The president of the 1929 class, Baker James Cauthen of Lufkin, was to become an important religious leader in the Baptist Church. Cauthen, actually a native of Huntsville, was living in Lufkin at the time he entered SFA. At 16 he was licensed to preach. He did a BA in English at SFA and was in the Scholarship Society, the Pine Log-Stone Fort Press Club, and was active in several of the religious groups like the BSU. After SFA, he did graduate work at Baylor and Southwestern Seminary before becoming a missionary to China. During the war, he served as a civilian chaplain in the Air Force 1943-44, and in 1946, he became secretary of Baptist Foreign Mission Board. Dr. Baker James Cauthen, executive director of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board from 1954 to 1979. He died in 1982.

During Cauthen tenure as head of the mission board, the number of Southern Baptist missionaries increased from 908 to nearly 3,000, and the number of countries where they served rose from 32 to 95. Evangelist Billy Graham called Cauthen “one of the greatest missionary statesmen in all American church life;” he said he was a “father figure” to Southern Baptist missionaries, and “gave them inspiration and prophetic vision.”