V. Carney Hargroves, Former Baptist Leader, Dies

The Rev. V. Carney Hargroves, former president of the Baptist World Alliance and the American Baptist Convention, has died at his suburban Philadelphia home at age 85.

Hargroves, who died Wednesday, was elected in 1954 to a one-year term as president of the American Baptist Convention, a denomination that includes 7,000 churches and 1.75 million members.

He led the Baptist World Alliance, which represents 23.3 million Baptists in 78 countries, from 1970 to 1975, and was pastor of Philadelphia’s Second Baptist Church of Germantown for nearly 40 years.

Hargroves was a member of a delegation of four ministers who visited the Soviet Union and other East Bloc countries in 1955, the first Americans since World War II to be granted such freedom.

Born near Norfolk, Va., he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton University. He studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and Princeton Theological Seminary.

Hargroves preached in Baptist churches in such far-flung places as Nagaland, India, Australia and Tasmania. He also served a stint in China, teaching missionaries’ children in an area 500 miles north of Shanghai.