Copyright by Robert C. Rogers and the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board.

     Arthur Flake was born in Texas, but moved to Winona, Mississippi in 1895 when he married Lena Nelson. A traveling salesman and department store manager, Flake was a gifted organizer who changed the face of Sunday School in the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1895 he organized the first Baptist Young People’s Union (B.Y.P.U.) in Mississippi in his church in Winona. He also served as a volunteer Sunday School superintendent in his church, and he was so successful that he was elected in 1909 as a field worker with the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1920, he was placed in charge of standardizing how Southern Baptists do Sunday School. He developed his famous “Flake’s Formula” for growing a Sunday School: discover the possibilities, enlarge the organization, provide a place, train the workers, and visit the prospects. Baptist historians point to God’s work through Arthur Flake as a major reason that Southern Baptists have had more growth through Sunday School than other denominations.

SOURCES:

 “Flake, Arthur,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, vol. 1, (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1954), 440-441; Jesse C. Fletcher, The Southern Baptist Convention: A Sesquicentennial History (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 123.