New Mexico Invasion

In the land of enchantment

Near old Santa Fe

You'll find Glorieta

In wondrous array.

In the midst of the mountains

God's presence you'll find

At our Glorieta

Rich friendship will bind . . .

Thus, to the melody of Red Sails in the Sunset, a chorus of little girls hailed a Baptist camping ground now abuilding in New Mexico. It is just about big enough (2,000 acres) to hold the twelve tribes of Israel, and it sounds, from the description of its boosters, like a land of milk & honey. From all over the U.S., some 3,000 Baptist Sunday-school teachers converged on Glorieta for seminars and steak fries, lectures and horseback riding, hiking and hymn-sings. It was their first glimpse of the camp, which, when it is finished in 1956 at an estimated cost of $7,000,000, will boast gardens, an artificial lake, hotels, dining halls, cottages and cabins to house half a million Baptists each summer.

Perhaps the most interesting feature about Baptist Glorieta is its location--right in the heart of traditionally Roman Catholic New Mexico. It is the latest and biggest sign of a Baptist invasion of New Mexico which has the invaders themselves surprised. In 1912, when the largely Spanish-speaking state was admitted to the Union, it contained 13 Baptist churches, with a total membership of a little over 2,000. Today New Mexico has 225 Baptist churches and over 60,000 members. New Mexico's Roman Catholic Church is officially unconcerned, but last month at a Catholic conference in Albuquerque, Archbishop Edwin V. Byrne declared in his keynote address: "The concern of this conference is to find ways and means to keep our Spanish-speaking people faithful children of the Holy Mother Church . . ."

Much of the Baptists' mustard-seed growth has come from immigration, mainly from Baptist-heavy Texas, drawn by oil booms, defense centers (notably Los Alamos) and tourist folders. But an incalculable amount is the result of the Baptists' aggressive evangelism. Sparkplug of this go-getting gospeling is up-and-doing Dr. Harry P. Stagg, 55, a minister who came to New Mexico from Louisiana in 1930, and has been executive secretary of the New Mexico Baptists for the past 15 years. Rotarian Stagg has pushed mission work and evangelistic camp meetings, to harvest a bumper crop of conversions from ranchers and cowboys, Indians and Spanish-Americans: about 20 New Mexican towns now have "Spanish Baptist" churches.

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