This Week in Texas Methodist History May 16

 

Bishop Baughman Dies En route to Preside over Annual Conference, May 18, 1960

 

 

In 1968 the United Methodist Church was created by merger of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church.  The EUB Church was a result of a 1946 merger of two Wesleyan denominations sharing a German language heritage.  The Texas Conference of the Evangelical Association had been organized in November 1887 in Temple. It consisted of clusters of churches in or near San Antonio, Temple, Wichita Falls, Denison, and Galveston.  Those churches grew out of missions to recent immigrants from northern states where the EA had long been established. 

 

In 1956 there were only seven active itinerant ministers so it became necessary to merge the Texas and Oklahoma Conferences.  That merger was accomplished on May 29, 1956 in Oklahoma City.  The presiding Bishop of that session was L. L. Baughman.  

 

Baughman had previously presided over two sessions of the Texas Conference which had been held at Lissie and El Campo.  He also presided over the sessions of the Texas-Oklahoma Conference in 1957, 1958, and 1959.

 

In May 1960 he was en route to the Texas-Oklahoma Conference to be held in Wichita Falls.  Unfortunately the sixty year old Bishop never made it to Texas.  He died in a motel room in Wellington, Kansas.  Fortunately Bishop Paul Herrick of Dayton, Ohio, was able to hurry to Wichita Falls to preside over the session. 

 

Statistics for the Texas-Oklahoma Conference in 1960 showed 4,417 members in 29 churches