all of them on the spot and handed them to well-wishers in attendance. He didn’t live to see 101, so I’m especially grateful that he could enjoy this publishing tribute at that gathering. As you’ll see, Michael wrote the foreword and I the preface. 

“When my sister Anne and I were preschoolers, our father, Raymond Arthur Coppenger, was a professor at Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee. He was just finishing his dissertation, begun several years earlier in Edinburgh. Our mother, Agnes, who had walked with him through years of study, both in Scotland and America, did much of the typing. I had no idea what he was writing about and that I would one day come to cherish Booth’s perspectives: Little did I know that, as a faculty member at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (my father’s alma mater), I would affirm the doctrines of grace; that, as a pastor in Arkansas and Illinois, I would baptize converts who had been springled as infants; that, as an editor of Kairos Journal, I would help publish some of Booth’s anti-slavery preaching.

As I write this, my father is about to turn 100 years old, and he continues to bless the body of Christ. He is a cherished member of First Baptist Church, Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and an emeritus professor of Ouachita Baptist University. Though he comes from humble beginnings, the son of a hewer of railroad ties in east Tennessee, he has distinguished himself as a Renaissance man—as a naval chaplain in the Pacific in WWII; as a home builder and auto-mechanic (making the most of a professor’s and suppl-preacher’s income); as a tennis coach, a tour leader, and a quartet bass. Above all, he has been a conspicuous and faithful servant of the Lord, an inspiration and guide for his family and colleagues.

It is a particular joy, then, to see this dissertation in print, because I love and admire my father, and because his writing lifts up the life and work of Abraham Booth, to whom we Baptist pastors owe a great debt.

I would like to thank Dr. Michael Haykin, who has taken special interest in my father’s work on Booth. He and his colleague at Joshua Press, Heinz Dschankilic, have been a great encouragement to us both. Thanks, also, to Southern Seminary’s Media Services shop and Evanston Baptist Church’s Mike Blissett for moving the dissertation from typescript to digital format.”