Criswell grew up in Texline in Dallam County, the most northwesterly community in the Texas Panhandle, where his cowboy-barber father moved the family in 1915.

In 1935, Criswell married the former Bessie Marie "Betty" Harris (1913–2006), the pianist of the Mount Washington church and an education graduate of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

Mabel Ann possessed an exceptional operatic voice and recorded three albums of sacred music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two with the Ralph Carmichael orchestra.

The popular evangelist Billy Graham joined the church in 1953, became a close friend of the Criswell family, and remained a member of the Dallas congregation for 55 years.

By the early 1950s he had hired professionally trained educational directors for each age group of the church, organized a sophisticated multi-level Sunday School program, added a full-time business manager to the staff, and broadened the church into a youth and family life center featuring a bowling alley, skating rink, and gymnasium with a track and basketball court.

[6] Criswell's accomplishments include helping to engineer the conservative resurgence of the Southern Baptist convention, a transition which began in the late 1970s.

[1] His death made national headlines, and as a farewell honor the city of Dallas closed off the U.S.-75 North Central Expressway for the celebrated pastor's funeral cortege.

Well-known pastor and author Rick Warren recounts his call to full-time ministry as a 19-year-old student at California Baptist College, when in November 1973 he and a friend skipped classes and drove 350 miles to hear Criswell preach at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco.

From 1969 to 1970 Dr. Criswell served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest non-Roman Catholic denomination in the United States, with some 16 million members.

[citation needed] During the twenty years that followed he was perhaps the most popular preacher at evangelism and pastors' conferences in America, and also preached extensively in mission fields worldwide.

[8][9] Criswell was a former segregationist, and was critical of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education delivering "...a widely circulated sermon labeling activists for racial integration “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up,” [and] preaching that “the idea of the universal brotherhood and the fatherhood of God is a denial of everything in the Bible.”[10] Criswell also railed at federal intervention against de jure southern segregation.

[11] In it, he was particularly critical of the National Council of Churches and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, calling on his co-religionists to resist these "two-by scantling, good-for-nothing fellows who are trying to upset all of the things that we love as good old Southern people and as good old Southern Baptists"[11] and referring to the intimidation of "those East Texans ... [such] that they dare not pronounce the word chigger any longer.

"[11] Taken aback by negative reactions to his remarks in the press, Criswell did not publicly address the issue again for over a decade, claiming he was "a pastor, not a politician."

"[13]In 1960 Criswell published an article attacking the appropriateness of Roman Catholics to serve as president, titled "Religious Freedom, the Church, the State, and Senator Kennedy."

[15] In 1976, Criswell supported the election of the Republican U.S. President Gerald R. Ford Jr., an Episcopalian, rather than the Southern Baptist Democratic nominee, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.