Professor Old Testament Crozer-Midwestern Southern Baptist Seminary, 1956-1964. Senior pastor Emmanuel Baptist Church, Albany, New York, 1964-1971, First Baptist Church, White Plains, 1971-1977, North Shore Baptist Church, Chicago, 1977-1989. Vice president Academic life, Dean of aculty Colgate Rochester Divinity School, Rochester, New York, 1989-1991.

Interim senior minister First Baptist Church, 1992-1993. Interim president Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Centre, Massachusetts, 1993-1994. Interim senior minister First Baptist Church, Worcester, 1994-1996, First Baptist Church, White Plains, New York, 2000—2001.

Trustee University Chicago Division School, since 1978. Visiting professor University Melbourne, Australia, 1992. With United States Infantry, 1943-1945.

In 1961, Ralph Elliott, an Old Testament professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, published his first book, The Message of Genesis. Judged to be somewhat conservative in most theological circles, it ignited a firestorm of controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention with which Elliott was affiliated. Publication of the book had two direct consequences. 1) Southern Baptists revised and updated the Baptist Faith and Message confession which had originally been written during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the 1920s. 2) Elliot was fired.

Thirty years later Elliott told his story in The Genesis Controversy. Elliott recounts the pressures, the behind the scenes maneuvering, the various dynamic (both public and private) which shaped that event which was trauma to him, to the institution he served, to the denomination which had bred him. The book is more than mere memoir, however. Elliott argues that what happened in 1962 is of one piece with what happened to the Convention as a whole beginning in 1979 when the so-called Fundamentalist wing moved aggressively to control the Convention. Elliott is convinced that his experience ensured the later and more encompassing experience.

The papers of this collection document Elliott's experience of the early 1960s and his later writing of The Genesis Controversy. These papers in no way comprise the complete papers of Ralph Elliott. His subsequent career as a respected pastor within the American Baptist Churches, USA is almost completely missing in these papers. These papers represent his early career as a seminary professor at two Southern Baptist seminaries (Southern and Midwestern) and the controversy which resulted in his dismissal.