Betty Alice Carroll, 1926-2022
IMB Photo
Betty Alice Carroll, an International Mission Board missionary emeritus who shared the gospel in Argentina, Jamaica and El Paso, Texas, died April 11, 2022. She was 95.
Betty was born Dec. 11, 1926, in Smithfield, North Carolina, to the late Naomi Mills and Clarence Charles Cowan. Because her father worked in bridge construction, she lived in several cities across the Southeast, including Chimney Rock, North Carolina, before they settled in Shelbyville, Tenneessee, where she graduated from Central High School.
When seeking missionary appointment, Betty wrote, “Everywhere we moved, on the first Sunday after our arrival in that town, my parents and two older sisters … joined the Baptist church.” Betty became a Christian at age 9 and said that having a Christian home, “was always a great tie that bound the members of the family together.”
She also wrote that participating in Girls’ Auxiliary (now Girls in Action and Acteens) led her to want to be a missionary.
Betty received the Bachelor of Arts from Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, where she met and married fellow student Dan Carroll Jr. Betty and Dan continued their education at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas, where each received the Master of Religious Education.
The Foreign Mission Board (now International Mission Board) appointed the Carrolls missionaries on July 9, 1953. After studying Spanish in Costa Rica for two years, they went to Argentina. For 15 years she and Dan served as church planters and taught at the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Buenos Aires. They later served as a missionaries in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic before spending 16 years at the Baptist Spanish Publishing House in El Paso, Texas.
Retirement brought them in 1989 to Waco, Texas, where they made Columbus Avenue Baptist Church their home, with Betty teaching Sunday School while Dan tended the church library.
After 70 years of marriage, Dan died Feb. 14, 2019.
Betty is survived by three sons, Daniel Marion Carroll III, Charles Cowan Carroll (Nursel) and John Price Carroll; seven grandchildren; and soon-to-be 12 great-grandchildren.
A service was held April 18, 2022, at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, followed by a graveside service at the Wortham Bend Cemetery, China Spring, Texas.
Read an obituary here.