SOUTHERN BAPTISTS A former soldier's new fight: contending for the Christian faith

Bobby Welch is likely to become the next president of the Southern Baptists.
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Bobby Welch remembers clearly the instant a Viet Cong guerrilla burst from the jungle that September day in 1966: "He saw me before I saw him, and he shot me at point-blank range."
Later, Welch would describe the impact of the shot, which came in the midst of a furious rescue mission. It was, he recalls, like being hit with the full swing of a red-hot steel bat, one that took a chunk of flesh out of his chest the size of a baseball. Just as there are few atheists in foxholes, there is nothing like a bullet near the heart to yank back a fallen-away Christian: "God, help me," Welch remembers pleading before passing out.
Rushing to the Army lieutenant's aid, Sgt. Albert Watts cleared Welch's airway and opened his fatigues. When he saw the damage, Watts just shook his head. He's gone, Watts thought to himself. He'll never make it. With other comrades, the sergeant loaded Welch's unconscious body on top of three dead American soldiers in a helicopter.
At the aid station, as the medics were pulling him out of the chopper by his ankles, they noticed he was still breathing.
"This guy is still alive!" he heard one of them say after the chopper landed. Welch, the product of a rigidly segregated Alabama upbringing, recalls that the medics who saved him from drowning in a puddle of his own blood were black.
In the recovery tent seven days later, as he hovered between life and death, Welch promised God, I'm going to live for you from here on out.
Within two years, he put aside his Purple Heart, Bronze Star and dreams of a military career for the life of a minister and evangelist who, nearly 40 years later, still calls his church a "forward operational base of God Almighty."
Leadership position
Welch -- a conservative Florida Republican who was trained as a Green Beret and Ranger -- is a virtual shoo-in to lead the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination with 16.2 million members.
With no significant opposition, the 61-year-old pastor of First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach is expected to win a one-year term as president when Southern Baptists gather in Indianapolis next month.
"I did not grow up in a Christian home," Welsh says. "None of my family were churchgoing people. I grew up literally on the other side of the tracks. ... Many of my closest friends of my teenage years are dead. One friend is serving a life sentence in the penitentiary."
Welch's life was changed, for the first time, by a teenage girlfriend who took him to her church, where he became a Christian at age 15. The girlfriend, Maudellen Bell, became his wife of nearly four decades, and the mother of their son and daughter, now grown.
The shooting, Welch recalls, "put a sense of urgency in my life. I almost didn't see tomorrow."
After several years in business back in Alabama, he enrolled in the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
"Vietnam is what God used to move Bobby toward his calling in the ministry," recalls the Rev. Bob Mowrey, who had converted the teenage Welch in Alabama. In 1972, Mowrey hired Welch as an associate pastor at Park Avenue Baptist Church in Nashville. Welch served there until 1974, when he was offered the pastorate in Daytona Beach.
A growing congregation
In the pulpit at First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, Welch is a mixture of emotional, evangelical fervor and conservative, military bearing. He is apt to fall to his knees at the end of a sermon, but keeps his suit jacket buttoned when he does.
Welch's 3,500-member downtown congregation, which he has served for 30 years, has outgrown its space, and the church is moving to a 226-acre site at the highly visible intersection of Interstates 4 and 95.
Welch radiates serenity, and his surroundings reflect that calm: His church office is furnished in Asian art, his back yard features a Japanese garden, and his hobby is raising bonsai trees.
"You cannot boss a tree," he says. The horticultural discipline has "forced me to practice patience and work for the long haul."