R. Keith Parks, a long-serving missionary and leader in international missions for the Southern Baptist Convention, has died. He was 97.
The SBC's International Mission Board, the successor organization to the global missions body that Parks oversaw, announced Wednesday that he had passed away on Tuesday.
He was preceded in death by his wife of 69 years, Helen Jean, and his daughter, Eloise, who both died in 2021. He is survived by three sons, three daughters-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
IMB President Paul Chitwood noted in the announcement that Parks and his wife had given “decades of their lives to serving Southern Baptists in our cooperative mission work to get the gospel to the nations.”
“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,” Chitwood continued.
“I am grateful for that legacy.”
Ronnie Floyd, former SBC president and former senior pastor at the multi-site Cross Church of Arkansas, offered public condolences on social media.
“I loved hearing Dr. Parks preach. As a young pastor and hearing him at an SBC, I was up all night wrestling with the call to missions,” Floyd tweeted. “Thank God for him.”
Born in Memphis, Texas, Parks would spend 45 years in international missions, with his first experience being as a student summer missionary in Colombia. From 1954 to 1968, he and his wife were missionaries in Indonesia.
From 1980 to 1992, Parks served as president of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board (FMB), which is now known as the International Mission Board. He also served in other roles with the FMB before becoming president.
After stepping down as president of the FMB in 1992, Parks went on to become the first missions coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and served until 1999.
CBF Executive Director Paul Baxley recently recalled that “Parks was deeply committed to the global mission of Jesus Christ throughout his life.”
“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,” said Baxley, as quoted by The Baptist Standard earlier this week.
“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.”
In an interview with The Baptist Standard in 2018, Parks said one of the great challenges in his ministry career was “to help local churches and Christians to realize that the mandate to share the gospel with everyone was given to every church and every Christian.”
“It was not the mission board’s or the missionaries’ work that they should support,” he said. “It was, and is, the responsibility of every church and every Christian, but each of us has a different role to fill.”
