Baptist missions leader Keith Parks dies at 97

R. Keith Parks, international missions leader of both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, died Aug. 26. He was 97.

Parks spent 45 years in international missions, serving as ninth president of the SBC Foreign Mission Board—now International Mission Board—from 1980 to 1992.

He and his wife, Helen Jean, were missionaries to Indonesia for 14 years before he joined the Foreign Mission Board home office staff, where he served in several administrative roles.

He went on to become the first coordinator of CBF Global Missions, serving in that role from 1993 to 1999.

When asked by the Baptist Standard in 2018 his favorite aspect of ministry, Parks responded: “Relating to and working with missionaries and local Christians all around the world. ‘Missionary’ is still my dominant DNA.”

Remembering the legacy of Keith Parks

IMB President Paul Chitwood expressed his gratitude for Parks’ legacy.

“We celebrate that Keith Parks and his wife gave decades of their lives to serving Southern Baptists in our cooperative mission work to get the gospel to the nations,” Chitwood said.

“While Keith served as president during a complicated time in Southern Baptist life, his intentional focus on taking the gospel to the unengaged is a lasting legacy that still marks IMB strategy to this day. I am grateful for that legacy.”

Todd Lafferty, IMB executive vice president and chief operating officer, also served on the mission field in Indonesia, in addition to other countries, before joining the U.S. staff. Lafferty said: “Keith Parks’ visionary and strategic leadership led us from familiar mission stations to unmarked roads in the missionary task to reach the least reached. His legacy lives on as we continue to seek to reach the remaining unengaged, unreached peoples in the world today.”

CBF Executive Director Paul Baxley similarly reflected on Parks’ legacy and contributions to the CBF Global Missions.

“Dr. Keith Parks was deeply committed to the global mission of Jesus Christ throughout his life,” Baxley said. “He provided visionary and transformational leadership in the establishment of CBF Global Missions. His experience, missiology and strategic clarity laid a strong foundation for our Fellowship’s participation in Global Missions.”

“Dr. Parks was deeply respected not only by our Fellowship at large, but also by our first generation of field personnel who were touched by his leadership, integrity and vision

“Our Cooperative Baptist Fellowship family joins me in offering prayers of gratitude for his life, leadership and personal participation in inviting people to faith in Jesus Christ and his mission of transforming love in the world.”

Field personnel recall Parks’ personal care

Jim Smith, retired field personnel and CBF Global Missions staff leader, remembered Parks as “sharp, friendly and unafraid to operate from the edges.”

“His vision for reaching the most unreached and most neglected around the globe made a difference in global missions. He visited works in a multitude of circumstances where he spoke very little and listened a lot,” he said.

Smith also fondly recalled Parks’ ministry at a person level.

“He called my mother just before she was operated on for spinal surgery. They actually waited to take her into the operation so he could pray for her. He never stopped learning and loving others,” Smith said.

Nell Green, retired CBF field personnel, likewise appreciated Parks’ care for the families of missions personnel.

“Dr. Keith Parks was our mentor, an inspiring leader, but simply ‘Uncle Keith’ to our children. He said once, ‘God does not call without a knowledge of your children.’ That helped us through some difficult times as we raised children overseas,” Green said.

 Both Keith and Helen Jean Parks considered field personnel as family, she added.

“Keith was always ready to think through a problem with you. Helen Jean would drop everything and take time to pray with you,” Green said. “They were caring, thoughtful leaders ready to invest themselves personally in the lives of those sent out.”

‘Passionate about reaching the unreached’

Karen Morrow, retired CBF field personnel, called Parks “one of my heroes of the faith, who embodied the Christian mission to reach the nations with the gospel message.”

“He was passionate about reaching the unreached and those with limited access to the gospel and established CBF Global Missions to that end,” she said.

Keith and Helen Jane Parks’ participation in a prayerwalk she led in Turkey was “one of the highlights of my ministry,” Morrow said. She recalled Parks overlooking the city of Antioch “with tears in his eyes,” reflecting on how Christians there sent out Paul and Barnabas as the first gospel missionaries and praying “with gratitude for all God had done.”

“Because of Keith’s life, service and leadership, countless people around the globe have come to have a personal relationship with Christ,” Morrow said.

Parks, a native of Memphis in the Texas Panhandle, got his first taste of international missions as a student summer missionary to Colombia’s San Andrés Island.

Thirty years later, when Toby Druin of the Baptist Standard asked the newly named president of the Foreign Mission Board to describe himself, Parks responded, “I am a missionary.” That remained his identity until the end.

An era of new dangers and opportunities

“Parks’ leadership thrust the IMB into an unprecedented era of effectiveness toward fulfilling the Great Commission,” said Jerry Rankin, who succeeded Parks as the mission board president.

“Missionary deployment around the world exploded under Parks’ predecessor, Dr. Baker James Cauthen,” Rankin said. “But Parks looked beyond successful growth to see that part of the world still unreached and closed to missionary presence.”

Parks’ time as Foreign Mission Board president coincided with world-changing events that brought new dangers—and opportunities—for Christian missionaries: the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS, growing numbers of terrorist attacks and assassinations, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square protests, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the proliferation of new technologies and birth of the internet.

Parks’ leadership was a match for the times. Southern Baptists in 1976 had adopted a goal of preaching the gospel to everyone in the world by the end of the century. It fell to Parks to determine what it would take to reach that goal.

The goal has yet to be reached, but research into what it would take yielded “crushing statistical evidence that without an enlarged vision of the world, Southern Baptists would never contribute their full share to global evangelization,” wrote Leland Webb, editor of the FMB’s The Commission magazine at Parks’ retirement.

What the research revealed was more than 6,000 unreached peoples, ethnolinguistic groups who lived with few, if any, Christians among them, had little or no access to Scripture and did not welcome missionaries. The 1.9 billion people in those groups likely never would hear the name of Jesus.

‘New strategies to reach the unreached’

“Keith Parks was a missiologist par excellence,” Clyde Meador—who worked with four mission board presidents—once said of Parks. “He would do what he saw as right whether it was popular or not.”

Meador filled several key roles, including executive vice president, at the IMB before his death in 2024.

What Parks did was urge missionaries to develop daring new strategies to reach the unreached. This gave birth in 1985 to Cooperative Services International, which assigned teachers, doctors, businessmen and humanitarian workers to countries closed to traditional missionaries.

Later, the nonresidential missionary program was born for missionaries to develop creative ways to reach unreached people they could not live among.

“Parks’ vision positioned Southern Baptists to respond to the fall of the Soviet Union and laid the groundwork for changes that followed his tenure to focus on people groups instead of countries and engaging the unreached,” Rankin said.

Parks also challenged Southern Baptists to consider countries where missionaries had long worked as partners in reaching the world. On his last overseas trip as FMB president, to participate in a meeting of Baptist leaders from across the Americas, Parks challenged participants to begin sending their own missionaries as partners in God’s mission.

“Too many Christians in this world are convinced their responsibility is only to the people of their culture and language,” Parks said.

“We’ll never reach the world for Christ if we restrict ourselves to our own language and culture. Local interest always wins when culture dominates Christianity. Global interest wins when Christianity dominates culture.”

Native Texan and faithful missionary

After serving as pastor of Red Springs Baptist Church in Seymour, and as an instructor in Bible at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Parks and his wife, the former Helen Jean Bond, were appointed in 1954 as career missionaries to Indonesia, where they served until 1968.

There he served at the Baptist Theological Seminary of Indonesia in Semarang, Java. He also did evangelistic work in Semarang, was mission treasurer in Jakarta and spent a furlough as an associate secretary in the missionary personnel department at the FMB’s home office in Richmond, Va.

Parks joined the home office staff in 1968, leading work in Southeast Asia from 1968 to 1975; directing the mission support division from 1975 to 1979; serving as executive director-elect, September through December 1979; and executive director (title changed to president in May 1980) from Jan. 1, 1980, to Oct. 31, 1992.

Parks earned the Bachelor of Arts degree from North Texas State College (now University of North Texas) in Denton, and the Bachelor of Divinity and Doctor of Theology degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

The Parks joined First Baptist Church in Richardson in 2000, where they taught the International Bible Class.

His wife of 69 years, Helen Jean, and their daughter, Eloise, both died in 2021.

He survived by: son Randall and his wife Nancy; son Kent and his wife Erika; son Stanley and his wife Kay; grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Parks was the author of Crosscurrents (Convention Press, 1966), World in View, A.D. 2000 Series (New Hope Press, 1987) and numerous articles and columns. He is the subject of Keith Parks: Breaking Barriers & Opening Frontiers, a biography by Gary Baldridge.

Compiled by Managing Editor Ken Camp from information provided by Mary Jane Welch of the International Mission Board and Aaron Weaver of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.