Wallace Watkins:  

Biographical Info on Dr. Wallace Watkins I was born to James Weldon and Elsie Mae Watkins of Cass County in November of 1939; attended public schools in Atlanta, Hooks, and Liberty-Eylau of Texarkana where I graduated in 1958. I attended and graduated from East Texas Baptist College (BA in 1963), Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (MDiv in 1968) and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (DMin in 1988). My wife, Susie and I, are in our forty-sixth year of marriage. We met and married in Texarkana where she was raised on the Arkansas side of town. We have two sons, Jeff and David, who both reside, currently, in the Dallas area with their families. Jeff is married to Julie (Dillard) and he is the father of twin girls, Taylor and Madison, age 16. David is married to Aimee (Ray) and they have Shelby, age 11, twins Brooklyn and Kendall, age 9 and a boy, Kinsler, age 2. (See family picture) I was converted to the Christian faith when I was twelve years of age and felt a definite sense of call to vocational ministry when I was only fourteen years old. I immediately began to receive invitations to preach youth revivals and speak in churches all over Bowie and Cass Counties from 1954 through 1961. While I was still a student at East Texas Baptist College in 1961, I was invited to accept the pastorate of a small country church on the Arkansas side of Texarkana near Fouke. I left that church in 1963 to attend seminary in Ft. Worth. My home church, the Eylau Baptist Church of Texarkana invited me to serve as their Pastor during the seminary days which I did until 1968. I resigned the Eylau church to do graduate work in Clinical Pastoral Education at the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Oklahoma City. It was during that time that Susie and I were married and we moved to Houston where I pastored the First Baptist Church of Hitchcock, Texas for two years. My pastoral ministry took on a different challenge and many doors of opportunity were opened to me as I accepted the invitation of First Baptist Church of Texarkana to go there as the Associate Pastor to Dr. Lory Hildreth. I was asked to lead out in the building and ministry of a satellite church north of town in the Moore’s Lane location. This location, built on a twenty-seven acre plot, became the permanent location for the current First Baptist Church of Texarkana. It was during this time that Dr. Hildreth resigned to accept a position with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, headquartered in Dallas. First Baptist, Texarkana has been live, on Sunday mornings, with KTAL, channel 6, out of Shreveport since 1948. In Dr. Hildreth’s absence, I had the opportunity to be in many people’s homes on Sunday morning via that television ministry. In 1976, Dr. Harvey Lewis, pastor for thirteen years of Central Baptist in Marshall, resigned to go out to East Texas Baptist College (as it was then) as Vice-President of Development. Central formed a Pastor Search Committee and began their work. A member of the church, Nina Kile, was recuperating from eye surgery at home where she saw me on Channel 6 and told the Search Committee, “I have been listening to a man from Texarkana that you might want to hear as a prospective pastor for Central. However, I’m not so sure but that he is too old for us” (I was thirty-seven at the time). Because I was the Associate Pastor and because the t...Expand for more