Growing up Pentecostal

Foreword

2009-10-15T14:08:00.009-04:00

Our Family in 1956 - Ten Children and Two More on the Way

When I was a teenage evangelist, traveling and preaching in the Church of God, people seemed to enjoy hearing my childhood stories more than they did my sermons. I traveled during weekends, school breaks, and summer vacations to churches over much of the United States, from South Dakota to South Carolina, and from Washington State to Washington, D.C.

Everywhere I went people would ask me to tell them stories of how I grew up. No doubt their interest was aroused in part because of the size of our family. I was born third in a family of twelve very bright and energetic children.

But that's not the only thing that piqued folk's interest. At that time my father was serving on the Church of God Executive Committee. I think many people liked to feel they were getting the inside scoop, at least from a kid's perspective, into life in Cleveland, Tennessee, a virtual Vatican of Pentecost. Many people referred to Cleveland as the Holy City, and not all of them meant it tongue-in-cheek.

In Cleveland I attended the North Cleveland Church of God, the oldest continuing local Pentecostal church in America - and perhaps the world. I lived either across the street from or within two blocks of the North Cleveland church, the Church of God International Headquarters, the Church of God Publishing House (Pathway Press,) and Lee College (now Lee University), the oldest and largest church-related Pentecostal institution of higher education in America.

However, not all of my experiences were made in Cleveland. Dad traveled extensively preaching at churches, camp-meetings, and other church gatherings throughout the United States and abroad, and he was very good about taking us children with him whenever he could. Then by the time I was 16-years-old, I was traveling and preaching on my own.

Frankly, being the son of a prominent minister didn't make me feel very special, since I often traveled by bus, hitch-hiking, or bumming rides from one meeting to another. My entire preaching wardrobe consisted of one dark green J.C. Penny "$16-Special" suit, a second-hand tweed sports coat, two white shirts with skinny dark ties, and a pair of black wing-tip shoes which had cardboard covering the hole in the bottom to keep my socks from showing through. I never thought of us as being poor. We lived like most people I knew back then.

Very often I remember staying with pastors of the churches where I was preaching and sitting up late into the night as they asked me to tell them "just one more story" of my childhood. Many encouraged me to publish those anecdotes in a book. In 1977 one of America's leading non-denominational Christian publishers also asked me to write a book about my experiences in growing up, after he read an article I wrote for Billy Graham's Decision magazine. I turned down that opportunity because at that time, as a young pastor, I was having a personal struggle with many of the doctrines and practices of the Pentecostal church. I felt I needed to be further removed from it to write with any degree of objectivity.

This book is not a history of our family. Each of us has our own story to tell, and although the experiences may overlap, each of us has his or her own personal viewpoint. Also, with an 18-year span between the oldest and the youngest, each of us grew up in a slightly different household. I have many more memories with my older siblings than the younger ones simply because of our age differences. I started traveling in the ministry the same year that my youngest sister was born.

So this is my story - as I remember it. Many of these recollections are reinforced by conversations with family members, as well as diaries, letters, photos, mementos, and clippings that I have kept over the years. As with all personal memoirs, this one cannot be written with total objectivity. However, I shall make it honest and true to the best of my ability.

As I write these words I am no longer a practicing Pentecostal, albeit still a Christian. As a post-Pentecostal I will always continue to cherish my roots and hold a deep appreciation for the Pentecostal church. I hope this volume will help preserve a small slice of the life I once knew. Also I trust it will serve as a remembrance of what the classical Pentecostal movement was like in the mid 20th century.

The Church of God as I knew it then no longer exists. It is now a larger organization, and many of the old practices and attitudes have changed - some of them for the better. I trust there will be many readers who are reminded of their own heritage, and perhaps others who will get at least a small glimpse and better understanding of what it was like growing up Pentecostal.

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In the photo above, circa 1958, there were only ten children in our still growing family. On the couch are, LtoR: couch: Mom holding Bruce, Mark, Dad, Cathy. On the Floor, LtoR: Philip, Sara, Stephen, Sharon, Camilla, Paul, Raymond. Jeffery and Melody were yet to be born.

Chapter 1: Born Again

2009-01-24T18:40:00.000-05:00

First grade was the watershed year of my life, and a rainy afternoon in April, 1952, was the divide. All the seven years and three months I had lived before that turning point, I had been a horrible sinner. But then, I was born again. It happened when my brother Paul and I found ourselves locked up all alone in the Cleveland, Tennessee, National Guard Armory.

It was a twelve block walk from our house to Arnold Elementary School, and the route offered almost limitless opportunities for adventure and mischief. That year, the Korean Conflict was dominating the news. From my classmates, I had heard tantalizing tales about the soldiers who drilled regularly at the Armory across the street from the school. One fateful afternoon I suggested to my brother, Paul, that we go over to the Armory and check things out for ourselves.

Paul was just 11 months younger than me and was also in the first grade. That was always a source of embarrassment to me, having a younger brother in the same grade. People thought I must have flunked, when actually we had been born in the same year. I was born in January and he in December of 1945, and thus we started school together.

Paul liked my idea of exploring the Armory so after school that afternoon, we boldly found our way over to the massive gray stone building and pushed hard against the big double doors. They grudgingly creaked open and we slipped inside. The doors clicked behind us as we excitedly began to inspect the premises. The place was cold and empty, just a big hollow gymnasium -- with no soldiers. We must have picked a bad day; we promised ourselves we would return tomorrow.

Then, when we went to pull the big doors open again, they wouldn't budge. We were locked up in this strange, spooky building. The windows in the front door were high over our heads, so the only way we could see out was to stand on a table in the lobby and jump with all our might. There, for a fleeting moment in mid-air, was our only glimpse of freedom, before we came crashing back down to the table with a thud.

In quiet panic, we searched the rest of the building. Every strange creak of the floorboards or the sound of the wind on a high overhead window sent a shiver up our spines. Every door we found leading to the outside was firmly locked, as well as the interior doors behind which we hoped we might find a telephone from which we could call for help.

Finding our way back to the front lobby, we sat down on the bare tile floor to ponder our dilemma. From Sunday School, we remembered the story of Paul and Silas in the Phillipian jail. We identified with them; their example seemed to be our best hope. We would do as Paul and Silas had done, sing and pray, and wait for God to send an earthquake to bust us out.

After a few rounds of Victory in Jesus, and I'll Fly Away, we began to sing "Give me that old-time religion ... It was good for Paul and Silas and it's good enough for me." Soon we were improvising: "And it's good enough for Paul and Stephen."

Before long we were standing on the table, clapping our hands, stomping our feet, and singing as if we were having camp-meeting. The noise and vibrations from the table sounded like the thunder of God, heightening our expectations for an earthquake. Between verses, we would jump for a glimpse out the window. Then we would hop down onto the floor, prostrate ourselves, and pray for a miracle. We prayed the way folks at our church prayed -- loudly and in unison.

After several rounds of seemingly futile prayer, Paul had an idea which we both agreed might make our prayers more effective. We needed an altar, the old fashioned mourner's bench kind of altar we were accustomed to at church. But, except for the table, which was way too high, the lobby was bare.

"I've got it," Paul announced, "let's take turns. You be the altar and I'll pray on you. Then I'll be the altar and you can pray on me." It was definitely worth trying. I dutifully got down on my hands and knees and Paul hunkered over me, wailing aloud to Jesus.

While I was being the altar, essentially pretending that I was a plank of wood, I had time to think of how scared I really was. First, I was afraid of the spanking I would surely receive from Dad if we didn't get out of there before he found out. Then, I was afraid we might not be delivered at all. Maybe there would never be an earthquake or no one would ever come and find us. Maybe we would stay locked up until we either starved or froze to death in this cold spooky prison.

It was what might happen after we died that gave me the greatest dread of all. Hell! There was no doubt in my mind that if I should die at that moment, I would go straight to the everlasting "lake of fire" because I was a sinner. In fact, I had committed the most terrible sin of my life that very afternoon.

"Hell-fire and brimstone" were not the constant theme in the preaching I heard as a child, but the subject did come up often enough that the prospects of eternity in Hell often occupied my thoughts. The God I knew about was a lot like my daddy. He could be very loving and caring most of the time. Then without my understanding why, He could become stern, harsh -- even cruel.

Most of the time, when I thought of God, I pictured Him as a kind, loving, Heavenly Father. But sometimes He appeared in my imagination with a sinister gleam in His eye. From His perch high above, He was watching my every move and reading every thought. I imagined Him leaning over the banister of Heaven, pointing a long menacing finger, and with the twitch of His hand consigning lost souls to the damnation I was sure they justly deserved.

In church, I was told that God had created Heaven for His children and Hell for Satan and his demons. But if we made the slightest transgression against God's law, as spelled out in the church teachings, we were making our own decision to spend eternity in Hell with the devil.

Hell was an indescribably horrible place. The fire was hotter than anything known on earth, the pain excruciating, the stench unbearable, and the screams of the tormented unending. I never heard my father preach a sermon specifically about Hell. The descriptions came mostly from traveling evangelists, Sunday school teachers, and others who cared for my eternal soul.

Dad did have one sermon which caused my imagination to soar, and at the same time scared me senseless. I heard the sermon more than once, because as editor of a Christian magazine, The Lighted Pathway, Dad traveled extensively as a guest preacher at different churches, often taking us children with him. The message was called simply "Eternity," and to describe it Dad would talk about Stone Mountain, Georgia. I had been to Stone Mountain with my granddaddy who lived in Atlanta, and I knew that this huge monolith was the largest exposed chunk of granite in the world.

In his sermon, Dad would ask the congregation to imagine there was a great bird that lived in a far distant galaxy of God's big universe, and that bird made a round-trip to planet Earth which took one thousand years to complete. From the peak of Stone Mountain, the bird would peck a single grain of sand, then fly back to deposit it in that distant galaxy from whence it had come. Suppose the great bird made another thousand year journey to collect a second grain of sand, and repeated the feat endlessly. When Stone Mountain was finally, completely erased from the face of the earth and where it stood there was now only an empty level plain, eternity will have just begun.

I thought often of eternity and the concept of forever-and-ever was hard for my imagination to grasp. Also, I sometimes thought of the fires of Hell, and on occasion I had held my forefinger over a candle's flame just to see how long I could bear it, which was only a split second. How then did I expect to endure the torment of eternal damnation in the infinitely hotter fires of Hell over by entire body, while I waited the excruciating intervals of time until the great bird came back for another grain of sand?

On one particular occasion, the truth of Dad’s sermon, in conjunction with the eternal fires of Hell, was etched indelibly on my young mind. Dad was preaching a revival meeting at the East Cleveland Church of God, just about a mile from our house. I was with him on that particular evening, along with Mom and several other siblings. The youngest children had stayed home with a babysitter.

During Dad’s sermon, I noticed a red glow began to illuminate the windows on the right side of the church. A man in the congregation got up and went out to investigate. In a moment he came back into the church with an anxious look on his face, gathered up his family, and left in a hurry. Dad just kept on preaching.

Soon a second family left -- then a third. The pastor, Brother Yates, was sitting on the platform behind Dad. I watched the concerned, nervous expression on his face. He glanced out the window of the church, then over his dwindling congregation, and back again to Dad. Unfazed, Daddy was droning on and on about the great bird laboriously making its way back from outer space for another grain of sand.

There must be an ethic practiced by anointed preachers that says neither Hell, high water, nor the town burning down can stop the word of God from going forth. By the time Dad finished preaching, hardly anyone was left in the pews, so an altar call seemed futile. Brother Yates dismissed the service, and the few of us who were still there went outside to see what was causing all the commotion.

Looking in the direction of our house, the entire night sky seemed to be ablaze. Dad loaded us children into the car and he and Mom commented on how big the fire was. The closer we got to home, the more anxious they became -- and for good reason. Stivers Lumber Company was on fire.

Stivers Lumber covered an entire block which was bounded on the west side by the Church of God International Offices and Publishing House and on the east by the railroad tracks. The north side of the lumber company, however, was the main concern of the hundreds of people who were watching from a vacant field a block away. There, right next to the stacks of burning lumber, was an oil company with huge storage tanks. Firemen in trucks with lights flashing were focusing their efforts on that side of the blaze. It was impossible to get too close to the fire because of the heat. The firefighters had already given up trying to extinguish the mountains of dry lumber which were an uncontrollable inferno. Instead, they were spraying water on the fuel tanks in an effort to keep them cool enough that they wouldn’t explode. Immediately on the other side of those fuel tanks was a wooden office building, and then our house.

By the time we arrived home, Mama and Daddy were frantic. The baby sitter was standing on the front porch with all the babies bundled up and ready to leave. We didn’t even go inside the house. Dad whisked them off the porch and drove us all to safety.

We joined what seemed like the whole town of Cleveland, gathering along Montgomery Avenue, a safe distance from the fire. From there, we watched Stivers Lumber Company burn until the wee hours of the next morning, when Mom and Dad were assured by the firemen that it was safe to return home.

It was a week before no more wisps of smoke could be seen coming from what was now a square block of nothing but ashes. Until this very day, the vivid memories of the Stivers Lumber Company fire define my mental image of Hell.

All this was rushing through my mind that fateful afternoon as I was playing like an altar and waiting for an earthquake. That's when I made the decision that if I should die in this cold stone building, at least I would go to Heaven and not to Hell. Silently I prayed now that even if God didn't deliver us from the Armory, would He please come into my heart and forgive me of my sin.

That very afternoon I had succumbed to temptation and committed the first deliberate sin I could remember. Miss Dugan, my first grade teacher, had asked me if I had finished an assignment. I looked her right in the eyes and told her a lie. "Yes ma'am," I had said aloud. Then, as a pang of guilt hit me, I muttered under my breath with lips barely moving, "I finished all of it I wanted to do." I hadn't wanted to do much.

Many times at church I had heard it preached that, "All liars shall have their part in the lake of fire...." That was me; I was a blatant bald faced liar. "Oh God," I now implored softly, "Please forgive me and save me and I will never tell another lie again -- never."

At that moment, I was born again. I didn't feel anything special. I just believed it; I knew it. I was born again as surely as all those radiant people at the North Cleveland Church of God. For years I had heard them give testimony of what awful sinners they used to be until God in His mercy reached way down into the horrible pit they were in, lifted them out of the miry clay of sin, and planted their feet on the solid rock of salvation. As I tried to comprehend the wonder of my new birth, I sensed such a relief that I really wasn't concerned, at that moment, whether God burst the doors open or not. I was on my way to Heaven, and for as long as eternity rolled, I would be praising Jesus. Forever!

Paul was still praying loudly above me when we heard the knock at the door. Glancing up through the window, our eyes met those of three eighth graders, looking down on us. We thought they looked like angels. These older boys were on their way home from basketball practice after school when they heard our commotion. Somewhere they found someone with a key and soon we were walking (skipping, jumping, running, laughing) home.

The buds of the maple trees were swelling in anticipation of warmer weather and everything was dripping from a just ended rain. It seemed that winter had suddenly turned to spring. I had never noticed the world being so beautiful before. Even the mud puddles looked lovely. I felt so light and free and good all over that I burst into song, and Paul joined in:

If you’re saved and you know it, say “Amen.”
AMEN!
If you’re saved and you know it, say “Amen”
AMEN!
If you’re saved and you know it then your life will surely show it,
If you’re saved and you know it say “Amen.”
AMEN!

Chapter 2: Down By the Creek Bank

2009-01-23T19:51:00.000-05:00

Although I knew my Mom and Dad would be very pleased to learn I had given my heart to the Lord, it was several years before I told them the circumstances of my conversion. I didn't want to get into trouble for being in the National Guard Armory when I should have been coming straight home from school.

Still, I had an immediate desire to witness and tell others about Jesus. I teamed up with Paul for our initial venture into personal evangelism. We didn't have to look far to find our first target. He was Richard, a fat little kid who lived next door. Richard was the vilest sinner I knew.

It was on a balmy spring afternoon that Richard came over to our house, as he often did, to play. Our back yard was bordered by a small creek and along the bank grew an enormous Weeping Willow tree. The drooping outermost branches of the tree literally touched the ground, creating a wondrous natural enclosure. The circle of those branches, which swayed with every breeze, was my favorite spot in the yard, and maybe my favorite place in the entire universe. This is where we took Richard on that fateful day and sat him on the grass between us.

Paul and I had our attack planned and well rehearsed. We wasted little time. "Richard,” I began, “did you know that if your daddy doesn't stop drinking, he's going to go straight to Hell, where he will burn forever and ever?

"Richard's eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open. We had caught him totally off guard. Before he could blink, Paul hit Richard from the other side. "Yeah, and your mommy's going to Hell too, if she doesn't stop running around the yard half naked in those short shorts and halters."

Richard looked stunned. It was obvious he had never been made to face the awful truth like this before. While Richard looked at each of us in turn, a quiver coming to his lips and the hint of a tear welling up in his eyes, I went in for the kill. "And that's not all. If you don't stop saying dirty words, you're going to Hell with them.

"But Richard didn't go to Hell -- not right then, anyway. Instead he puckered up and ran crying to his mother. She met her squalling son on the front porch, and after comforting him for a moment through his sobs, she yelled angrily at us, "You boys leave my baby alone!" It was a long, long time before Richard was allowed to come over to our house to play again.

"Oh well," I consoled myself, "sometimes the truth hurts." At least my conscience was clear. I had done my duty to God and my friend. If he rejected the message and was eternally lost, at least his blood wouldn't be on my hands.

With that first effort in soul-winning behind me, I turned next to mass-evangelism. It wasn't difficult to get a crowd. First, there were my many brothers and sisters, and also our big back yard was one of the nicest on the block. The Weeping Willow tree and the creek full of tadpoles, crawdads and other creatures was a magnet which drew kids from all over the neighborhood.

About three feet up from its base, the trunk of the willow split into three prongs. In the center of them was just enough room for one seven-year-old boy to stand. It made a dandy pulpit. One fine summer afternoon, with the help of Paul, Sarah and other siblings, we gathered all our friends and had them sit in rows beneath the sheltering green cathedral formed by the willow branches. Pulling our Red Ryder wagon over to the base of the willow, I used it as a step to mount to the crotch in the tree.

To an eager crowd of about a dozen kids, I announced it was time for the service to begin. First, Paul prayed an invocation, then Sarah led everybody in singing, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine... Let it shine till Jesus comes ... Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine." With the mood properly set and hearts mellowed by the worship, I began my sermon. It was one of my favorite Bible stories and one I felt especially appropriate for the setting.

I exhorted my congregation: "Zacheus was a wee little man, just about as little as we are, and he was a sinner too. One day, Zacheus heard that Jesus was passing by and he climbed up a Sycamore tree, just like I climbed up into this Weeping Willow. When Jesus saw him, he called out 'Zacheus, you come down from that tree.' After he climbed down, Jesus went to his house for tea. Just like Jesus went into Zacheus' home, He will come into your heart if you will repent of your sins, open the door of your heart, and let Him in.

"At that point I paused, lowered my voice, and instructed: "Every head bowed and every eye closed." I'd seen altar calls a thousand times in church and knew exactly how to do it. I asked those who had never invited Jesus to come into their hearts to raise their hands, and 3 or 4 of the kids did just that. Sarah was singing softly, "Just as I am, without one plea...."

I told those who had raised their hands to get down on their knees right there by the creek bank. As they did, and the rest of us "saints" gathered around. We laid our hands on them and prayed earnestly for their salvation with shouts of "Glory to God!" "Hallelujah" and "Thank You Jesus!"

It would be nine years before I preached my first real sermon. I was a happy, adventurous, mischievous boy, typical in many ways, but deadly serious about my religion.

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The photo above, circa 1950, is of the six oldest Conn children in front of the Weeping Willow. They are, LtoR: Stephen, Sara (with Raymond,) Paul, Philip and Sharon.

Chapter 3: Papa was a Preacher

2009-01-22T07:18:00.000-05:00

Charles was a new Christian, just like Edna, when he arrived at the Church of God Bible Training School in Sevierville, Tennessee. Also both of them had fathers who worked for the railroad. Albert C. Conn, Charles' dad, was a mechanic at the Southern Railroad Yard in Atlanta, Georgia. The Conn family lived in the Riverside section of the city, up near the Chattahoochee River.

They were members of Collins Memorial Methodist Church, where Charles served as president of the local Methodist Youth Fellowship. His mother, Belle, was what people called an "old time shouting Methodist," of the Wesleyan holiness tradition. Her children say that when she was a young woman, sometimes when the service got lively, she would "shout her hair down."

Albert, the patriarch of the family, was a good man who supported his wife and seven children in their church involvement, but he did not attend services much himself. Besides his work at the railroad, Albert's primary interest was in the Ku Klux Klan, and he was a leader in that organization.

In those days, the KKK was not exclusively a racist organization, but more a fraternity of men who considered themselves the defenders of all that was right in their own eyes. In other words, they were against anything and anybody who did not act, think, talk and worship in a manner that they considered appropriate. Among other things, they were anti-negro, anti-communist, anti-Jew, and anti-holy-roller.

As a child I heard many stories and read articles of how the Klan had terrorized Pentecostal believers in the southern United States. They were known to drag Pentecostal preachers out of their homes at mid-night, whip them with a lash, and leave them bleeding - sometimes dying. There were other occasions when Pentecostal churches were burned, or shots were fired into those churches while service was being held.

Charles was a very bright young man who had a way with words and a gift for public speaking. He studied anti-Communist literature and developed a talk in which he denounced the menace of Communism. Albert took his teen-aged son all over the Atlanta area to give his speech at Klan rallies. But Charles disappointed his father by never actually joining the KKK. He did not agree with everything he saw and heard at Klan meetings, particularly the racist ideas the Klan embraced.

Charles believed in human dignity for all people and stood up for what he thought was right. As a very young man he sometimes staged his own silent protest by sitting in the back of the bus with the colored folks, in spite of the criticism of his peers and the dismay of his father. This was a full generation before Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to move from her seat in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, which sparked the modern Civil Rights movement.

That was not the only way in which Charles rebelled against his father. He also decided early that he wanted to become a writer. He had a job delivering Western Union telegrams via bicycle in downtown Atlanta. After work, or whenever he could find a spare hour, he would go to the Atlanta Public Library, where he read and studied. In an effort to enhance his image as a writer he bought himself a satchel and had lettered on the side: "Charles W. Conn, Author and Poet."

Charles was only 16-years-old when he caught the eye of a remarkable lady, Willa Scott, who also spent much time doing research at the library. She was an older woman, and a journalist for the Atlanta Constitution. One day Mrs. Scott asked Charles if he would give her his address. She wanted to meet his parents.

Later that day, after Charles took the streetcar from downtown to Riverside, and then walked the last couple of blocks to his family's humble home, he was surprised to see Mrs. Scott already there, talking with his parents. Even before asking Charles, she wanted their permission to become his personal tutor, without charge, and teach him everything she knew about research and journalism.

Albert and Belle Conn were uncomfortable in the presence of this educated and refined lady. Her request caught them totally off guard. Being a writer was not what they had in mind for their son, but they gave their consent. For three years during the gloomy days of the great depression, when prospects for a college education were bleak, Willa Scott poured herself into her eager young student in whom she felt she had discovered a genuine talent.

Albert was an exceptionally intelligent man, and everyone in the community looked up to him as a leader, but he was illiterate, having never had an opportunity for schooling. He thought his son's obsession with books was foolishness. He wanted Charles to learn a trade that would be useful, like farming, building things, or repairing machinery. His son's unwillingness to join the Ku Klux Klan and his refusal to become a farmer or a mechanic caused Albert to despair that Charles would never amount to anything worthwhile.

Although Charles had been involved in the Methodist Church, he had never had a born again experience with God. As an older teenager he began to think more and more about spiritual things. His interest was piqued when a large revival tent was erected in Riverside and a protracted Pentecostal meeting was conducted there, sponsored by the 6th Street Church of God, which is today the well known Mt. Paran Church. At the conclusion of that revival, in 1938, the Riverside Church of God was established, and a church building was erected on Bolton Road, not far down the same street as the Collins Memorial Methodist Church.

Charles was drawn to the joyous worship style and spirited preaching of the Pentecostals. But for a matter as serious as his own eternal soul's salvation, he wanted to seek the counsel of men he considered God's top spokesmen in the city. He also wanted to hear it from more than just one viewpoint. So it was that early one spring morning he found himself riding the trolley into downtown Atlanta, with appointments to meet separately with the pastors of two of the largest churches in the city. They were Jesse Henley, a Baptist, and Bill Boring, a Methodist. Both of these good men took time to counsel and pray with their young visitor that he might receive the gift of salvation, but Charles felt no satisfaction in his heart. So he took the streetcar back home to Riverside.

It was still early in the day, about 11 am, and Charles was the only person on the streetcar other than the driver. As he rolled along the city streets, Charles called upon God quietly and personally, once again asking Jesus to come into his heart. Telling of the experience more than 60 years later he said: "The glorious flood of peace and joy that overwhelmed me, alone on a streetcar, was like an infusion of new life that has been with me from that time until now without question or regret." It was May 1, 1939. One week later Charles attended a service at the new Riverside Church of God where he received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit with the initial evidence of speaking in other tongues. He was now a Pentecostal.

Soon after his conversion Charles felt God was calling him to preach, so he gave up his ambition to become a writer and began making plans to attend Bible School. That fall he packed his bags, and with a tearful kiss and hug from his mother and a handshake from his disappointed father, he caught the train for Tennessee and the Church of God Bible Training School.

It was on his first day at B.T.S. that Charles fell head over heels for Edna, but it took her much more time to make up her mind about him. Charles was almost two years younger than she, and Edna had many other suitors. It required more than a year of constant focused pursuit from Charles before she finally came to love him too. They made plans to marry and enter the ministry together.

Charles began his ministry as an evangelist, traveling widely, mostly by bus, from Georgia, to Ontario, and Louisiana to Iowa. Edna became his willing partner and wholehearted supporter. Those early days were difficult, having no home of their own, and staying with pastors and church members in the towns and rural areas where they ministered.

Nine months after the weddomg their first child, Philip, was born in Decatur, Alabama. Soon thereafter, Charles accepted an appointment to pastor the Church of God in St. Joseph, Missouri, housed in an ornate old Methodist building much in need of repair. The congregation was small, and the people were not a good match for the fledgling pastor. In their mind he was too bookish, and he couldn't even play the guitar. At least the parsonage offered a somewhat stable environment for the birth of their second child, Sarah. After 18 months in St. Joseph, Charles asked to be reassigned, and was moved to the tiny town of Leadwood, Missouri, on the other side of the state, about 60 miles south of St. Louis.

Charles and Edna's ministry was "fruitful" in Leadwood in more ways than one. Not only did the good folks there embrace them with open arms, but the nursery department exploded with growth. Five months after their arrival in Leadwood I was born, and then eleven months after that came Paul, replacing me as the baby of the family. Within the next two and a half years, Sharon and Raymond were born.

It was a snowy winter evening when I came into the world, in the back bedroom of the small parsonage next door to the church. I weighed in at 11 pounds and 10 ounces, Mother's biggest baby. On top of being nine months pregnant, Mom was also down with the mumps on the day she gave me birth. Perhaps that was a factor in my being born hard-of-hearing, although it was several years before that defect was discovered.

The Leadwood church was a strong one, especially for such a small town. About 200 people attended Sunday Services, and my earliest memories include thinking that I was the favorite of everybody in the church. I was a happy child and church people called me "the baby with the million dollar smile." Sister Limp and Sister Jordan would fight over which one got to hold me during the service, and sometimes one wouldn't come if it was the other's turn to keep me.

When I was in my twenties I went back to Leadwood to preach. Sister Limp's daughter laughed as she told me of the church feud I had caused between her mother and Sister Jordan. She also gave me a framed picture of myself as a toddler, which she said sat on the mantle in the Limp house for many years, before her mother passed away.

Dad thought he had given up being a writer in order to become a minister, but it turns out he became both. He began writing articles for the "State Paper" of the Churches of God in Missouri, and soon his talents were discovered by Alva B. Harrison. Sister Harrison, the widow of a Presbyterian minister, published a youth magazine called the Lighted Pathway. After her husband's death, she joined the Church of God and moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, to be near the Publishing House. Her magazine was adapted by the Church of God and became the official youth publication for the denomination, with Alva B. Harrison continuing as editor.

Dad often wrote articles for the Lighted Pathway, and also began to write for the Church of God Evangel, the official organ of the church. When Sister Harrison's advancing age caused her to retire from the editorship of the Lighted Pathway, Dad was invited to Cleveland to take her place. His new job description included not only being editor of the Lighted Pathway, but he was also over all Church of God Sunday School and Youth Publications. As a young child, I was very excited about moving to a new town. Both Dad and Mom were so attached to their church family in Leadwood that they were reluctant to leave. Mom told me that as far as she was concerned, Leadwood was the center of the universe.

Dad initially turned down the offer for a position in Cleveland. However, my parents both believed so strongly in our denominational system that they decided any appointment made by those over them in the church was surely the will of God.

The local grocer in Leadwood was also sorry to see our family go. We were his only customer who bought grits. Our growing family, now with six children, ate lots of grits, and he stocked them especially for us. When we moved to Tennessee, he packed up all he had on hand and sent them with us. We were on our way to the Holy City: Dad and Mom in their old Plymouth, six energetic children, a few suitcases, and a year’s supply of grits.

Chapter 4: Mama was a Beauty

2009-01-21T20:04:00.000-05:00

My mother, originally Edna Louise Minor, grew up in Alabama where her father, William Morris Minor, was an accountant and telegraph operator for the L&N Railroad. Her mother, Cuba Adkins Minor, was a devout and talented Christian woman and the mother of five children: Morris Jr., Edna, Frank, Robert, and Mary.

Edna's earliest memories centered around Warrior, a small community along the railroad tracks a few miles north of Birmingham, where the family lived for a few years. There was a deep ravine behind their Warrior home, and on the other side of it stood a little white frame church, the Warrior Assembly of God. It was one of the earliest Pentecostal congregations to be established in Alabama.

My grandmother, Cuba Minor, who got her first name by being born during the Cuban War, was a deeply spiritual woman with many talents. She was drawn by the joyous music she heard echoing across the hollow behind their house, and began walking the path through the woods to the Warrior Assembly, her five children in tow.

The message Cuba Minor heard at the Assembly of God appealed to her more deeply than did that of the Baptist church to which she was accustomed. She became "filled with the Holy Spirit," with the evidence of speaking in other tongues, and fully embraced the Pentecostal faith. Cuba became the church pianist and took an active roll in leading worship services.

But the message preached at the Assembly of God was a hard one; the church rules were very strict. Young Edna was reluctant to make a commitment to the Lord. The railroad transferred Mr. Minor to El Paso, Texas, at his own request, because he thought the dry climate of the southwest would be good for his asthma. However, after a short tenure in El Paso, the family was homesick and he took them back to Alabama. This time they lived in Decatur, a larger town in North Alabama on the Tennessee River.

There was no Pentecostal church of any kind in Decatur, but my grandmother soon found two other ladies who were also Spirit-filled believers, and the three of them began holding "cottage prayer meetings" in their homes. Because the Minor house was more spacious, it became the primary venue for their services.

These two other ladies had ties to another Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God. Since there was no significant difference in the doctrine and practice of the two churches, Cuba acquiesced to her friends and the three ladies founded what was perhaps the first Pentecostal congregation in northern Alabama, the Decatur Church of God. It soon outgrew the Minor home so the little congregation bought property on Sherman Street and built a new church.

To her mother's dismay, Edna was indifferent to church and Sunday School. When she became a teenager and was no longer required to attend services, she dropped out altogether. Edna was a chaste young woman with high principles, but she was also an uncommonly good dancer, and liked going to the local swimming pool with her friends. She also enjoyed enhancing her natural good looks by wearing a little make-up, had a stylish cut to her hair, and had no qualms about seeing a movie at the local theater.

Dancing, mixed bathing, movies, make-up and cutting your hair were only a few of the many practices that were strictly taboo according to the rigid Holiness standards of both the Church of God and the Assemblies of God. Edna would have no part of it. This indifference toward religion troubled her mother, but being as wise as she was godly, Cuba relaxed the reins of parental control while still praying privately for her strong-willed daughter.

When Edna was 20, a young single evangelist, James L. Slay, came to conduct a revival meeting at the Decatur Church of God. In the evangelist's party was also the LeFevre Trio from Atlanta, Georgia: Eva Mae, Alphus and Uriah. The four of them all stayed in the Minor home for the duration of the revival. Edna had no way of knowing that James L. Slay would one day become a prominent church leader, and “The LeFevres” would gain popularity as one of the pre-eminent Gospel singing groups in America.

At the time, Edna had graduated from Decatur Central High School and was working at a public job in town, though still living at home. She enjoyed the company of the evangelistic team, all of them near her own age, but she never went to church to hear them preach and sing.

Many years later, James Slay would recall how Edna sauntered past the evangelistic team on her way to the swimming pool, bathing suit slung over her shoulder, as they were leaving for church. Even though Edna did not spend a lot of time with the evangelists, they did become casual friends. One day they all enjoyed a picnic together, and no doubt the evangelists made a far greater impression on Edna that any of them realized.

Later that same summer, Edna decided of her own accord to attend a Sunday service at the Decatur church. At the close of his message, the pastor invited all who wished to pray to come to the altar. She went forward and knelt, asking Jesus to forgive her sins and come into her heart. It was August 20, 1939, a day that she celebrated for the rest of her life as her spiritual birthday. Mom has told me that the experience was not an emotional one for her, but simply a decision she made to become a Christian from that point forward. It was a firm commitment from which she never wavered.

Edna's dad was not as involved in church as was her mother, but he was a good man and a devoted father who wanted the best for his children. He encouraged Edna to go back to school to make a better future for herself. The fall term was starting soon at the Church of God Bible Training School, commonly called BTS, located in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Sevierville, Tennessee.

At that time, BTS was just a Bible School, not a degree granting institution. (As the school grew over the years it evolved into what is now Lee University, in Cleveland, Tennessee.) With financial help from her dad, and carrying his own personal Bible which he loaned her to use while at school, Edna took the train to Knoxville. There she caught a bus to Sevierville, and never looked back. Among her classmates were all four members of the evangelistic team who had made such a positive impression on her: James L. Slay and Eva Mae, Alphus, and Uriah LeFevre.

No sooner did Edna arrive on the BTS campus than she was spied by a young man, a new student from Atlanta, Charles W. Conn. Charles was smitten immediately. He says that he fell in love with this tall, statuesque brunette from Alabama the moment he first laid eyes on her. So enraptured was he by the sight of Edna standing there on a staircase, a stream of light from a high window casting a halo over her, that he later wrote a poem to celebrate the moment. Dad is a good poet, but of all his works this is the one I have always enjoyed most. I've heard him quote it a hundred times:

MY OBSESSION

I thought she was an angel
When first my eyes espied her,
Standing there on the staircase
With charm and grace beside her
Or else a queen from some old, forgotten story;
But no! She moved; she smiled -- she smiled at me,
Oh, glory!

I lost my heart that moment
To whatever she might be:
Angel, goddess, queen or maid,
She bound my heart eternally.
Ah! This bondage brought no pain or sad lament,
But love, sweet love, in which my heart has found
Glad content.

Naught had I to give this maid,
No fame and no possession;
Yet to win her heart became
My dream and my obsession.
I gave my love, my dreams, my hopes -- I gave my life;
And with these gifts I made her mine -- my best friend
And my wife.

Chapter 5: Cheaper by the Dozen

2009-01-20T07:39:00.000-05:00

Our family of eight arrived in Cleveland in August, 1949, and in September, the oldest child, Philip began first grade. There were five pre-schoolers still at home. No one could have known that six more children would be born in Cleveland, bringing us to an even dozen.

Mother had her first child when she was 23 and the last when she was 41, so we were born over an 18 year period, with no multiple births. All of us were born at home, and a couple of us arrived before the doctor did. Mother was never in a hospital as a patient in her entire life until a few weeks before she passed away at the age of 78.Here is a listing of the twelve in the order of our birth:

Philip Wesley - January 4, 1942

Sarah Elizabeth - September 21, 1943

James Stephen - January 26, 1945

Charles Paul - December 23, 1945

Sharon Lois - April 29, 1947

Raymond Andrew - August 3, 1948

Camilla Ruth - April 9, 1950

Frederick Mark - October 30, 1951

Mary Catherine - November 12, 1953

David Bruce - December 18, 1955

Peter Jeffrey - January 18, 1958

Melody Anne - February 22, 1960

Before Mom and Dad named us, they wrote each of our names down, studied it carefully, considered the meaning of each name and all the ways in which that name could me used, and thought of every possible nickname. They wanted each of us to have names that would wear well our entire lives.

My first name was for James the Apostle as well as James the brother of Jesus. My second name was for Stephen, the first Christian Martyr. I was also named for J. Stewart Brinsfield, a former president of Lee College, and a man Mom and Dad highly respected. I have signed my name using the first initial J. and my middle name, Stephen, since I first learned to spell it in the first grade.

Each of us had at least one Bible name by design. Philip was also named for John and Charles Wesley. Paul bears our father's name, but not as a "junior." Each of our names has some special significance.

I absolutely loved growing up in such a large family. There were always lots of interesting things going on and plenty of playmates for any adventure that came to mind. I've often heard my dad say that the only way a person can stand the hubbub of such a large family is to either be born into it, like we children were, or to let it grow on them gradually, as was the case with him and Mom.

Dad traveled extensively in his ministry and on his trips he sometimes met people who did not know he was a Pentecostal preacher, but learned he had 12 children. He loved it when they exclaimed, "Oh, you must be a devout Catholic." This set him up for his stock reply, and he would say it with a grin: "No, just a passionate Protestant."

People have sometimes asked me if the rumors were true that my mom had a vision when she was a single young woman that someday she was going to have twelve children. I asked Mother about that once and she told me that when she was a teenager, she had asserted she would never have any children. She said, "God never would have entrusted me with such a vision. If I had known I was going to have 12 children, it would have scared me out of getting married. The only vision I ever had was of sugarplums dancing in my head."

Mother didn't believe in birth control. She always recognized this as a personal conviction, saying it would be wrong for her, but that others must do what they felt would be right for them. She never pushed her personal convictions on others -- not even her own children. Long after I was an adult, Dad told me of a time he tried to use birth control. Mom literally kicked him out of bed, saying, "If God doesn't have a chance, you don't either." If there was no possibility for her to get pregnant, should that be God's will, then there would be no sex.

Mother never planned to have twelve children. She told me how she cried when she learned she was expecting Paul, her fourth child. It was not that she didn't want Paul; but I was so young she still wanted me to have the opportunity to be the baby a little while longer. Mother had the unique ability to make every one of us children feel we were her very favorite child. Some people have only one child; Mom had an only child, twelve times.

Mother often spoke of Susanna Wesley, who was her role model. Susanna, a very godly woman who lived in 18th century England, was the mother of 19 children, including John and Charles, founders of Methodism. In an interview, Mother once said, "What if Susanna had decided that fourteen were enough? Then John Wesley would never have been born, and there would possibly never have been the Methodist Church. Or, what if she had decided 18 were enough? Then Charles Wesley would never have been born, and the world would never have been blessed by his magnificent music."

I've also heard Mom talk about how Susanna, even with 19 children, set aside regular times to be with each child one-on-one. Following Susanna's example, Mama regularly made it a point to spend time with each of us children on an individual basis.

My mother never had a "kid." She considered that a slang term and forbid us to use it around her. Kids were baby goats; she only had children. Once we had a box of Cheerios with bold red letters on the front that said, "Hey Kids!" Mom turned the box to face the wall, and when it was empty, she was eager to throw it into the trash. She was sorry that such an uncouth influence had come into our house and hoped we would not be contaminated by it.

Mother fully expected each of her children would become a leader in the cause of Christ. She believed it so strongly that she felt it her solemn duty not only to train us, but also to instill the Love of God in us, and protect us lest some evil should cut short our destiny. For example, once when two of my brothers and I asked if we could go swimming at Parksville Lake without an adult or lifeguard, she would not hear of it. "What if something should happen and you should drown?" she said, "To let you go without someone to watch out for you would put the future leadership of the Church of God in jeopardy."

Although not all of us have remained in the Church of God, few would say that Mom fell short of her goal of rearing sons and daughters who would be of service to God and mankind. She and Dad produced two university presidents, a college dean, a university professor, two ministers, a preacher's wife, a missionary, several school teachers and administrators, and a wealthy businessman/philanthropist. Their 31 grandchildren are also charting similar courses, among them being teachers, missionaries, ministers, a research scientist, an attorney and more.

I'm sure it must have been a matter of concern with Mom and Dad as to how they would house, clothe and feed so many children, but I never heard them discuss it, except to say that the Lord would provide. I took it all totally for granted. When we moved to Cleveland, it was into a two bedroom white frame house, behind the Church of God Publishing House, on 11th Street. It must have been built before the days of indoor plumbing because our only bathroom, which was in the back of the house in a little hallway, seemed to have been added after the house was built.

Dad's starting salary in Cleveland was $250 per month, plus the parsonage was provided. Although money went further then than now, things were still very tight. When the old Plymouth that had brought us from Missouri finally wore out, we went without a car for two years. Just about everything in Cleveland that was important to us was within walking distance, and if unusual circumstances demanded a ride, a taxi could be hired to take you anywhere in town for fifty cents. Dad's main concern was how he would get to out-of-town preaching appointments, of which he had many.

For those two years, he had to limit himself to accepting invitations to places he could reach by bus or train. Traveling and preaching was not only something he enjoyed doing, it was a part of his calling. Also, the love offerings he received were the only way he had to supplement his meager income.

I was very excited and proud when the day finally came that Dad decided he could afford an automobile again. He brought home a beautiful second-hand Buick Roadmaster. It was a monster of a car and in my favorite color -- blue. I loved the design with little holes along the front fender on each side that looked like they may have been the work of woodpeckers, except that they were lined with chrome.

In our 11th Street house, the larger of the two bedrooms was just big enough to hold two double beds, each pushed against the wall on opposite sides of the room, with a narrow passageway between them. Five of us children shared that bedroom, with three boys in one bed and two girls in the other. Raymond, the baby, slept in a crib in Mom and Dad's room.

We had been living there for well over a year when early one Easter Sunday morning, Dad came into the bedroom to awaken us. He seemed excited, and told us all that the Easter Bunny had brought a very special present. We had a new baby sister, Camilla, named after one of my Mother's aunts. Dad lined us all up and we marched single file into the bedroom to have a look.

Of course none of us really believed in such things as the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. We were taught that such things were only make-believe, but it was okay to pretend.

Later I was to learn more details of Camilla's birth. That very Saturday afternoon, my mama had walked about 8 or 9 blocks to the doctor's office in downtown Cleveland. The doctor had stopped delivering babies in homes, sending his patients to the hospital instead. However, he made an exception for Mom since she had already given birth to a half-dozen children at home.

Mother was about two weeks past due with her seventh child, and the doctor wanted to admit her to the hospital and induce labor by artificial means. She balked, telling him that the baby would come of its own accord; she wanted to leave everything in God's hands.

The doctor scoffed at my mother, treating her as if she were an ignorant bumpkin. After all, he was the doctor and felt he knew better than she. Mom was quite sure he didn't. In a condescending tone, the doctor told her to go home and call him when she went into labor. Mom cried as she walked back to the house because she felt so belittled by the doctor. She prayed through her tears that God would cause the baby to come soon.

In the pre-dawn hours of the next morning, Mom said she felt an unusual pressure as she got up to go to the cold unheated bathroom. And suddenly, as she entered the room, she felt one sudden sharp pain and realized that she was not only in labor but that the baby was actually already coming. She eased herself to the floor and called for Charles.

Dad hurried to Mom’s side and assisted in the delivery of his new baby girl. He placed the baby on Mom's tummy, umbilical cord still attached, and then called the doctor. All of us children slept soundly throughout the entire episode. By the time we got up, the doctor had already come and gone, and Mom and baby had been pronounced fine. For her last five pregnancies, Mother found a new physician, Dr. Stansberry, who treated her with respect.

Mom often said that Camilla’s birth was the easiest she ever experienced. All the others were much more difficult, especially me with my broad shoulders. Camilla was Mom’s second largest baby, weighing in at an even ten pounds. Coming near the center of the twelve, Camilla was a gift to the entire family. She grew up close to all of us, and it is she who has kept us all connected to this day.

With the birth of Camilla, baby Raymond was pushed out of the crib and moved in to sleep in the same bed with his three brothers. This presented a dilemma. Three boys in a double bed had been a tight fit, but four was even more of a challenge.

Here's how we solved it. Three boys slept as usual, one on the right, one on the left and one in the middle. Then, because we were still small, there were a couple of extra feet of unused bed space at the bottom, so one of us slept crosswise at the foot of the bed. Mom set us up on a rotating basis so that each of us had to sleep at the foot only once every four nights, and also every fourth night we each got the favored spot in the middle. There you didn't have to fight for the covers quite so hard.

We didn't sleep in this arrangement for long before we got a roll-away bed that was stored in the hallway, and set up in the living room every night. We boys took turns sleeping alternately in the living room and in the bedroom.

Our only source of heat in that house was a single coal burning furnace which was set up each fall in the living room, and taken down again in the summer. On school days, Mom or Dad would get up an hour before they awoke us children and start a fire. Our bedroom became ice cold on many winter nights. I soon learned to sleep with the clothes I was going to wear the next morning laid at an easy arm's reach beside the bed.

When we were called to get up at 6:30 a.m., I would grab my clothes, and while still under the covers, pull my pajamas off and slip into my school outfit. Then, I would make a mad dash for the living room and stand as close to the furnace as I possibly could, being careful not to get too near the pipe, lest I singe the hair on my head.

When we first moved into the 11th Street house, there was a long white frame building directly across the street from us which served as a girl's residence for the Church of God Home for Children. The home was in process of being relocated to Sevierville into the facilities once occupied by the Church of God Bible Training School. The Children's Home remains in Sevierville to this day and is called Smoky Mountain Children's Home. The Bible Training School was moved from Sevierville to Cleveland when the Church of God bought the former campus of Bob Jones University, which had been in Cleveland but relocated to Greenville, South Carolina. With the move to Cleveland, the name of the School was changed from BTS to Lee College, in honor of F. J. Lee, an early church leader.

Not long after the Children's Home vacated the building across the street from our house, I was playing on our front porch with several of my siblings. A man came up the walkway, holding a little girl by the hand. The girl, who was about my own age, was barefoot and wore a tattered dress. The man had a sad, defeated countenance about him, like someone to whom life had been very unkind. I went inside the house and announced, "Mama, we have company."

Mom came to the front door where the man told her he was there to place his little girl into our orphanage. Mother explained to him that the orphanage used to be across the street but had moved. The dejected man gestured toward all of us children, as we looked on wide-eyed. He argued, "If this here ain't no orphanage, then what are all these kids doing here?"

Mother said that we were her children, but that's not what he wanted to hear. He became upset and the little girl began to cry as her daddy insisted he could no longer take care of her. Mother gently pointed the man in a direction where he might be able to find some help. He walked with heavy, shuffling feet up 11th Street, his little girl clinging to his hand. That experience left an indelible impression on my young mind. It made me feel very blessed, and rich, to live with my family in such a nice house.

We stayed in that 11th Street house for four years. In 1952, Dad was elected by the Church of God General Assembly as the new editor of the Church of God Evangel, and Editor-in-Chief of all Church of God publications. It was a very big promotion for a 32-year-old preacher, especially since, according to the denominational structure at that time, it meant he was now on the Church of God General Executive Committee, the youngest man ever to serve in that lofty position.

The biggest change to me as a child is that this meant our family moved two blocks up the street to a much nicer parsonage, on the corner of 8th Street and Montgomery Avenue. There we had five bedrooms and two baths, but I wasn't happy about the move at all. The yard was much smaller than on 11th Street, and there was no creek or Weeping Willow tree. I had to sacrifice all of that just for the advancement of Daddy's ministry.

Even the 8th Street house became too small as more children were born and the rest of us grew, so Dad created a sixth sleeping area in one corner of the basement. It wasn't a real room, having book cases for partitions on one side and a curtain forming the other wall. There was no door or window, but we did have a rug covering the unfinished concrete floor. Paul and I shared that basement room. I loved having my very own bed for the first time, and as an adolescent I also liked the spaciousness and privacy it provided us. Dad continued in his position as Editor-in-Chief for ten years and we lived in that house until the beginning of my senior year in high school.

Many years later the 8th Street house was torn down to make way for the construction of the Church of God Theological Seminary. Where the 11th Street house once stood is now the lower parking lot of the North Cleveland Church of God.

Feeding twelve children must have also been a challenge for Mom and Dad. I never heard them complain, although I was aware of some of the sacrifices they made. We were rationed, but there was always plenty to eat. For example, if we had fried chicken, my favorite dish to this day, we children were allowed one good piece like a thigh, leg or wish-bone from the end of the breast, and then we could also have a bony piece, like a neck, wing, or back. If I was lucky, I got the gizzard, my favorite of all. Chickens were only sold by the whole bird in those days; there were no pre-packaged chicken parts at the grocery store.

Chicken also sometimes came on the hoof. I remember once when Dad went somewhere to preach, a part of his "love offering" was a live hen. I was fascinated to watch Mom butcher the chicken and stew it with dumplings, although I had also seen this done by my Grandmother Conn in Atlanta.

Along with the chicken, there were always plenty of other good things to eat, like potatoes, beans, macaroni-and-cheese, and fresh vegetables. Sometimes for supper our entire meal consisted of Mom's incomparable cornbread, baked in a heavy black cast-iron skillet, and a big pot of beans -- navy, pinto, or great northern, seasoned with a ham bone.

Another favorite dish was "Daddy Soup." Dad made a big production out of presenting this dish, which was the only thing I ever remember him cooking. "Daddy Soup" was home-made vegetable-beef soup, with huge chunks of vegetables and small whole onions. I thought it was much better than "Mama Soup." Maybe I thought so because Daddy was the king of hype, and he told us his soup was the best in the whole wide world.

Although Mom and Dad had grown a garden in Leadwood, there was no time or place for that in Cleveland. Even though we had a big back yard when we lived on 11th Street, it flooded when the creek overflowed its banks after every big rain, and was not suitable for gardening. We didn't forage for food often, but occasionally we did. One early summer day when Grandmother Minor was visiting us from Alabama, she said she was craving some poke greens. Most folks called it "poke sallet." The way Grandmother described them, poke greens sounded delicious.

She rounded up all of us children who were old enough to walk and led us down behind the house to the creek bank. There she showed us how to find and identify this most desirable edible weed. We gathered a big bunch of it, proudly carried our bounty back up the hill and into the house, and watched with amazement as she cooked them up. Grandmother explained to us how you had to pick the greens young and cook them in two waters, or else they might be poisonous. To me, they tasted like something between collards and spinach, and better than either. To this day, I scout the woods near where we live and watch for the first succulent sprouts of poke as they emerge in the spring. Every time I eat a "mess" of them, I think about Grandmother Minor.

Another food for which we foraged was wild blackberries. Not only was it a great adventure, but we always enjoyed a good blackberry cobbler. We used some of the blackberries fresh, but most of what we found we froze for winter use. There is absolutely nothing better on a cold winter day than a bubbling hot blackberry cobbler, fresh out of the oven, with vanilla ice cream on top. My brothers and I were only too eager to keep the freezer stocked.

Blackberries grew abundantly in an overgrown field which lay between our house and the railroad tracks. Mom's primary concern in letting us go there to pick berries was that we might encounter the hobos who sometimes camped beside the tracks. With ample warnings to be careful, we took Mama's biggest kitchen pots to fill with berries and went to gather our prize.

One very hot, sticky summer day while Paul, Raymond, and I were in the blackberry patch, Raymond accidentally stepped on a hornet's nest that was hidden in the briars. Paul and I were both standing within twenty feet of him. Raymond was immediately stung and began to perform a wailing dance right on top of the hornets, slapping and screaming bloody murder.

Paul ran for all he was worth, and was soon out of range of the stinging insects. Although I was as close to the hornets as Paul, I froze dead still in my tracks, having heard somewhere that if you are very still the hornets won't recognize you as a living being and will ignore you. It wasn't easy standing like a mannequin, seemingly for a solid hour, while dozens of angry hornets buzzed by so closely that I could feel the wind from their wings.

The end result was that Raymond received more than 30 stings. When we got him home, he was covered with huge red whelps and was violently ill. I didn't get a single sting and Paul got two. From that day forward, none of us was as eager to go pick blackberries again, and Mom was just as pleased that we didn't. But, I did miss the cobblers.

Our usual weekday breakfast fare was oatmeal, or cold cereal. However, on weekends, when we weren't rushing to get off to school, we usually had grits, eggs, bacon or sausage, and toast or biscuits, with gravy. Here again we were rationed to one egg, one slice of bacon or sausage patty, but all the grits, bread and gravy we could eat. Sometimes we had pancakes, which was always a special treat.

I showed an interest in cooking from an early age, and Mother let me help her in the kitchen. Saturday breakfast was my specialty. By age twelve I had reached a level of proficiency that allowed me to tell Mom she could sleep late and I would take care of Saturday breakfast.

I took great pride in cooking for a dozen people, starting the grits first, then the bacon or sausage, using the drippings as a base for my gravy. I never mastered the art of making scratch biscuits, so I used the canned variety, but with the gravy over them they were fine. The eggs, usually scrambled but sometimes fried, came last. The trick was in making all of these elements come out hot and tasty at the same time without burning anything. Mom must have thought I did okay because I never remember her turning down my offer to let her sleep late and leave it all up to me.

I also enjoyed baking, partly because it was fun, but also because I loved sweets and we didn't have them on a regular basis. The reward for baking a cake was getting to help eat it. My favorites were chocolate and coconut layer cakes. I enjoyed scratch cakes more than those made from a mix, so Mama let me experiment with making them.

One afternoon shortly after I had baked a coconut layer cake from scratch, we had unexpected company drop by for a visit. It was Brother and Sister G. R. Watson, Dad's former pastor and wife from Atlanta. When we had company in those days, Mom and Dad ate with them in the dining room while we children either ate in the kitchen or waited until the grownups were done. Then, Mom would serve us in a second sitting in the dining room. There simply wasn't room for all of us around the table at once.

That night for dessert Mom served the Watsons a slice of my freshly baked cake, explaining that I had made it with flour, shortening, eggs, butter and sugar. I had even whipped up the icing from scratch. I was only 13 and Sister Watson acted so impressed that she demanded I be brought into the dining room at that very minute so she could brag on me in person. I was so proud it almost made me want to become a chef.

Some of my other siblings also became adept at making fudge or cookies, especially my older sister Sarah. She could even make lemon meringue pies, which I considered something of a miracle. No matter who did the baking, when there were sweets in the house they were strictly rationed. There was no such thing as saying, "I think I'll have another cookie or another slice of pie.” Mom was custodian of the sweets, and she saw to it that whatever we had was divided evenly between all of us.

Besides housing and feeding us children, our parents had to work hard at keeping shoes on our feet and clothes on our backs. Shoes were not much of a problem during the summer. Each spring I eagerly looked forward to the first warm days so I could go barefoot. I prided myself in developing tough calluses on my feet, and when I was younger there were many weeks in summer when I did not see my shoes between Sundays, except for taking them out to go to Wednesday night service at church.

Our family was the only one I knew of that used to get surplus clothing from an orphanage. It didn't happen very often, but on a couple of occasions a big woolen mill gave the Church of God Home for Children more socks or some other item than they could use. So the Home sent some of their windfall our way.

Being the second son in the family meant that much of what I wore was hand-me-downs from my older brother, Philip. We also sometimes got second hand clothes from members of our church who had older children. When we bought new clothing, from J.C. Penney or Parks-Belk department store, it was usually Sunday clothes. These were nicer than what we had for everyday wear.

I still remember the Saturday morning when the phone rang, and after Mom had finished talking to the caller she told me to go three blocks down the street to the Johnson's house on the corner of Trunk and 8th to pick up a sports coat. Paul Johnson, a friend of mine, was a husky guy about a year or so older than me, and he had outgrown his sports coat. I was 15-years-old at this time, and my only blazer was getting too tight and was ready to be passed on to a younger brother anyway.

The sports coat I got from Paul Johnson was the nicest one I had ever had. It was of a tweed design that could go with either green or black slacks. With money I had earned from my part time job in a grocery store, I bought a pair of each. That jacket was what I wore when I preached my first sermon about a year later. And with the two different colors of slacks, it was the dress wardrobe I carried with me on several of my early weekend preaching trips. I wore the green slacks for one service and the black slacks for the next, and hoped that they looked like two different outfits.

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The above photo is one of the few we have of all twelve children together. It was taken in our kitchen at the 8th Street house in Cleveland, circa. 1960.

Chapter 6: Games Children Play

2009-01-19T08:10:00.000-05:00

Life at our house was never boring. There were always plenty of playmates ready and willing to engage in whatever games or adventures came to mind.

Dad was a big fan of Georgia Tech football, since as a child he had lived not far from the Georgia Tech campus. He tried to interest us boys in football by giving us a ball and gold-and-black Georgia Tech helmets and jerseys for Christmas. We would play football in our yard or at a nearby park with three or four siblings to a team. But truthfully, it wasn't my favorite sport. Maybe it was because I was a clumsy kid and never excelled in athletics.

In the seventh grade at Mayfield Elementary School I did give in to peer pressure and tried out for the football team. Dee Frisbee, who was both my seventh grade teacher and the coach, told me I was a tackle and put me on the "B" team. For the first three games of the season I sat on the bench, or would have if we had had a bench. Actually I just stood on the sideline. Then, when our team was 30 points ahead of Templeton Hill School during the fourth game of the season, Coach Frisbee let me go in and play the last quarter. It was no fun at all. The only thing I was allowed to do was butt heads with the big Templeton Hill boys. I never even got to touch the football, much less run with it. After that game, I retired from football.

A favorite game which was unique to our family at the time was Fruitcake Lid. We played this any time of year, but particularly between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas, when we would have a new fruitcake tin. We discovered that the lid was a wonderful object for tossing back and fourth to each other. I could make it sail as straight as an arrow just a few feet off the ground. It would fly all the way across our yard and into the next if someone didn't catch it. Dad enjoyed tossing this with us and we would spend hours entertaining ourselves with it.

On several occasions over the years, a neighbor, or even a stranger passing by, would stop to watch us play and asked us where we got such an interesting toy. They wanted to know where they could obtain one for themselves. We showed them that it was just the lid from a fruitcake tin. Many times Dad mused that we ought to get a patent on the idea and manufacture the "flying saucers." Maybe a fad would catch on, like it did with the hula hoop, and we would become rich. But those occasional musings were as far as the idea ever went. Several years later someone else had the same idea, while tossing the lid from a tin that came from the Frisbie Pie Company, and the "Frisbee" was born.

The type of play I enjoyed most were unstructured adventures like catching wild creatures in the creek behind our house: frogs, tadpoles, salamanders, crayfish and such. Occasionally we would even find a snake and that was really exciting. I learned how to pin a snake down with a stick and grab it behind the neck so I could hold the writhing serpent without being bitten. Of course these were harmless garter snakes or black rat snakes for the most part. The water snakes were much harder to catch and they had a nasty disposition, but were still harmless. Very rarely we saw a copperhead - a poisonous pit viper. Whenever we found one of those we killed it either by hitting it in the head with a stick or throwing rocks. I learned to identify the different animals with books, such as a big volume in Dad's library, A Nature Atlas of North America, and also field guides I checked out of the public library.

One summer noonday Mom called us children in from our play to have lunch. I sat at the table beside my younger sister, Sharon, a toddler not much more than two-years-old at the time. Sharon was chewing on what looked to me like a strip of rubber about 15 or 16 inches long. She took it out of her mouth and laid it beside her plate when the food was passed. That's when we all noticed that the "rubber" toy was a live garter snake. Sharon had chewed on it so thoroughly that the poor little snake just wiggled there on the table for a while and died.

Mom threw the snake out and also washed Sharon's mouth and hands, lecturing her to be more careful of what she put in her mouth. George Kepler, our next door neighbor, worked as a photographer for the local newspaper, the Cleveland Daily Banner. He told a writer at the newspaper office about the incident and the next day a headline on the front page read: "Girl Bites Snake; Snake Dies."

Snakes could be difficult to find when you wanted one, but there was another dangerous animal that was much more plentiful - the honeybee. The blooming of the white flowering crab tree beside our front porch in early spring marked the beginning of the honeybee season. One of the big kids in our neighborhood told me that if you picked up a honeybee behind the neck just right it couldn't sting you.

With so many siblings, not to mention the other children in our neighborhood, there were always plenty of recruits for a vast assortment of clubs. With a club you could have more fun than by yourself. Together you could do wondrous things like build forts or tree houses, fight wars, dig caves, or get stung by bees. That's right, the Bee Sting Club was the most popular of all.

My brother Paul and I originated the club on a long hot summer afternoon as we were watching the bees work the white clover which carpeted our yard. It must have taken us half-a-day before we summoned up enough courage to deliberately pick up our first bee. We each carefully grasped a buzzing insect at the base of the wings, holding it between our thumb and index finger, always keeping a close eye on the throbbing stinger. To our half surprise and great relief, it worked. We weren't stung.

It's not that we really minded bee stings. We had stepped on enough bees with our bare feet that we had acquired a tolerance, if not an immunity, to their venom. We also had learned to keep the Arm-and-Hammer baking soda handy to make a paste for applying to fresh stings to soothe the pain. So now what? What do you do with a live bee in your sweaty little hand? It is said that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but surely the opposite must be true of a honey bee. A bee in the hand is of little value at all.

We decided to carry our prey to the top of a grassy knoll down along the creek bank. And there, while the warm breezes blew and the Mockingbird mocked, the club was born. We each dared the other to place the bee in the palm of his hand and cup it over with the other. Then holding our cupped hands out in front of us, with the honeybee buzzing inside, we closed our eyes, held our breath, and waited for the sting. It didn't take long for the bees to do their part, and when they did we rolled down the hill to the base of the weeping willow, hollering bloody murder all the way.

A crazy idea? Not on your life. When you are eight, and the sky is blue, and the sun is hot, and the summer is eternal, our actions made perfect sense. Our exaggerated screams of agony summoned an instant swarm of brothers, sisters, and neighborhood kids who congregated under the shade of the Weeping Willow to hear of our brave and heroic exploit. We explained to our admirers that we had just started a new club, the most special and exclusive one of all. It was the Bee Sting Club, and it was only for the strong, the daring and the brave.

In order to belong you had to be stung by a bee. After that a sting a day was required to maintain your membership. Peer pressure had never known a finer moment. Everyone wanted to join - except chicken Richard, who was known as a Mama's boy anyway. We thought surely our parents would hear the commotion and come stop our madness. They didn't. And one daring soul after another took his turn of plucking a bee from a clover blossom, climbing the hill, cupping his hands, waiting for the sting, and them rolling in the grass. Each of us tried to outperform the other in our torturous cries, while our playmates cheered. It gave new meaning to the term, "The agony and the ecstasy." The neighborhood supply of baking soda was soon exhausted.

Most of our clubs only had a lifespan of a few weeks, but two of them lasted an entire spring and summer. They were the 4-H Club and the Mad Men. My older brother, Philip, came up with the idea of starting a 4-H club. We lived in town, not in the country, and they didn't have a 4-H at our school. However, Philip had heard about a club by that name from one of his friends, and although he had no idea what the name meant he thought it was a good one and wanted to start such a club himself.

Philip called a meeting of six boys. It was Phil, Paul and me, and also the three Burt brothers who lived up the street from us: Daniel, Larry and Neil. We decided that our first major club project would be to raise money with which we would purchase a pocket knife for each of us. The knives cost 59 cent each, plus tax, downtown at the F. W. Woolworth five and dime store.

We figured we would need four dollars, which would require collecting 200 returnable pop bottles to be cashed in at Vest Grocery for two cents each. Soft drinks didn't come in cans or throw-away plastic containers in those days, just returnable bottles. Those bottles were as good as money and finding them along the roadways, back alleys, and railroad tracks became a pursuit which occupied us for weeks. Every day we would walk the three quarters of a mile to Arnold School and back by a different route, scouring every roadside and ditch for bottles.

Occasionally we would find a beer or whiskey bottle and we had heard that the returnable deposit on them was a whole nickel. Even though the temptation was great, we were horrified at the thought of doing anything that would encourage the evil of drinking. We reasoned that if one of the bottles we redeemed for cash were refilled and someone were to drink out of it, we would be an accomplice in their sin. We would be partially responsible for someone losing their soul and squirming for all eternity in hell. That was unthinkable, so whenever we found a beer bottle we would quickly pick up a rock or any other nearby object and with a righteous zeal we would bash it to bits. I always held my breath when we broke beer bottles because I didn't want to smell any of the fumes. You just couldn't be too careful in the presence of such evil.

When the day finally came that we had 200 bottles, we loaded them into two Red Ryder wagons and all six members of the 4-H Club hauled them the six blocks to Vest Grocery to cash them in. I was so excited that I was soon going to have my very own pocket knife - a well deserved reward for all the many weeks of hard work.

Bill Vest, the owner of the store, looked over our bottles with a sour expression on his face and counted them carefully. He then straightened up, arched his back and grunted from all the leaning over. "Boys, these bottles are dirty," he drawled. "I'm not going to be able to give you but a penny each for dirty bottles. How does two dollars sound?"

My countenance fell. I was no dummy; it was clear that Bill Vest was ripping us off. He was going to turn those bottles in to the man who delivered his soda and get full credit for them, and was taking advantage of us just because he felt he could get away with it. Mr. Vest had a reputation for being stingy anyway. Behind his back everyone in town called him "Make-a-Buck-Vest," and now he was going to steal two bucks from us.

Our protests fell on deaf ears. Vest held out two one dollar bills and Philip, our club president, reluctantly took them.

Dejectedly pulling our empty wagons back home we discussed what to do with the money. Philip suggested that since we only got half the money we expected, we should buy only half the pocket knives on which we had planned."

But which three of us will get the knives?" I asked.

Philip explained in a matter-of-fact tone that it would only be right that the three oldest get the pocket knives. That would be Philip, Daniel and Larry, leaving nothing for Paul, Neil and me. To settle the question Philip called for a vote. There was a tie, three votes for and three votes against the motion. Philip explained that in such a case the votes of the three oldest of the club counted more, so the three youngest would just have to wait and get their pocket knives after we had collected more bottles. I was heartsick. That would take forever. It seemed we had already cleaned out every back alley and roadside ditch around and I doubted there were 200 more empty bottles in the whole county.

Philip, Daniel and Larry headed off to Woolworth's to buy their pocket knives and Paul, Neil and I went home and had a meeting under the Weeping Willow tree. We were mad - really mad - first of all at Bill Vest and also at our older brothers. We decided then and there that we would secede from the 4-H and form our own club.

"What are we going to call our club?" Neil asked. "We're mad, so let's call our club the Mad Men." I suggested. "Yeah," Paul agreed, "The Mad Men's Club." And so it was.

When Philip, Daniel and Larry returned from town with their new pocket knives, they found that we had torn down the 4-H fort that the six of us had been building from scrap lumber in the woods down by the creek. While they surveyed the ruins, we ran around them in circles, whooping like banshees, and shouting, "We're the Mad Men and we declare war!" The feud lasted until school started back in the fall.

It happens that waging war was very much to the liking of all of us. We didn't fight all the time. Often the six of us would play together as we had before. But whenever the mood struck us, which was often, the Mad Men would announce the time and place for a battle and both we and the 4-H would make our preparations.

For some battles we would gather up every available garbage can, arranging them in two rows about 50 feet apart. Next we would collect an ample of supply of small rocks or stones. Hunkering down behind the trash cans, and using the lids for shields, we hurled stones at each other until one side called a truce. After a few stone-throwing battles, that got to be a little boring, so we expanded our arsenal with spears and bows and arrows we made from saplings scavenged in the woods.

Bombs came next. These consisted of paper bags filled with gravel, broken glass, rusty nails, or whatever else we could find. The most feared of all our bombs, and my personal favorite, also carried a special ingredient - dog poop. The two oldest Conn Sisters wanted to join in the fun, so Sarah sided with the 4-H and Sharon joined the Mad Men. Because they were girls we didn't give them full fighting rights. Both sisters had the title of "cook and ammo girl" for their respective camps. The "cook" part meant that they would bring us vanilla wafers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or whatever else they were able to scrounge in the kitchen. The job description for "ammo girl" was to make bombs. We boys were quite happy with this arrangement because we didn't really relish collecting dog poop. Fortunately Sarah and Sharon both knew a woman's place. Women's liberation had not yet been invented.

I came up with one battle plan that was truly brilliant, if only it would have worked. I positioned myself up in the Weeping Willow tree on an overhanging branch with three bricks, one in my hand and two in my lap. Then Paul and Neil called for a battle. Their job was to taunt the 4-H boys by making faces at them and calling them names. When the 4-hers began to chase Paul and Neil, they ran directly beneath my perch. I was waiting to drop the bricks on the heads of our enemies. Fortunately for them I missed.

Actually this was all in good natured fun, and nobody ever expected that anyone would actually get hurt. However, during the thick of one battle Philip let fly with a home-made arrow and it stuck into Paul's head with a thud, right behind his left ear. Paul had to be rushed to the emergency room at the hospital to have the arrow extracted. The doctor said it just missed doing serious damage. Our parents didn't know about the wars until the arrow incident. After that war was outlawed. We made our peace, and turned to less violent pursuits, like the Bloody Nose Club.

I conceived the concept of the Blood Nose Club with brilliant cold logic. The idea first came to me when I heard the story of the straw that broke the camel's back. Just one straw was as light as a feather, but enough of them piled on one after another would ultimately break a camel's back, or so the story goes. So I reasoned that a single feather-light tapping on the nose would hardly be felt. And if I continued to tap the nose ever so lightly, with each blow being only a feather harder than the one preceding it, then when the blows were sufficient to raise blood, the person being hit would hardly notice it at all.

That seemed entirely logical when I was nine years old.. I ran my idea by Philip, Sarah, Paul and Sharon but none of them bought it. Then I shared my theory with Raymond, and he volunteered his nose for a test run. We got a cold wet cloth ready to sop up the mess. Raymond then laid down on the grass, face up, and closed his eyes. From the World Book Encyclopedia I took the "S" volume, the heaviest book in the set, and straddled over my little brother, to hold him down just in case he changed his mind. Ever so softly I touched his nose with the book, then again just a little more, then again and again.

I kept asking, "Does it hurt yet?" and he would wince and say, "Not really." Raymond was such a tough kid; I liked his spunk. Within three or four minutes Raymond was initiated as the first full-fledged member of the Bloody Nose Club. After we got the bleeding to stop, and went back into the house for a fresh cold wet rag, I laid on my back in the grass and took my turn.

Raymond was either very impatient or he didn't fully understand the concept behind the club. He abbreviated the process and in only four or five whacks he brought me gushing into the brotherhood. I must confess that this club was not one of our most popular ones. Even the Bee Sting Club had more members. But four or five siblings finally joined, although none were eager to submit to regular bleedings to maintain their membership.

Our 11th Street house had a full walk-out basement divided into four quarters. On one corner was a utility room with washer, drier and freezer. Another corner became the family room and library, and yet another was made into a bedroom which Paul and I shared. The garage corner was basically empty. It was here that we children often played on rainy days, and it was also here that I first felt "the power."

At church people often testified of feeling the power of God. Some said it was just like electricity going through their bodies. Others described it as hitting them at the top of their heads and going out the soles of their feet. Often I would hear preachers, especially the evangelists who frequently visited our church, say, "Oh hallelujah. I feel the power. Don't you feel it, Saints of God?" And the sanctified brothers and sisters would shout back. "Amen, I feel it." As they did, some would recoil in a jerk and shout out "Whoop, Glory!" I imagined I could actually see the current of God's glory going through them.

I wanted to feel that power and often prayed that God would zap me like he did the evangelists and the testifiers. But God never did. I reasoned that if it felt like electricity going through your body, then I could at least get a sample of that anointing if my coat hanger theory worked.

An electric outlet on the basement wall had a broken cover and copper wires were visible through a small crack. I noticed it every time I plugged the radio in to that receptacle to listen to the Lone Ranger broadcast, which came on every afternoon at 4:00 o'clock, shortly after I got home from school.

One day after the Lone Ranger and his sidekick, Tonto, had rode off into the sunset for another day, I unplugged the radio and looked long and hard at the glistening bit of exposed copper wire. Working up my courage, I thrust the end of a metal coat hanger into the socket. The power hit me like a bolt of lightning and knocked me to the floor. It was the first time I ever fell out under the power.

I was elated with my new discovery. And like anyone with a new spiritual experience, I could hardly wait to find someone with whom to share it.

Sarah was always game for an adventure, and she was my first recruit. After Sarah was zapped, and picked herself up off the floor, we decided to try it holding hands and see what would happen. The power went through both of us. I had heard something about rubber shoes serving as an insulator, so our next experiment was for me to put on my tennis shoes while Sarah stood barefoot. I then held Sarah by the left hand while I touched the coat hanger to the wire with my right. It was amazing. I only felt a slight tingle and Sarah was knocked to the floor again.

One by one Sarah and I brought our other siblings to the basement, only telling them that we had a surprise for them.

We both wore tennis shoes, and made sure that our victims were bare-footed on the damp concrete floor. We told them to take our hand and close their eyes. It was wonderful. One by one all of our siblings felt the power, and after we explained to them how we had done it, each one was more than eager to go and recruit the next victim. Before supper that night there was a line of us nine kids long, all holding hands and wearing tennis shoes, except for the last one. It was as much fun as what our pastor called a "gully-washer revival."

By the way, please DO NOT try this stunt at home. It is said that the angels watch over children and fools. In this instance, we qualified for angelic watchcare on both counts.

I wish the angels had done a little better job when we started the Blind People's Club. But then maybe they were on duty, because Raymond could have been hurt much more seriously than he was.

This club actually started out of empathy for the blind. I had seen such a man in our town, with a white cane, tapping out his footsteps as he walked along. Some of us children had been discussing what it must be like to be unable to see. So we thought we would find out.

Paul and I were the first two to blindfold ourselves. Three blocks from our house was Fowler's grocery, across the street from Mayfield School. We went there often to pick things up for Mom. The proprietor, Russell Fowler, was a member of our church and prided himself in knowing all of us children by name, and even keeping up with our ages. We figured the three blocks from our house to Fowler's Grocery would be a reasonable distance to travel in our experiment.

With blindfolds we made of cloth baby diapers, we felt our way up Montgomery Avenue to the corner of 11th Street. Crossing this street was our biggest obstacle. We did it by standing on the curb and listening intently until we could not hear any traffic, then we made a mad dash until our feet found the curb on the far side of the street. From there we had two more blocks to go down People's Street. Our second intersection was only an alley, with scant traffic, so it presented no significant problem.

What a proud moment it was when we stumbled into the front door of the little store, took off our blindfolds, and told Mr. Fowler of our accomplishment. He just smiled and told us we had better be careful. I'm not sure he believed we had actually done it without peeking, but we had. We put out blindfolds back on as we exited the store and found our way back home the same way.

Upon hearing of our exploit, the other children were more than eager to join the Blind People's Club. We all thought it was such an adventure that some of us went to Fowler's Grocery and back blindfolded three or four times over a period of as many days. But that all ended the morning that Raymond collided with a car while crossing 11th Street. The automobile didn't hit Raymond so much as he hit it. He ran right into the side of the moving vehicle, and the back right tire rolled over the top of his right foot.

The man driving the car was horrified at the sound of the thud and the sight of a screaming little kid with a crushed foot lying there on the pavement. My concern was for Raymond, and also for myself, for the licking I knew I was going to get as the club's founder and president. The stranger put Raymond in the back seat of his car and took us home. Then he rushed Raymond with our mother to the hospital emergency room. When they returned a couple of hours later, Raymond was hobbling on crutches, sporting a huge cast on his right foot, and proud to report that he had eight broken bones.

The Blind Man's Club ended that day never to be revived again. However, it was only a couple of days before rambunctious Raymond was ready for a new adventure. It was summer. The honeybees were still buzzing. Raymond was behind in his membership obligations but eager to catch up. Hobbling outside on his crutches he managed to find three bees in the clover that were close enough together that he could step on all three at once with his good bare foot. With three bee stings on the sole of his left foot and eight broken bones in the right one, he took a few days off to recover.

Chapter 7: Rich in Books

2009-01-18T08:47:00.000-05:00

My brothers and sisters and I were playing one day beside the small creek that bordered the back yard of our 11th Street house. Some black children who lived behind us also came down to the creek that day. A stretch of woods separated their house from the creek. From our yard, we could barely make out where they lived, up the hill, through the trees.

I didn’t see those children often because their mama didn’t allow them to go into the woods. However, that day they had slipped down to the creek and we played together for a while. They told me that our family was poor, which was news to me.

I had heard of poor people but it never occurred to me that we might be counted among that number. I saw nothing poor about the fact that there were ten of us living in a two bedroom house. I thought poor people were like the men who slept in the hobo jungle over by the railroad tracks. Sometimes one of them would come and knock on our door to ask Mama for something to eat, which she always gave them. I had also seen poor people scavenging in the city dump over in Gum Hollow, when I had gone there with Dad to carry a load of trash. We weren’t like that; we weren’t poor.

Still I wondered, so I went into the house and asked, “Mama, are we rich or are we poor?”

“Oh, we’re rich, Son,” Mama said. “We don’t have a lot of money but we’re rich in many ways.”

“Like what, Mama?”

“We’re rich in love; I’m rich in children and you’re rich in brothers and sisters,” Mama said. “And we’re rich in books.”

Rich in books; I liked that. Mama was right about it. There were literally thousands of books in our house, far more than any of our friends had. From a very early age I had been taught to love and respect books. I ran out of the house and down to the creek bank. Cupping my hands like a megaphone, I yelled at the top of my lungs, up toward my little friend’s house. “We’re rich in books! We’re rich in books!”

Dad was, and is, the most obsessive bibliophile I have ever known. His personal library, at its peak, numbered more than six thousand volumes, and they were all organized and lovingly cared for. There were books everywhere in our house, and lots more at his office.

As an editor, Dad was fortunate that almost every Christian publisher in America sent him review copies of everything they printed. But he also bought books -- lots of them. In addition to Christian books, our family library also contained most of the classics, reference works, including three different sets of encyclopedias, many history books, hundreds of books for children and youth, and lots more.

Our library was legend in our town. There were times, both at Mayfield Elementary and at Bradley High School, when teachers couldn’t find what they were looking for in the school library, so they asked one of us children to check and see if we could find it at our house. Often we could. Even the Cleveland Public Library was known to call Dad and see if he had a certain book which wasn’t on their shelves.

Before we children could read, Mom and Dad would read to us. Mom had a ritual for celebrating the first frost every autumn. On that day, she would gather us children around her and read from a book of poetry by James Whitcomb Riley: “When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock….”

I loved that poem and looked forward to the first cold snap every year so I could hear Mama read it again. There were other poems in that book which I knew by heart, such as “Little Orphant Annie,” and “The Raggedy Man.”

As soon as a few of us older children learned to read, Dad set up a program to encourage our reading habits. Every book in his library was classified and we were rewarded from one to ten points for each one we completed. Mom and Dad kept a careful record and we were given a penny for each point. A children’s book under 50 pages got one point. A novel over 100 pages brought a nickel, and a longer non-fiction book could fetch up to a dime. Since we never got an allowance, reading books was my chief means of earning money until I got my first job at age 10. There were also other ways we were encouraged to read -- like having siesta.

Dad returned home once from a missionary trip to South America and called a family meeting. School had just been let out for the summer and Dad informed us we were going to begin a new family tradition -- one he had learned about on his trip. It was called "Siesta." Beginning that very day, and until the first day of school in the fall, we would observe Siesta every Monday through Friday.

Siesta was scheduled from 1 p.m. until 3 p.m. There would be no playing and no talking. We had only two options; we could take a nap or we could read. I never knew of anyone to sleep during that time except Mom and maybe the babies. All of us children read, both from the family library and books we checked out from the Cleveland Public Library. In the course of a typical summer, each of us would read several dozen books.

Most comic books were not allowed in our house. Superman and other super heroes were too violent. Cowboy comic books had shooting in them, and we weren’t allowed to play with toy guns, or read about cowboy guns. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were forbidden because of their foul language. Those cartoon characters frequently used words like “Gee, Golly, and Gosh,” which Mama said was just a different way of saying Jesus or God. We couldn’t read anything that took the Lord’s name in vain.

Of all the books in our house, the Bible was number one. When we were very young, Dad told all of us children that he expected us to read the entire Bible through before we reached our 12th birthday. Upon completion of reading the Bible cover to cover, we were to be awarded the princely sum of $10, which was much more money than I had ever had at one time in my whole life.

On the evening of my 10th birthday, I began reading the Bible through, and it took me more than a year to complete it. At Dad’s suggestion, I read the New Testament first, and then went back to the Old Testament. I read it all in the Authorized King James Version. I was aware of a few other translations in existence, like the Moffat Bible which I sometimes heard preachers quote, but the King James was the only Bible readily available, and it was considered the most reliable.

Dad’s idea to read the New Testament first was a good one. I enjoyed reading the Gospel accounts of the miracles of Jesus, although I had already heard all of it before in church and Sunday School.

The Old Testament was more difficult for me to understand. I got bogged down in all the genealogies, and some of the blood and gore and sex scenes were things I didn’t hear preached about too often in church. The Bible was the only book I could read that had violence in it. I plodded through and earned my ten dollars before I turned 12.

Not only did we children read the Bible, but we memorized huge chunks of it. Even before we could read, Mother would spend hours with us children, teaching us by rote to recite many of the Psalms and other favorite passages from both the Old and New Testaments. We were rewarded for quoting Bible verses from memory. Depending on the length, we might be given a nickel or a dime for a passage of Scripture.

Once, in preparation for a statewide Bible quiz for the Church of God in Tennessee, I memorized the entire books of II Timothy and Titus. I took the top prize for the North Cleveland district and made it to the state finals in Daisy, Tennessee. I lost out to another contestant when I had a mental block while standing in front of the big crowd.

When I was six, the summer before Paul and I started first grade, we learned the books of the Bible. One morning at church our Sunday School superintendent, Brother Bridges, announced a contest. He held up a five dollar bill and said that in two weeks he was going to give that very five dollar bill to the youngest Sunday School scholar who could stand up in front of the church and recite, in order, the names of all 66 books of the Bible.

I immediately had mixed feelings. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I could memorize the Books of the Bible if I wanted to, even though I couldn’t read yet. The problem was Paul. He was almost 11 months younger than me and if he decided to memorize them too, I wouldn’t have a chance. There was only one prize and it went to the youngest.

Walking home from church that afternoon I asked Paul, “Are you going to learn the books of the Bible?”

Just as I feared, he was, so that left no hope for me. I immediately abandoned the idea of even trying. If I did learn the books of the Bible, I couldn’t make myself younger than Paul.

About a week later, Paul could recite the entire Old Testament and was closing in on the New. On Monday evening, he stood in front of the family at our devotional time and recited all the way from Genesis to II Corinthians.

Dad turned to me and asked, “What about you, Stephen? How many of the books can you recite? Are you going to try to win the five dollars?”

Why should I learn any of the books of the Bible? There was absolutely no incentive for me to do so. Paul was going to win that five dollar bill and there was no way I could beat him -- not even if I quoted the books of the Bible backwards, while I stood on my head and gargled peanut butter at the same time -- naked. Paul was younger than me and I didn’t have a chance.“I can’t name any of them,” I told Daddy.

After devotions, Dad called me aside and said how disappointed he was that I wasn’t going to try to win the contest. I thought Dad was either really stupid or that he thought I was. I tried to explain to Dad that Paul was going to win the contest, and there was no use in my trying. I just couldn’t get him to understand. He ordered me to learn the books of the Bible whether I won a prize or not.

For the next five days, I studied the books of the Bible with Mom. Paul and I also studied them together. By that Saturday night, I stood up in family devotions and recited all 66 of them, with only one quick gasp for breath after Malachi. I fervently hoped that Paul would wake up Sunday morning with the flu, or maybe measles.

The next day, at the closing exercises for Sunday School, in front of the whole North Cleveland Church, Brother Bridges asked all of the boys and girls who had learned the books of the Bible to rise to their feet. About a dozen of us stood.“

Wonderful! Now all of you who are more than 12 years old, please be seated.” Three older kids sat down.

We lost a few more successively when he called for those who were 11, 10 and 9. After a couple of 8-year-olds were eliminated, only Paul and I remained. I still stood my ground while Brother Bridges called out, “Any seven-year-olds?” But when he asked for six-year-olds, I had to sit down. Paul stood alone at age five, beaming from ear to ear.

Brother Bridges called Paul up to the platform and asked him to face the congregation. Paul quoted the books of the Bible flawlessly. The whole church cheered when he was awarded the five dollars.

That afternoon when we got home from church, Dad and Mom called me and Paul together and did something I thought was a bit unfair, but I was still very glad they did it. They told Paul that since we both had memorized the books of the Bible, and since we were brothers and also the two youngest standing, he should share the prize. Paul got three dollars for first place and I got two dollars for coming in second.

Another reason we children spent so much time reading is because we didn’t have a television in our house. Dad wasn’t one of those hard-line Pentecostals who thought television was a sin. He enjoyed watching TV, but he and Mom agreed that having one in the house would be a detriment to family life. They did not get their first television until after I was grown and had moved away from home.

In the beginning, we didn’t have a television because none was available. I remember when the first television station went on the air in Atlanta, Georgia, 120 miles south of Cleveland. Only two people of my acquaintance got TV sets then. One was Bill Vest, who owned Vest Grocery, and the other was Lee Bell, who was a member of our church and a friend of our family.

To pull in a signal from Atlanta required a very tall tower, set up with guy wires, which also necessitated a considerable outdoor space. A rooftop antenna wasn’t powerful enough do the job.The first program I ever remember seeing was a Georgia Tech football game at Lee Bell’s house. Since Dad was a big Georgia Tech fan, Brother Bell invited us over on Saturdays whenever a game was televised. All television was black and white then, and the best picture we could pull in was often fuzzy or snowy.

A few years later the first station came to Chattanooga, and very soon thereafter there were three Chattanooga stations. Almost everybody in Cleveland got a TV then. All that was required to bring in a clear signal from Chattanooga was a rabbit ears antenna which sat on top of the television set.

Whenever one of us children asked when we were going to get a television, Dad’s standard answer was that we would get one as soon as all twelve children had each read all 6,000 books in our library.

Although we didn’t have a television, we did have a high fidelity record player, and Dad had a large collection of 33 rpm records -- mostly classical. Some of my friends referred to our house as Conn’s Library and Hi-Fi Shop. Dad tried, with limited success, to instill in us children an appreciation for classical music.

Elvis Presley became very popular when I was a pre-teen, but Dad wouldn’t allow any of his “vulgar” music in our house. I did listen to Elvis on the radio in my room sometimes, along with other singers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Pat Boone. I enjoyed the vintage rock-and- roll, as did my siblings. Paul once dared to smuggle into the house a 45 rpm single of Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel.” Unfortunately, Dad found the record, confiscated it, and we never saw it again. He felt it was his duty to guard us children against such unwholesome influences.

One day Mom got a new automatic washing machine to replace her old Wringer Washtub. The new one had a round glass front door through which you could see the wash cycles. It was a fascinating sight to behold. I thought that washing machine looked a lot like a big white television set -- and in living color too. Color television wasn’t even available yet.

I sat and watched that washing machine go through its cycles, timing each one of them. Then I listened to a couple of my favorite records in Dad’s collection: the William Tell Overture and the Grand Canyon Suite, noting the time of each movement. I particularly liked the William Tell Overture because a portion of it was used as the theme for The Lone Ranger, a program I listened to on the radio.

From these elements, I put together a program and then gathered all my brothers and sisters around. Putting a load of laundry in to wash, I turned on the record player, setting the wash cycles to music. I played the “Cloudburst” movement of the Grand Canyon Suite during the rinse cycle and when the spin cycle kicked in I had the William Tell Overture blasting, with the Lone Ranger riding into the sunset. Now that was entertainment!

Chapter 8: Speaking in English

2009-01-18T00:23:00.000-05:00

It was not until I started first grade that I realized I couldn’t talk plain. Up until then, about the only people in the world I knew were church people. If any of them noticed my speech impediment, they did not call it to my attention. Maybe it’s just that I was such a shy little kid that I never talked much anyway, except to my own family, and they all understood me.

My teacher in first grade, Miss Dugan, had a very difficult time comprehending things I tried to tell her. She often made me repeat what I said several times before she caught on. Also, some of the other kids in the class made fun of the way I talked. Since I was naturally shy anyway, I soon learned not to speak at all unless it was absolutely necessary.

One day, some of the kids at school had been particularly unkind in mocking my speech. I made a decision; I would never open my mouth again in school. As Paul and I walked home together that afternoon, I explained my reasoning to him.

I figured there were three gestures that covered all the communication that was really necessary. I could shake my head up and down to mean “yes.” I could shake it side to side to mean “no.” Or, I could shrug my shoulders to signify “I don’t know.” That should take care of just about every situation.

For several weeks I tried to follow my policy of speechless communication, but I soon learned it didn’t work in every situation. Sometimes I had to talk -- especially when Miss Dugan asked me a question that could not be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.”

Miss Dugan became very concerned about my inability to express myself and my acute shyness. She called my parents in for a conference. It was decided I should see a speech therapist.

One afternoon the next week, I was exempted from class and was taken a couple of blocks up the street to the Bradley County Health Department. This was to be the first of six years of speech therapy. In the beginning the sessions were weekly, but over time they became less frequent.

I remember that first meeting with the therapist well. A man in a white coat sat across a table from me in a little room and held up pictures, asking me to tell him what I saw.

I did okay on some words, but when it came to “pie” and “fish,” he went back and asked me to repeat the words over several times. He wrinkled his brow and wrote things down in his notebook.

The therapist asked me to stick out my tongue and touch my nose. I stuck it out and put my finger to my nose. He looked exasperated. “No, Son, not that way. Touch your nose with your tongue.” He stuck out his own tongue and curled it up to touch the tip of his nose to demonstrate.

Now I was the one who became frustrated. I could barely get my tongue out of my mouth and up over my upper lip. It came nowhere close to touching my nose.

The man asked me to whistle. I already knew I couldn’t do that. I had been trying to learn to whistle for years. My brothers and sisters had even tried to teach me how to whistle, but to no avail. Whistling was just one of those things I couldn’t do.

The speech therapist diagnosed my problem. My tongue was too short and too thick. He said I would just have to practice the difficult words over and over in hopes that I would eventually learn to pronounce them a little better.

In some ways I enjoyed the weekly visits to the Health Department for speech therapy because it was a break from the classroom. But trying to say the words that I just could not get to come out right was very frustrating. It sounded to me like I was saying them right.

After I transferred from Arnold to Mayfield School, in second grade, I no longer went to the Health Department. Instead, a lady therapist came to the school for regular visits.

At Mayfield, my therapist set up a table in a corner of the gymnasium, the only available spot in the school, and met with me there. This woman seemed to know what she was doing more than the man at the Health Department. After a couple of years, she was replaced by someone else. But with one therapist or another, I would meet for periodic lessons until I completed sixth grade.

The second therapist agreed with the initial diagnosis that I had a short, fat tongue. She also tested my hearing. That was my main problem. The hearing test showed that I had a 40% loss of hearing in my left ear and a 60% loss in my right ear. Jokingly, I used to tell people I had a 100% hearing loss. When they looked at me quizzically, I would explain. 40% in one ear and 60% in the other equaled 100%. All told, I figured I had the equivalent of one good ear.

But worse than my overall diminished hearing, there were certain high frequencies I couldn’t hear at all. This made it very difficult for me to distinguish sounds such as a soft “f”, or “th”. For example, “mother” sounded to me like “mudder,”
and “think” sounded like “fank”, so that’s the way I said them. I had a particular problem with many words that had the letter “i” in them.

The therapist wanted to know if I had ever had the mumps. I told her I was the only one in our family who had not had the mumps. I related to her how my mom had been down with the mumps on the day I was born. When my siblings got the mumps but I didn’t, she supposed I must have acquired immunity from within the womb.

The therapist decided I had been born with my hearing defect. It was determined that even a hearing aid would not enable me to hear the high frequencies, which was the primary cause of my speech impediment.

Slowly over time, either I learned to talk better or the kids at Mayfield learned to understand me better. Either way, the ridicule from my school chums subsided.

A lot of the kids at school went to the Baptist church, which I thought was the Babless church because that’s the way I heard the word spoken. That name made sense to be because they babbled less than we did at the Church of God. I was absolutely amazed when in the fifth grade I saw the word “Baptist” in a book and asked someone what it meant. They told me, “Oh, you know that, Stephen. It’s the Babless Church.” I found it hard to believe. In written form, Baptist didn’t look at all like Babless.

It was when I was around kids I didn’t know so well that I had the most problems. One such instance was at church youth camp. I loved camp, and it was a highlight of every summer from the age of 9 through 18. The first year that I was too old to be a camper, I became a counselor. Later, as an adult, I served as a camp director for many years.

One summer camp when I was eleven, I had a particularly traumatic experience. That summer I was housed with about 20 other boys in a large tent with wood shavings for the floor. We had army style cots arranged in a circle around the sides of the tent, and the center was empty, except for the tent pole.

My counselor that year was James. He was a preacher’s kid who was still a teenager himself. James was a hero of mine. He lived just a couple of blocks down the street from us in Cleveland. My buddies and I from North Cleveland had requested that we be put in James’ group because we looked up to him so much. Five or six of the boys in the tent were from our church, but the others were from different parts Tennessee.

There was a little jingle going around at that time which kids enjoyed singing:

Pie, pie, tater pie,
I like good ole tater pie.
P – I – E - E – I – P, pie.
I like good ole tater pie.

Whenever I sang this jingle, my “i’s” and “e’s” sounded exactly alike. “Pie” sounded like “pee”, “like” was pronounced “leek”, and “tater” came out “teeter.” I didn’t like to sing the song because other kids made fun of me when I did.

Every day after lunch all of the campers had to return to their tents for 30 minutes quiet time. We were told this was to let our food digest before we began the afternoon recreational activities. It was during this quiet time that someone in our group told James about the funny way I sang the “Tater Pie Song.”

James ordered me to get up in the center of the group, stand by the tent pole, and sing it. I protested, but he told me he was the counselor and he was giving me an order. “Stand up and sing.”

I had always been taught to obey those who have authority over you, and the fact that James was an immature teenager did not matter. He was my counselor and I had to do what he said. I reluctantly went over by the tent pole and gave my rendition of the jingle.

The boys around me in the circle guffawed and mocked me until I was in tears. For the rest of that week, some of those boys continued to taunt me. Whether it was on the ball field, in the cafeteria, or at the swimming pool, whenever they saw me they would point at me, laugh, and sing, “Pee, pee teeter pee, E leek good ole teeter pee….” It was one of the most traumatic weeks of my life.

At home, my family never ridiculed me for the way I talked, and some of my younger brothers and sisters even talked a little like I did. Dad said it was because they learned to talk, at least in part, by listening to me.

Not only did I take speech lessons at school, but Mother also worked with me at home.

One night during family devotions, while Dad was away, Mom asked me to read the Scripture for the evening. I chose a passage from Philippians 4, which contains the phrase, “think on these things.” The only problem is that I read it “fank of dese fangs.”

After devotions, when the other children were sent up to bed, Mom asked me to stay downstairs and talk for a while. Over and over we worked on that phrase. Again and again I repeated it exactly the way I heard it: “fank on dese fangs.”

And then, in a flash of inspiration, I blurted out, “I’ve got it, Mudder, it’s not ‘fank on dese fangs.” It’s ‘fink on dese fings.’”

Mother cried and pulled me close to her bosom. “That’s better, Son. Now run on to bed. We’ll work on it some more later.”

With lots of hard work, therapy, trial and tribulation, by the time I completed sixth grade I had fairly well overcome my speech impediment. It would take a few more years before I would overcome my extreme shyness. That didn’t happen until about the time I learned to speak in tongues.

Chapter 9: A Peculiar People

2009-01-17T23:38:00.000-05:00

It has never been cool to be Pentecostal. Even as a very young child I was well aware that we were different from other people. It was evident by the way we dressed -- especially the women. They wore long dresses (slacks were forbidden), long sleeves, high necks, and absolutely no jewelry or make-up. We were Holiness people, and some people called us Holy-Rollers, although for the most part we didn't call ourselves by that term. We considered it derogatory.
The Pentecostal/Holiness dress code was so severe that we stood out almost as much as the Amish do in today's society. There were many times I would go to town or out to a restaurant with Pentecostal friends, very aware of how different we looked, and hope other people did not notice. But of course, they did.

Some people despised us Pentecostals, a few admired us, and most people just tolerated us -- as long as we stayed on our side of town. In many places, that meant staying on the "other" side of the railroad tracks. In Cleveland, it meant remaining on the east side of Ocoee Street, which was U.S. 11.

This was very evident when I was a student in elementary school. During first grade, I attended Arnold School which was on the west side of Ocoee Street, and I was the only Church of God student in my classroom. When I was in second grade, I transferred to Mayfield School, on "our side of town." There were seven or eight other Church of God kids in my class then, including my brother Paul, but we Pentecostals were still a decided minority. That's remarkable when one considers that Cleveland was a small town and the International Headquarters of the denomination, with probably more Church of God members per capita than any other spot on earth.

We were a peculiar people and proud of it. Often I heard it said in church that the Bible calls God's people peculiar. One brother loved to proclaim it every time he would testify. With a self-righteous grin, he would loudly declare, "Halliluyer, I'm peculiar." We had Scripture to validate our status: "But ye [are] a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light:" I Peter 2:9.

We Pentecostals expressed our peculiarity primarily by the long list of things we did not do. And the list was longer for women than it was for men. We did not drink alcohol, smoke, chew tobacco or dip snuff. We didn't participate in worldly amusements, such as going to motion picture theaters, skating rinks, bowling alleys, ball games, pool halls, etc. Golf was denounced as “cow pasture pool.”

We didn't dance except in the Spirit, like the old-time Shakers and Quakers. Women wore long hair, usually piled up on top of their head in a bun. Men wore short hair, off the collar. We wouldn't dream of going in mixed swimming with the opposite sex. All jewelry and make-up was taboo. The list went on and on. I knew one minister's son who was "churched," or ex-communicated by his own preacher father for tossing a ball back-and-forth with a friend on Sunday. Even the preacher's kid was not allowed to desecrate the Lord's Day.

When I was a high school student, we had a revival meeting at our church. One of my unsaved school friends attended. She gave her heart to the Lord one night in our altar, and the next Sunday morning, when an invitation was given for new members to join the church, she went forward. A sanctified sister in the congregation stood and interrupted the minister, pointing out that this young lady was wearing a finger ring and therefore should not be allowed to join the church.

The humiliated and confused girl burst into tears and fled. I never saw her in church again. Some in the congregation were appalled and embarrassed by what had happened. Others commented on how glad they were to see someone stand up for old-time Holiness. They said the church couldn't afford to sit idly by and allow the world to creep in like that.

In Dad’s office at the Church of God Publishing House, he had a large magnifying glass in his top middle desk drawer. It was used for inspecting photos before they were published in any official church periodicals. Photos that were sent in from “the field,” picturing a church group, revival meeting or the like, weren’t usually a problem. But sometimes, to illustrate his article, Dad used a photo service such as that of H. Armstrong Roberts. Those pictures he had to screen carefully to make sure no one in them was wearing a finger ring or a necklace.

Most Pentecostals were sincere in their rigid legalistic beliefs. Many were also self-righteous in their attitude, and quick to condemn anything or anyone they considered "worldly."

As ultra-strict as the North Cleveland Church of God was, we were ridiculed by some other churches in the denomination for being too liberal. Many Church of God preachers railed against radio and television. I've heard some rant especially hard against the evil of watching I Love Lucy, and other such shows which were considered an evil influence. Some called it "Hell-a-vision" -- the devil's pipeline into the American home.

There was a pastor in Georgia whom I knew well who was one of those who railed against television for years, and then he succumbed to temptation and bought one. He told the congregation that he only bought it to watch the news so he could keep up with current events. He said he took the knobs off the T.V. and kept them locked in a safe place so his sons could not watch television while he was away.

Shortly after the television was placed in the church parsonage, a sister stood during a Sunday service and proceeded to prophecy. Speaking in a deep, loud, demanding tone, as if the very voice of God were speaking through her, she proclaimed: "Yea, I say unto thee, thou sayest thou hast bought thy T.V. to watch the news. But I say unto thee, thou hast bought it to watch I Love Lucy. Thou shalt be cut off, yes-sir-ee Bob." Her prophecy came to pass. Shortly afterwards, the pastor was forced by the congregation to leave that church and go find a more "liberal" congregation.

There were also those who preached against drinking Coca Cola, although we drank it in the fellowship hall at North Cleveland. One sister from a small mountain congregation in Kentucky saw me drinking a Coke one day when I was in college, and severely rebuked me. Not only did she consider Coke a "strong drink," which the Bible cautions against, but she said it was also known to contain cocaine.

I informed her that Coke actually did carry a trace of cocaine in its original recipe, but that it had long since been deleted from the drink's formula.

"That doesn't matter," she insisted. "You're drinking out of a bottle and liquor comes in bottles." She reminded me that the Bible teaches we are to avoid the very appearance of evil. According to her, I was destroying my testimony, and as a young preacher, it was especially wrong. Someone may see me drinking out of a bottle, presume it was alcohol, and it would cause that soul to be offended, stumble, and be lost. She warned me that that person’s blood would be on my hands.

Pentecostals as a whole lived on the lower end of the socio-economic strata. Most of our church members were poorly educated blue collar folks, although there were exceptions. I was very aware that there was not a single Church of God teacher in the entire Cleveland City School System when I was a student there. When I went to Bradley Central High School, which was in the county school system, I was very proud that two of my teachers were members of the Church of God. Both attended the North Cleveland church.

One was Mr. Wilson, my speech teacher, who served for a while as Sunday School Superintendent at the church. The other was Mrs. Platt, wife of the president of Lee College, but people at the church talked about her because of her worldly ways and lack of dedication to the Lord. She sometimes wore a light dab of lipstick at school. That was considered worldly and no “dedicated” Church of God member would think of doing such a thing.

The first time I ever felt persecuted for my faith was in first grade. Although my brother Paul was also in first grade, he was in a different classroom. A little girl in my room was having a birthday, and to celebrate it her parents reserved the entire Princess Theater in downtown Cleveland. They made arrangements to take our class to the theater on a field trip to see the movie Heidi.

The day before the field trip, our teacher, Miss Dugan, gave us all permission slips to take home and be signed by our parents so we could go see the movie. Only two of us, a girl who was a member of the Church of the Nazarene and I, were not allowed to go. That afternoon while all our classmates were at the theater, the little Nazarene girl and I were given coloring books and crayons and put at a table in the school cafeteria, where the kitchen help could keep an eye on us.

In a funny sort of way I felt both inferior and superior. The inferior feelings were brought about by the condescending looks and offensive remarks from my classmates. Even though they may be members of a Baptist, Methodist or Presbyterian Church, deep inside my heart I felt we Pentecostal/Holiness folk were more righteous than they. That was the reason for my sense of superiority. I was proud of my humility.

I took comfort in feeling I was somebody special in the eyes of God. In my mind, the very Creator of the universe Himself was partial toward Holiness people. I knew God had other children besides us, but in my sincere, young heart I was quite certain we were His favorites. But, I still wanted to see Heidi.

Actually, we Pentecostals could watch movies; we just couldn’t go to the motion picture theater to see them. We lived practically next door to Lee College, which was a Church of God school, and they showed movies there. I wondered why it was that we were not allowed to go to the Princess Theater downtown or the Starview Drive-In Theater to see a show, but a few months later when the same movie was shown in the Lee College auditorium, we could see it then.

Mom said there were three reasons. First, while some movies playing at the theater were good, others were bad, with people smoking, cursing, drinking and killing in them. If we went to a wholesome movie like Heidi, we would be supporting the same theater that showed the bad movies and that would be helping the Devil’s work.

Second, someone might see us go into the theater and not know what kind of movie we were going to see. That could cause them to be offended, or cause us to destroy our testimony. There were many things that were not necessarily wrong within themselves, but if doing them caused a weak brother or sister to stumble and fall, then it would be a sin.

Finally, I was told that the movie theater is a worldly place. Sinners go to theaters and they do sinful things there. I wasn’t sure what kind of sinful things went on in theaters, but I imagined it must include swearing, smoking, drinking, gambling and fornicating. That’s no place for a Christian.

There were a few students who came to Lee, especially from rural mountain areas, who were aghast that movies were being shown on campus. They protested that Lee was compromising with the world and becoming too liberal. When I became a student at Lee, I had a couple of classmates who refused to even watch an educational film that was shown in the classroom. The teacher allowed them to lay their heads on their desk and not watch, lest they violate their own conscience.

I loved going to movies when they were shown at the Lee College auditorium, which was fairly often. Since the church and the college forbade members or students from attending worldly amusements, they seemed to feel a responsibility to provide alternative entertainment.

Whenever a movie was to be shown at Lee, it first had to be pre-screened by a committee of faculty and ministers. In addition to his work as an editor for the Church of God, Dad also taught some classes at the college, so he was on the pre-screening committee. I loved it when he let me and some of the older children go with him to the pre-screenings.

They were held in a large projector room in the basement of the Lee College library. Usually 30 or 40 people were present, as the other pre-screening committee members also brought their wives and children. Everyone loved a good movie.

As the committee viewed the movies, they took notes of any objectionable words or scenes, and those were cut out before the movie was shown in the school auditorium. One Biblical movie had a scene where Salome did the Dance of the Seven Veils before King Herod. It was one of the most awesome things I had ever seen. Even as an eleven-year-old, I knew it wouldn’t pass the pre-screening committee. Sure enough, when I saw the movie again during its public showing in the auditorium, the dance had been deleted.

One of my favorite movies was the 1939, 20th Century Fox black-and-white classic, Stanley and Livingstone. It was a missionary story about Dr. David Livingstone, and a newspaper reporter named Stanley, played by Spencer Tracy. Because the movie was so popular and had a strong Christian message, it was shown for a Friday night youth service at the North Cleveland Church of God and again on Saturday evening at Lee. Both times the movie played to packed houses. It was the most exciting film I had ever seen, and almost caused me to dedicate my life to being a missionary in darkest Africa. I saw it three times, including the pre-screening. The parts where Stanley was smoking a pipe were cut out before the public showings. It would never be acceptable to allow a picture of a person smoking in church, or at the church college either.

The first time I ever went to a theater to see a movie, my dad took me and two of my brothers, but he assured us it wasn’t a real theater. We were traveling with Dad to the Church of God Florida State Camp-Meeting in the late 1950s. The camp-meeting, where Dad was to be a featured speaker, was in a large open-air tabernacle in the small town of Wimauma. In the nearby city of Tampa, there was a new “Cinerama,” a theater with a large wrap-around screen which was showing a special feature about a sailing ship called Windjammer.

Dad wanted to see Windjammer, but first he had to convince us boys it was all right. He explained to us this wasn’t an ordinary theater. The film was shown in a special building and used a newly developed “cinemiracle” process. It required three projectors and an ultra-long curved screen which enveloped the audience in the picture.

Philip, Paul, and I questioned Dad because we still weren’t sure that either Mother or God would approve. I think I was more reluctant to go than my brothers, but I did want to see the movie. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have because I wasn’t totally convinced we weren’t sinning by being there -- especially when Dad ordered us boys to not dare tell anyone what we had done, because they might not understand.

Later that same summer I had another close call with sin, and almost missed Jesus’ Second Coming.

Every summer we children, two or three at a time, spent a week with my grandparents in the Riverside section of Atlanta, Georgia. There were so many things I enjoyed about going to Riverside. Sometimes the week coincided with Vacation Bible School at the Riverside Church of God, which was fun. Granddaddy had chickens, a goat, a big workshop, and there were woods to explore out behind the house.

My grandparents didn’t get indoor plumbing until I was a little older. In the early days they had a hand-dug well behind their house from which they hauled water up with a rope and pulley. Beyond the well, a path led down the hill to the outhouse. Saturday night baths in Atlanta were on the back porch in a galvanized tub. Water was pulled up from the well one bucketful at a time, and heated on the propane stove. I thought that was fun.

Sometimes Granddaddy would take us children with him on his Watkins Products route, or to the Southern Railway Station where he used to work before an incident in cleaning a tanker car caused him to suffer from lung problems. On the hottest summer evenings, he took all the men and boys in the family to the bath house at the railroad yard to take a shower.

The thing I liked most about going to Riverside was being pampered by Dad’s family. He had four sisters, a brother, aunts, uncles, cousins and other assorted kin who were all fun to visit. I especially enjoyed my unmarried aunts who loved to unleash all their maternal instincts on me and my siblings.

Aunt Idelle and Aunt Fay were very good at taking us to do things. They gave me my first ice cream sundae and my first Chinese food. Also, most every summer we could count on a trip to the Grant Park Zoo.

It was when Aunt Idelle and Aunt Fay took me and Paul to the Fox Theater in downtown Atlanta that I was afraid they had crossed the line and led us into the paths of sin.

When Aunt Idelle first asked if we would like to go to the Fox Theater for a Saturday Matinee, I immediately rejected the idea. “We’re not allowed to go to the theater,” I told her. “It’s a sin.’

Aunt Idelle was a devout Christian, and served as Sunday School Secretary at the Riverside Church of God. She knew the rules, and kept them. But this was different she explained, “It’s only a sin to go to the theater to see a movie. We’re going to hear a concert with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.” We told her that if she was sure it was okay with God, we would go.

As we rode the trolley from Riverside to Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta, I was already having second thoughts. I remembered a sermon I had heard an evangelist preach at the North Cleveland church not long before. It was about the rapture and how people who weren’t ready when Jesus came, which would probably be that very day, would be left behind.

For as long as I could remember, I had been expecting Jesus to come back at any moment. People at church always talked about doing things tomorrow or next week by adding to the end of their sentence, “…if the Lord tarries.” He had already been tarrying since I was just a little kid. Now, I was eleven years old and He hadn’t come back yet. I was sure He would return at any moment.

As the trolley rolled on toward the Fox Theater, I recalled how in 1953, I had been talking to my cousin Ronnie in Grandmother’s front yard about the Second Coming. I had noticed that the address on my grandparent’s house was 1958 Main Street. “Wouldn’t it be something,” I mused, “if Grandmama’s address and the year were both the same number?” But Ronnie and I agreed that would never happen. The world as we knew it wouldn’t be here in 1958. Jesus would most certainly have raptured us away long before then.

It had been three years since I had that conversation with Ronnie. Every time I returned to Atlanta I remembered, and marveled that Jesus was still tarrying. Now here it was 1956, just two more years until it would be the same number as on the Conn’s Main Street house. The Lord had already delayed His coming longer than anyone ever thought possible. Surely He would be back soon -- probably that very afternoon.

I thought again of what the evangelist had preached. “When Jesus comes again for His Church, people in the theaters will be left behind. People at the ball games, in the dance halls, pool halls, bowling alleys, skating rinks and other places of worldly amusement will be left behind.” The preacher said that when Jesus comes to rapture His church, He won’t even look under the roof of such wicked places because He knows that no Christians would be found there.

The trolley stopped a half block from the Fox and I drug my feet behind Aunt Idelle, Aunt Fay, and Paul, praying all the way for Jesus to please delay His coming for just one more afternoon. And if this was to be the day He came again, which I was sure it probably was, would He please look under the roof of the Fox Theater, because I was just going to be listening to a symphony orchestra and not watching an ungodly movie.

Atlanta’s Fox Theatre was originally built as the Yaarab Temple Shrine Mosque in the late 1920’s. It has been called “an outlandish, opulent, grandiose monument to the heady excesses of the pre-crash 1920’s.” It is a mosque-like structure complete with minarets, onion domes, and an interior décor which is even more grandiose than its facade.

The interior depicts an outdoor Arabian courtyard with a sky full of flickering stars and magically drifting clouds. I was so taken by the place, especially the ceiling with its star-studded sky, momentarily I forgot that Jesus was probably en-route from Heaven at that very moment to rapture His church. Then, as the orchestra started to play, I remembered Jesus and looked up, anxiously searching the starry ceiling for any sign of His appearance.

I looked around me with great compassion for the multitude of sinners in that ungodly place and thought what a terrible shame it was that all of them were going to be left behind, and me with them, unless God was merciful.
“Please, Dear Jesus,” I pleaded silently as I dug my fingernails into the upholstery on my chair. “Please, won’t You tarry just a little longer? Let us out of here before You come. And please forgive me for being here with all these sinners.”

The concert seemed to go on for hours. When the last encore had finally ended, I gave a huge sigh of relief and we walked out onto the sidewalk. The bright afternoon sun surprised me. We had been in there under the starry sky for so long, I had forgotten it was still daytime.

My first thought upon exiting the theater was to wonder if Jesus had already come and gone, and we had missed Him. The streets of the city were filled with people -- hundreds -- maybe thousands of them. How, I wondered, could I know whether Jesus had already come or not. For many anxious moments I looked up and down the street until suddenly I saw a sign from the Lord.

There, on a corner waiting for the traffic light to change, was the most welcomed sight I could have imagined. It was a middle-aged lady in a flower-print dress with long sleeves, a low hem line and a high neck. She didn’t have on a dab of lipstick and not a single piece of jewelry could be seen dangling from any part of her body. Better yet, she had long hair that was all piled up on top of her head in a bun. That was a Holiness woman if I had ever seen one. There was absolutely no question in my mind that if the Rapture had taken place, she is one person who would have been caught up to meet the Lord in the air, but here she was standing on Peachtree Street.

“Hallelujah! Thank you, Jesus!” I exhaled. That was a close call.

Aunt Idelle and Aunt Fay walked with Paul and me a few blocks down the street to a cafeteria and told us we could have anything we wanted for a mid-afternoon snack. I selected a beautiful slice of cake. I was uncertain of the flavor, but it looked yummy. I was more than half way through my dessert when Aunt Idelle asked, “Stephen, did you know that was rum cake?”

I was devastated. God had just delivered me from the theater, and here I was already sinning again. I pushed the cake aside and a big lump came up in my throat. Silently I prayed that God would please forgive me just one more time, and I explained to Him that I would never have chosen that particular piece of cake if I had known it had rum in it.

There was a song we sometimes sang about such things. It was just a fun “camp song,” but it was fraught with truth:

We never eat cookies
‘Cause cookies have yeast,
And one little bite makes a man like a beast.
O can you imagine a sadder disgrace
Than a man in the gutter with crumbs on his face.

We never eat fruitcake
‘Cause fruitcake has rum,
And one little bite turns a man to a bum
O can you imagine a sorrier sight
Than a man who gets drunk on just one little bite.

Away, away with the rum, by gum,
With the rum, by gum, save a bum, by gum.
Away, away with the rum, by gum,
The song of God’s Mighty Army.

Chapter 10: Law and Order

2009-01-16T20:00:00.000-05:00

Mom and Dad each shared the responsibility of rearing us children, but because of Dad's work and travel commitments, Mom was the chief organizer and enforcer of the rules. To a casual visitor at our house, it may have sometimes seemed chaotic with so many children all clamoring for attention at once. Actually, I never knew of a moment when everything wasn't under control.

Around the dinner table there might be six or seven totally different conversations going on at the same time, but with a single word, either Mom or Dad could immediately call us all to order. A remarkable thing about our parents is that not one of us twelve children can remember a time when either of them raised their voice in frustration or anger. Yelling was not allowed inside the house, although we children sometimes howled like a pack of wild hyenas when we were outside playing.

Our home was, for the most part, a happy comfortable place, but it was also run with military-like precision. Everyone knew what the rules were and no one dared step out of line, at least not for long.

Every day after school we were to report to Mom for the assignment of our daily chore, and only after that was done were we free to play. Of course there were exceptions. For instance, if it was my turn to help with the dishes, then I could play until after supper.

As the six older children matured, we were each assigned one of the younger six to watch over. This worked out particularly well on Sunday mornings when we were all preparing for church. When I became a teenager, I always had two people to dress, myself and either Mark, Bruce, or Jeff.

Dad and Mom were both strict disciplinarians. They believed totally in the Biblical admonition, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him,” Proverbs 22:15.

We were reminded often that spankings, or whippings, were meted out for only two reasons: lying or disobedience. I thought that was redundant since it was disobedience to tell a lie. I suppose it was just my folk’s way of emphasizing that always telling the truth was of utmost importance. The only lie I ever remember consciously telling was the one to my first grade teacher on the afternoon before I was saved.

Whenever one of us children received a paddling at school, and that happened to me four or five times a year, it meant an automatic spanking at home. When I got to high school and they began giving detention instead of paddlings, I was spanked at home for that too. The punishment at home was always more severe. Regardless of whatever excuse or explanation I might give, the school teacher or principal was always presumed right.

School spankings were usually administered by the principal -- Mr. Wilson in elementary school and Mr. Schultz in high school. Mr. Wilson had a mean looking paddle carved out of a 1x6 piece of lumber. Etched on one side of it were the words, “Board of Education,” and in the center was a big hole, an inch in diameter. We were told that the hole was there so the paddle would raise blisters, although it didn’t.

Because of fear that a student might accuse the principal of administering unreasonably harsh punishment, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Schultz always had a teacher come into their office to serve as a witness.

The school spankings were tolerable, and I considered getting one a badge of honor. The worse part was the spanking I knew I was going to get at home.

My parents didn’t have a paddle. They spanked either with a belt or a switch. When we lived on 11th Street and had lots of overgrown bushes behind the house, Mom or Dad sometimes sent us children out into the yard to select a switch for our own spanking and bring it to them.

Choosing a switch was excruciating. If I brought in too small of a switch, it would not pass muster and would be discarded in favor of the belt. The trick was to find a switch that was as small as possible without being too small. It was an art at which I became very adept.

When one of us was due a spanking, and Dad was away, Mom would give us a choice to either be spanked by her, or wait until Dad came home and be spanked by him. My choice depended on my mood at the moment. Mom didn’t hit has hard as Dad, but she didn’t have as good an aim either. A blow on the back or legs was worse than one on the butt. Dad always hit the mark, so I usually chose to wait and take my punishment from him.

It was very unusual for me to go an entire day without a whipping. My parents were probably imitating the same stern discipline which they had endured as youngsters. Some of my friends had parents who were just as strict, so I accepted it as normal.

I also had friends who said their parents never spanked them. I both envied and felt sorry for those children. I envied them for not getting whippings. I was sorry that their parents didn’t love them enough to discipline them.

I never doubted the love my parents had for me -- especially my mother. Mom and Dad always exhibited a united front in their discipline and one never disagreed with the other in front of us children. However, on more than one occasion, I overheard my Mom privately plead with Dad not to be so hard on me.

Once Dad came home from a preaching appointment and gathered all of us children around. He wanted to tell us about an experience he had that weekend.On Saturday night, Dad had stayed in a church parsonage with the family of the pastor of the church where he was preaching. He had shared a bedroom with the pastor’s son. That evening, after the lights were out, the pastor’s boy declared, “Brother Conn, my daddy really does love me and my sister.”

“That’s wonderful,” Dad replied. “I’m sure he does.”

“He loves us so much that he wouldn’t spank either of us for anything in the world.”

“Children,” Dad said. “I just want all of you to know that I love you even more than that preacher loves his children.”

For a fleeting moment, a ray of hope sprang up within my heart. I thought Dad was about to announce that he was repenting for ever having spanked us and would never do it again.

“I love you so much,” Dad said, “that if I ever catch one of you being disobedient or going astray, I’m going to whip you until you get back in line and don’t make a shipwreck of your life.”

My almost daily spankings didn’t come because I was a rebellious child. I wasn’t. They usually came for goofing off when I should have been doing my chores, not doing my homework, or scuffling with my brothers and sisters. No doubt the number one reason for spankings was for fighting.

We children probably didn’t fight any more than most siblings and the fights were never serious. But Mom and Dad had zero tolerance for any kind of squabbling. If one of my brothers hit me, and I hit back, even what we called just a “tap,” both would get a spanking.

For example, Paul and I shared a double bed for most of our growing up years. We had an invisible line drawn down the center of the bed, and the two of us had an agreement that if the other crossed that line, he was fair game. If I awoke in the night and found Paul’s leg or head over the line, I had the right to beat the living daylights out of that part of his body until it was withdrawn across the line. Likewise, he had the same privilege concerning me.

The problem with our system was that Mom and Dad didn’t agree with it. No hitting was allowed for any reason. If one of us yelled loudly enough for Mom and Dad to hear, the hitter was spanked. If the other hit back, we were both spanked.

Although I generally thought the punishment Dad and Mom gave us was fair, at least in their own eyes, there were a few times that I questioned my Dad’s judgment.

One particular instance was when Dad had just returned home from a preaching trip that had kept him away for more than a week. We children knew what was to be expected when he returned.

Dad sat in his easy chair and lined us all up like stair steps in front of him, from the oldest to the youngest. Beginning with Philip, we were each ordered to confess everything we had done during Dad’s absence that deserved a whipping. After each tearful confession, he would ask each of us other children if the one being interrogated had left anything out. If any of us could tell of a single misdeed that the other had done but not confessed, he would receive twice as many licks with the belt for that infraction.

After Philip admitted that once he had disobeyed his mother and another time he had stayed out past his curfew, he obediently got down on his hands and knees and Dad gave him the number of lashes he deemed appropriate for the crime.

One by one this continued as each child bared his or her heart, and was summarily spanked. No one dared leave out a single punishable offense because we all knew our siblings would be only too willing to tell, and then we would really get it.

When Dad had left on this trip, I knew that judgment day would come upon his return, as it always did. I was fearful of my dad’s wrath, and while he was away I had made a concentrated effort to be obedient to my mother, to stay out of fights with my brothers and sisters, and to always do my homework and keep the family rules. I honestly could say that I had done nothing deserving of a spanking.

Dad questioned me sternly, demanding that I tell him the truth. I quivered in fear but stood my ground; I had been a good boy. Dad questioned the other children, calling each by name one at a time. “Can you tell me anything Stephen has done that deserves a spanking?” I shivered and waited. They all answered, “No sir, Stephen didn’t do anything wrong this time.”

Dad passed me by and went on down the line, ordering the others to confess their own wrongs. Paul, Sharon, Raymond and all but the youngest babies each got a whipping. Then, before Dad dismissed us, he looked back at me and commanded sternly, “Stephen, get down on your hands and knees in front of me.”

Tears welled up in my eyes; a lump rose in my throat; horror struck my heart. “But why, Daddy?”“

I can’t believe in the entire time I was away you didn’t do at least one thing that deserves a spanking.” He said. “It’s not right for everyone else to get spanked and not you. Let’s just say that I’m going to give you a whipping for general principles.” He spanked me as hard as if I had disobeyed.

Dad had told us children often that when he had to discipline one of us, it hurt him more than it hurt us. From that day forward, I never believed it again.

When I started to school, Dad informed me that he expected me to make all A’s and B’s. He warned that if I brought home a C, I would be spanked for disobedience, because I was capable of better grades.

I made my first C in third grade, and I cried all the way home from school with my report card. I had been excited at the beginning of third grade because I knew that was the year I would learn to write in cursive. I thought that was a very grown-up thing to do.

I eagerly learned cursive, but I was not well coordinated and didn’t have the prettiest handwriting in the world. In those days the teacher graded students on penmanship, and Mrs. Smith gave me a C.

To my great relief, Mom and Dad discussed my C in penmanship and decided to make an exception for only that subject. They explained that penmanship had less to do with intelligence and more with coordination. They knew I was clumsy, so I was given a pass that time.Later, when I brought home C’s on subjects like history and arithmetic, I was spanked. Dad said I had a near genius IQ, so anything less than an A showed I wasn’t trying and anything less than a B deserved a spanking.

Worse than the spankings were the long talks I often had with Dad, usually late at night. He would frequently call me down to the dining room after the other children had gone to bed. That is where he wrote his books and articles at home in the evenings.

He would have me sit down across the table from him and berate me until I wept profusely, telling me that I was going to be a failure in life if I didn’t make better grades. He said I wouldn’t even be able to get a job pumping gas at a filling station but would have to dig ditches.

When I started to cry, I think it made him feel badly. He told me often that the reason I was crying wasn’t because he was being too hard on me. After all, he loved me and was just trying to help me. The reason I was crying, Dad said, is because I had overactive lachrymose (tear) glands.

A particularly vivid memory I have is of such a talk with Dad on the evening of my twelfth birthday. I was very excited about turning twelve. I was on the verge of being a teenager. To me, that meant I was practically grown. That evening Mom had cooked a special dinner, which had been followed by a gift from my parents and birthday cake for all.

Maybe it was something about my turning twelve that triggered Dad that evening. I suppose he thought I was almost grown too, and an utter failure. After the other children had gone to bed, I was called down to the dining room for one of our talks.

Dad told me that I was no longer a child but a young man, and he was concerned that I was not turning out well. Of all his sons, Dad said that I was the one most like him. That’s why he was harder on me than the others. He berated me for more than an hour about my grades, my poor posture, my being over weight, and other flaws. My lachrymose glands kicked in big time.

Then, Dad got down on his knees in front of me. “It’s your birthday and I’m not going to spank you this time,” he said. He started to cry himself, but I strongly suspected that his tears were just theatrics.

“Son,” Dad sobbed, “I have failed you as a father, because someway, somehow I have not motivated you to do better in school so you can someday amount to something worthwhile in life.”That’s when Dad handed me the belt. “Here, Son, take my belt and spank me for failing you so much as a father.”

More than anything I wanted to take advantage of this unexpected opportunity, grab the belt and wallop the daylights out of him. But I didn’t dare. I wasn’t sure Dad was really sincere, and even if he did take a beating from me that time, I felt he would even the score the next time he spanked me -- which I knew would be soon.It was almost midnight when I was sent back up to my room. I was still lying awake in my bed thirty minutes later, when Dad called me down again.

Dad seemed remorseful that he had ruined my twelfth birthday. He apologized, and at the same time defended what he had done as being prompted only out of a heart that loved me and wanted me to reach my full potential. It just broke his heart that I was wasting my life by being a B and C student.

Then Dad handed me a book. It was one from his personal library that was also a favorite of mine, Around the World in 1,000 Pictures. Dad had inscribed the book and handed it to me as a peace offering. “Here, son,” he said, “I want you to have this. Happy birthday!”

I still have that book. On the inside of the front cover in my Dad’s handwriting are these words:

To Stephen, my son,
Whom I love
And who bears
The likeness
and desire to travel
of his father–
on his 12th birthday.
Dad
January 26, 1957

When I pick that book up, even to this day, half a century later, my lachrymose glands begin to work.

One of the last times my Dad whipped me was when I was eighteen. It was the spring of my senior year of high school, on a Friday afternoon. I had just finished eating dinner and was across the street from our house in the parking lot of the North Cleveland Church of God, trying to learn to ride a skate board.

Skate boards were a fairly new invention, and it was my first time to be on one. I wasn’t doing too well, barely keeping my balance. Suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, I was tackled by my 14-year-old brother, Raymond.

“That’s my skate board and I’ve been looking for it. Give it to me right now!”

Unknown to us, Dad was watching from the window in his study and saw our scuffle. He stepped onto the front porch and called us home. “Both of you,” he ordered, “up to your rooms right now and don’t come down until it’s time for family devotions at 8 o’clock.”

“But, Dad,” I protested, “You can’t ground me tonight. I’m scheduled to preach for the YPE service at South Cleveland. I’ve got to leave here in about an hour.”

The South Cleveland Church of God was a large congregation on the other side of town and I was excited because my mother had planned to go with me that night. It would be her first time to hear me preach, even though I had started preaching almost three years earlier. Dad had never heard me preach either. I don’t remember why he couldn’t come that night.

“Well, Son,” Dad relented, “if the people at South Cleveland are expecting you to preach tonight, I’ll let you go, but not until you’re punished for fighting.” I dutifully got down on all fours and took my whipping. An hour later, I was standing in the pulpit to preach, my bottom still stinging.

I’ve heard it said that a child’s first concept of God, the Heavenly Father, is learned from his or her relationship with their earthly father. If this is so, that must be the reason I was so afraid of God. I never doubted that my Dad really did love me, and he showed it in many ways. But step out of line for a moment and the consequences were swift and severe. In like manner, I thought no infraction missed God’s all-seeing eye and nothing would go unpunished.

As Dad grew older, he also mellowed. All of us older children will readily tell you that he was much harsher on us than on our younger siblings. Like many of his generation, he thought it was his duty to be stern with us.

I was a young adult when I overheard Dad correcting my baby brother, Jeffrey. “Son,” he said in an exasperated tone, “you have done everything I told you not to do. You have gone where I said you were not to go. You have gotten into things I ordered you to stay away from. Suppose you were a father and your son disobeyed you like that. What would you do with him?”

Jeff swallowed hard, blinked his eyes, and replied hopefully, “Serve him refreshments?’

That answer caught Dad so off-guard he burst out laughing. He grabbed Jeff, gave him a big hug, and said, “Okay, but you must never disobey me again.” Dad took Jeff by the hand, led him into the kitchen, and the two of them enjoyed a snack together.

Chapter 11: Getting an Education

2009-01-15T19:00:00.000-05:00

I was mostly a B student. My educational career started that way in first grade at Arnold School.

Miss Dugan, my teacher, had just graduated from college three months before. She was a nice lady, tall, single, and coach of the 7th and 8th grade girl’s basketball team.

I liked Miss Dugan, and she seemed to like me. But, she was of the opinion that A grades should be dispensed to first graders rarely, if at all. Every report card I ever got from her was straight B’s, as were the report cards of most of the students in my class.

My brother, Paul, was also in first grade the same year as me, but he was in a different classroom with a much older teacher. She was from the old school that believed in being lavish with A grades to good students. Every report card he brought home was straight A’s.

In second grade, we transferred from Arnold to Mayfield Elementary School. Mayfield was a smaller school with only one second grade class, so Paul and I were in the same room together.

Two things about Mayfield were particularly exciting to me. First, I thought our principle, Woodrow Wilson, was the former president of the United States. Second, the milk they served in the cafeteria said “Mayfield Milk” on the carton. I thought we had our own cows somewhere back in the kitchen. I later learned that there was another Woodrow Wilson who had been president, and Mayfield is a regional dairy located in Athens, Tennessee. Such disillusionments were a part of my education.

That first year at Mayfield, in second grade, I made about half A’s and half B’s. Paul made all A’s. I knew Paul wasn’t any smarter than me, but he was ten times more outgoing and quickly became one of the teacher’s pets.

During third and fourth grades the same pattern continued. I got A’s and B’s and Paul got all A’s. The fact that I couldn’t talk plain and was painfully shy certainly had an adverse effect on my participation in class, which was virtually nil. Paul and I often compared notes and I was beginning to suspect teacher prejudice was involved. I was ten years old now -- old enough to figure out that maybe my first grade teacher had pegged me as a B student, the other teachers had seen my record, and just continued the tradition.

Mrs. Walker was our teacher in fourth grade. She was an older lady, past retirement age, but still teaching because there was a teacher shortage in Tennessee.

Mrs. Walker was my favorite teacher up to that point in school. The thing I liked most about her was we could get away with just about anything in her class. She was absent minded and hard of hearing. When things got a little too noisy for her in the classroom, sometimes Mrs. Walker would just give us a make-do assignment, turn down her hearing aid, and zone out at her desk. At those times she didn’t seem to notice what was going on around her.

Like our teachers before her, Mrs. Walker almost always gave me B grades and she gave Paul A’s. Paul and I discussed this one day and decided to test my theory. For geography class, Mrs. Walker had assigned us to write a paper about the Belgium Congo. Paul and I collaborated on the assignment and we turned in identical papers. Mrs. Walker never noticed our papers were the same, word for word. Paul got an A; I got a B. We wouldn’t dare tell Mrs. Walker what we had done, for fear of getting into trouble over it. I resigned myself to the fact that I was destined to be a B student.

Our classroom had a side door which led directly to the outside. One beautiful spring day, shortly after lunch, Mrs. Walker had her hearing aid turned off and was napping at her desk. The side door was open to let in fresh air and the outdoors was calling my name. I had just been reading about Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and playing hooky, which appealed to me greatly.

On a dare from another student, I slipped out of my seat and ducked outside. I ran as fast as I could across the school yard to get out of sight as quickly as possible. It was only then I realized that I didn’t dare go home or Mother would learn of what I had done. So I walked down to Fillauer’s Creek and played there alone for a couple of hours until school was out. Playing hooky was fun, but not quite as much fun as I had expected it to be. The best part is that Mrs. Walker never noticed I was missing.

Mayfield was a public school, but it may as well have been a Christian one. We had regular chapel services, led by local pastors, and most of the teachers kept a Bible on their desks for ready reference. When I was in fourth grade, a couple of representatives of the Gideon Society came around and presented everyone in the class their own personal copy of the New Testament -- Authorized King James Version.

Our sixth grade teacher, Jack Tullock, gave extra credit for memorizing Bible verses. Every Friday after lunch he would announce that it was time to recite our verse of the week. This was a cinch for me because we were allowed to pick our own Scripture to memorize, and I already had a repertoire of them I had learned at home and in church.

One by one we would stand in front of the class and recite our chosen Scripture while Mr. Tullock made due note of it in his record book.

The local city school board passed two policies that I thought were great. First, no teacher was permitted to give homework on Wednesdays, because most churches held their prayer meeting on that night and homework would be a detriment to the students attending church. Second, if the local church a student attended was engaged in a revival meeting, and the student was attending the services, he or she was exempt from homework for that evening. This policy made us Church of God kids the envy of the school because we had far more revivals, and longer lasting ones, than the other churches.

I continued at Mayfield School through eighth grade, and our 1959 graduating class was the last eighth grade graduation they would hold. After that year, the city went to a three tier school system, with elementary school, junior high school (later called middle school) and high school.

The big majority of students at Mayfield attended church somewhere. They were Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Church of God with a sprinkling of Independent Pentecostals or other denominations. During the years I attended Mayfield, there was never a Jewish student or any from a non-Christian religion. There were no Catholics either, except for a few months one year in fifth grade.

I had heard of Catholics before, but had never actually seen one that I knew of. I had been told that instead of believing the Bible, the Catholics did whatever the Pope said. The Pope was kind of like our General Overseer in the Church of God.

When I was in fifth grade, at an assembly program with the whole student body present, it was announced that the next day our school would be getting its first Catholic student, a young girl named Maria. She was in fifth grade and would be in my class. Maria had just moved to Cleveland from Michigan, because her father was going to be working at the new Bowater’s Paper Mill nearby.

The reason for the announcement was because the school authorities, after much deliberation, had decided to make a special exception to the school dress code that would apply only to Maria. Girls at Mayfield were not allowed to wear pants to school, nor could they wear makeup or have pierced ears. Female teachers couldn’t wear slacks to school but they were allowed makeup and earrings.

In the assembly program, it was carefully explained that Maria was coming to us from an entirely different culture up north and her ears had been pierced since she was a very young child. The girl and her family had agreed she would abide by the rule forbidding girls to wear slacks or makeup, but they had appealed to the school board about the earrings and the exception had been granted.

Maria didn’t look evil at all as I had expected her to. She had dark hair in a short pageboy cut around a pretty face. And on each of her earlobes there was a tiny gold ball. Also, like me, she was very shy. I don’t think I ever talked to her except to bashfully say “Howdy.” Maria was only in our class for a few months before her family moved back to Michigan. Maybe they couldn’t take the culture shock of Cleveland.

The no slacks, no makeup, no pierced ears policy for students was fine with us Pentecostals. We considered those things sinful anyway. Our beliefs were as much cultural as they were Scriptural.

Two national events stand out in my mind as a student at Mayfield and both of them concerned the American flag. One was the addition of the words “under God,” to the pledge of allegiance. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill which inserted “under God” into the pledge in the summer of 1959.

The next fall, when I started fourth grade, the first thing the entire school did was re-learn the pledge of allegiance -- under God. Mr. Wilson and every teacher at the school was profuse in their praise of President Eisenhower and the addition of the words “under God” in the pledge. They said it was about time for America to take a stand for God and right.

I was in eighth grade when our teacher, Mr. Money, announced that Alaska had been admitted to the union as the 49th state, so we now had a new flag with 49 stars instead of 48. Only a few months later, during the summer after I graduated from 8th grade, Hawaii also became a state and the 50th star was added.

For ninth grade I went back to the old building where I had attended Arnold Elementary School in first grade. That facility had just been changed into Cleveland’s first Junior High School. So after one year there, I was in the first Junior High School graduating class in the history of Cleveland.

Bradley Central High School came next, and that was a whole new experience. At the time, Bradley was the largest public high school in the state of Tennessee, with more than 2,000 students. Some years later Bradley was divided with the formation of Cleveland High School.
My world expanded greatly at Bradley. Now I was rubbing shoulders with kids from all over the county. There were no blacks; they had their own school called “College Hill,” over in Cleveland’s Sixth Ward. If there were any Jews or Catholics at Bradley, I didn’t know them personally. But there was a big mixture of town and country kids, and some of them were adherents to denominations that were unfamiliar to me: Episcopalian, Church of Christ and Seventh Day Adventist. I thought I was really in a mission field now.

In tenth grade, I got my first exposure to godless higher education. Mrs. Rogers, my biology teacher, dared to violate Tennessee state law and teach the theory of evolution. Although I thought she was wrong, I admired Mrs. Rogers for taking such a risk. In those days her teacher’s certification could have been revoked for teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school, had someone made an issue of it.

Cleveland was a little less than 30 miles from Dayton, Tennessee, where the famous Scopes Monkey Trial had drawn national and international attention over that very issue back in the summer of 1925. People still talked about it -- William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow and the “Trial of the Century.” Hollywood even made a movie about it, Inherit the Wind. Of course the good guys -- the creationists -- won.

Mrs. Rogers was an excellent teacher and one whom I respected highly. But I was concerned for her soul because, in my mind, she must be a terrible infidel to teach evolution.

One memory from Mrs. Roger’s class was on May 5, 1961. That day she brought a radio to school and instead of studying biology, the class tuned in to the first flight of an American astronaut into outer space. Within the span of a single class period, Alan Shepherd was launched into space to an altitude higher than any American had ever flown before, and returned safely to earth. America was behind Russia in the space race at that time and this was one of the biggest things I could remember ever happening.

Another event in Mrs. Roger’s class was of a more personal nature, and it marked me for the remainder of my high school career. I had read an article in Life magazine about the 1939 college fad of swallowing live goldfish. For some reason my sophomoric brain was totally intrigued by the idea, and I decided to try it.

One Saturday I went to the F. W. Woolworth’s store in downtown Cleveland and bought two goldfish. I put them in a glass bowl in my room at home and watched the fish for a long time. When I felt the moment was right, I reached into the bowl, picked up one of them, and popped it down the hatch. I immediately realized I had made a mistake. The next time I swallowed a goldfish, it would be head first. The scales on this one caught on my throat as it went down backwards. After swallowing the goldfish, I laid on my bed for thirty minutes to see if I would survive. I was sure I could feel it swimming around inside my stomach.

The next Monday at school, before the final bell rang to begin biology class, I told some of my friends about my feat. They said they didn’t believe me, and one of them pointed out a lone goldfish swimming in an aquarium in the classroom and dared me to show them. “I’ll give you a quarter if you do it,” he said.

Others chimed in. “Here’s my quarter too.”

Soon a total of $1.25 had been pledged and to me that was serious money. In 1961, a quarter would buy you a Coke, a bag of peanuts and a candy bar. For $1.25 you could buy a five day’s supply. I told all of them to give their money to one boy who would hold the purse until after I had demonstrated my bravado. Then I walked over to the teacher’s desk and asked, “May I please swallow the goldfish over there in the tank?”

Mrs. Rogers was unflappable. “Sure Stephen, go right ahead.”

I caught the fish, held it carefully by the tail, dropped it into my mouth, and it slid down the chute head first, easy as pie. Not only did I earn $1.25, I also earned a reputation that stayed with me throughout the remainder of my years at Bradley Central High School. Students I didn’t even know would pass me in the hallway and blurt out, “Hey, it’s Goldfish Conn.”
I didn’t like that nickname, but there was little I could do about it.

The following Sunday morning at church, one of the sanctified brothers stopped me in the North Cleveland lobby and asked, “Stephen, what’s this I hear about you swallowing a goldfish at school?” Now I was frightened. The word was out even among the grownups at church so surely my daddy would find out. Innately I knew he would disapprove of such foolishness, and I dreaded the consequences.

Sure enough, that afternoon Dad asked me about the goldfish swallowing incident. He berated me long and hard over it, telling me what a fool I had made of myself and that I was an embarrassment to the family. Dad said he wasn’t going to spank me this time because he had never told me not to swallow a goldfish before, and therefore, I had not technically disobeyed him.

“So,” Dad announced, “Since you like to swallow things, I want you to go into the kitchen right now and bring me a dozen eggs.” Dad called several of my brothers and sisters around his chair where he sat in the living room and told them to watch while I stood in front of them and swallowed a dozen raw eggs.

The first one went down with a little gagging and lots of tears, then the second and a third. My siblings were all laughing and thoroughly enjoying the spectacle.

“That’s enough for now,” Dad stopped the show. “We’ll save the other nine eggs for later.” Over the next several weeks, whenever it suited Dad’s fancy, he would call on me to swallow another egg or two. Each time there was an audience, such as my older brother, Philip, when he came home from college for a weekend. And each time, the egg swallowing was accompanied by a reminder of what a stupid thing I had done and what an embarrassment it was. After a few weeks, the entire dozen was swallowed and Dad let the matter drop.

It was during the spring of that sophomore year in high school that I first felt the call of God on my life, and I preached my first few sermons. Kids at school knew I was a Christian and very serious about my religion. Some of my classmates even heard me preach at local churches, or on the street corner.

In my junior year, a scrappy little punk named Jesse asked me that since I was a Christian and a preacher, did I believe in fighting?

“No,” I told him. “I don’t fight.”

With that Jesse hauled back and gave me a hard unexpected blow to the stomach. I didn’t retaliate. Jesse grinned and said, “Just checking.”

Jesse was a wiry little guy, five inches shorter than me, but very tough. He wore his hair in a ducktail and usually had a sullen smirk on his face. On one of his arms was a homemade tattoo which read, “Born to Lose.”

One day I was in the boy’s room at school and Jesse cornered me in a stall. “Okay, Conn,” he snarled, “let’s see how good of a Christian you are.” He slapped me in the face and challenged, “Come on. Fight me!”

When I didn’t strike back, Jesse shoved me back against the toilet and came at me with a barrage of punches. “Let’s fight, Conn! Let’s fight!”

I reported the incident to our home room teacher, Mr. Austin. Jesse was in the same room. Mr. Austin called both of us up to his desk and said, “Boys, I understand the two of you have a little score to settle. Why don’t we do it with boxing gloves?” Jesse and I both agreed. I felt this would be permissible, even for a pacifist Christian, because boxing was a sport and not like real fighting.

The next morning the entire class went down to the gym; Jesse and I put on boxing gloves. I was larger than him and probably stronger, but not nearly as fast or as experienced in fighting. Encircled by thirty boys who were cheering and egging us on, Jesse and I slugged it out. I’d love to say I knocked the slop out of him but I actually came away from the match battered and bruised. However, I did land a few good punches. My good showing at least earned a lot of respect from my classmates. The referee called it a tie; Jesse never challenged me again.

I had a remarkable personality change during my high school years. It was a kind of metamorphosis in which I came out of my bashful shell. I had pretty much overcome my speech impediment by this time, and I began to compensate for my former shyness by becoming the class clown. I’m convinced that many clowns and others with a fearless façade are actually very timid people, pretending they aren’t afraid.

I was not a clown in the sense of some who are always pulling pranks or practical jokes that might hurt or embarrass someone else. I just had a good sense of humor, recognized life’s absurdities, and didn’t mind pointing them out. In my senior yearbook, which I still have, many students, and a few teachers, wrote that they appreciated the way my “stimulating, extemporaneous repartee” livened up the classroom.

When the time came to choose Superlatives for the school yearbook, my classmates elected me as “Wittiest.” That was the highest honor of my life up to that time, next to being elected Mr. Tennessee Church of God Youth Camp when I was 16.

To present the Superlatives, a school assembly was held in the gymnasium. More than 2,000 students and the entire faculty were present. For the program, the Superlatives, which included my brother Paul (Most Likely to Succeed), were to dress as historical figures. I took a piece of burned cork, blackened my face and hands, and came out as James Meredith.

James Meredith is not a well known figure today, but he was very much in the news in the early 1960s, and I felt surely he was destined to become a historical figure. James Meredith was the first black student to be admitted to the University of Mississippi. His admission was opposed by state officials and students. U. S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent federal marshals to protect Meredith from threats of being lynched. During riots that followed Kennedy’s decision, 160 marshals were wounded (28 by gunfire) and two bystanders were killed.

My choice of costume was controversial since Bradley was not yet integrated. Throughout high school, and even in elementary school, I had been very outspoken in favoring school integration. It was a hotly debated issue in those days and my position was not the most popular one. Because of my stance, a few kids at school called me “nigger lover.” I think I identified with the black’s cause because, as a Pentecostal, I too was part of a misunderstood and persecuted minority group.

Dad couldn’t have been more displeased when he learned I had been elected “Wittiest.” He told me I should be ashamed. It was a disgrace for a young preacher to be elected the “biggest jackass” at Bradley High School. Dad said I would never be a success in the ministry unless I became more serious about life.

Dad’s scolding hurt my feelings, but that was offset by a couple of my classmates who told me they had become Christians because of my example. They said I had demonstrated to them that a person could be a Christian and still laugh, be happy, and enjoy life.

When I was attending high school, it was exactly a one mile walk from our house to school. Going to Lee College was easier; that was only two blocks away.

I loved life at Lee. I had practically grown up on the campus, knew every teacher by name, and had already been involved in extra-curricular activities at Lee for most of my high school years. I saw Lee as a year-long youth camp with classes. I was happy to be among my own people, and now seriously preparing for the ministry.

Lee College had been founded in 1918 as the Church of God Bible Training School, primarily for the purpose of preparing young men and women for the ministry. Over the years the school had evolved into a four year Bible College. Around the time I enrolled at Lee, there was also a new Junior College division which offered an Associate of Arts degree in Liberal Arts. It was still a small school of under 1,000 students, where just about everybody knew everybody. Today, Lee has evolved into a full-fledged Christian liberal arts university with an enrollment around 4,000.

I enjoyed my classes at Lee and did well in them initially. During my first semester I made the Dean’s List, and was also elected as a freshman representative to the Student Council. But, my academic career soon went downhill.

It was my ministry that got in the way of my studies. I had started traveling on weekends with the Lee College Pioneers for Christ when I was only a sophomore in high school. My first year as a student at Lee was my fourth year to participate in the Lee College Pioneers for Christ (PFC). Upon beginning college, I was instantly one of the more experienced ministerial students on campus.

Just a few weeks after school started, I was assigned the leadership of the “Kickoff Invasion” of the PFC, taking 60 students for a weekend in Lindale, Georgia. There we held several services in the local church and community, taught soul-winning classes, and knocked on hundreds of doors, witnessing to people about Jesus. I was completely responsible for organizing and directing the event, which included not only the witnessing activities, but also arranging the logistics for transportation, lodging, etc. I had served as an Invasion leader even when I was in high school.

Virtually every weekend while I was a student at Lee, I was preaching somewhere. During the week, I often preached midweek services at nearby churches, as well as in nursing homes, in jails, and even on street corners.

I had an urgent zeal to win souls, and struggled with how to make a balance between preparing for future ministry vs. taking advantage of the ministry opportunities that were already before me.

If I had an invitation to go somewhere and preach for a weekend, but had a big test coming up or an important assignment due on Monday, I always opted to go out and preach and let my studies suffer. The reason was simple. I was thoroughly convinced that people were dying every day and going to Hell, lost without God. If I could go out and win even one soul to the Lord over the weekend, that was infinitely preferable to staying home and studying for a test. What good would it do for me to be an A student, but the blood of some lost soul be on my hands -- someone I could have won to the Lord if I had only gone and witnessed to him?

A good example of this was an incident during my freshman year. I had been invited to preach for Sunday services at a church in McMinnville, Tennessee, about two hours from Cleveland. I borrowed a car from a friend to reach my appointment.

The altar service following my Sunday evening sermon had lasted until late into the night, with people praying and seeking God. There was also an hour’s difference in the time zone between McMinnville and Cleveland. It would have been between 1 and 2 a.m. before I could have gotten home. My first class on Monday was at 10 a.m., when I had an important test coming up in Psychology class.

At the pastor’s encouragement, I decided to spend the night at the parsonage in McMinnville, and then leave at 6:30 the next morning, rather than drive the winding route back home over the mountains so late at night. I had my books with me and spent some time studying for the test that evening before going to bed.

The pastor awakened me at 6 a.m. the next morning, and soon I was on my way home. Driving over Signal Mountain, I spotted a couple of hitch hikers on the side of the road. I saw this as a God given appointment to tell a soul about Jesus. I picked the two fellows up.
They were going to Polk County, Tennessee, the next county beyond my destination. I told them I could take them as far as Cleveland.

Immediately after we started traveling, I asked the men if they knew Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour. Neither of them did. In the next hour I witnessed to them as if that day would be their last chance to meet God this side of eternity. I always witnessed like that. As far as I was concerned, it was now or never -- do or die -- turn or burn -- Heaven or Hell.

When we reached Cleveland, it was 30 minutes before my class was to start, but the men had not yet accepted Christ as their Saviour. I felt that to leave them now in their lost condition, just so I could take a psychology test, would be incomprehensibly selfish, if not downright evil. They were on the very verge of giving their hearts to the Lord. I felt sure that if I had just a little more time I could persuade them to repent of their sins and accept Jesus. There’s no way I could leave them in this lost condition. How could I ever live with myself; how could God ever forgive me; if I just dumped these two souls on the side of the road and left them dangling over Hell because I was in too big a hurry to plead for their souls just a little longer? I volunteered to take them all the way to Polk County.

I missed my class, but somewhere along the road the two men both agreed to pray the sinner’s prayer with me. I stopped the car, led them to Jesus, gave them some gospel tracks and encouraged them in their new walk with the Lord. Then I drove them on to their destination.
Later that afternoon, back in Cleveland, I looked up my psychology professor and explained to him what had happened. “But your responsibility right now is to study and prepare yourself so that you can be an even more effective minister later,” he told me.

“What about those two souls?” I asked. ”Should I just let them go to Hell in hopes that I can win somebody else to the Lord later? What if Jesus comes today? What if those men don’t live until tomorrow? What’s more important, taking a psychology test or letting someone burn in torment for eternity?”

My professor looked dismayed and didn’t even try to answer. He made arrangements for me to make up the test later, but I didn’t do too well on it. My mind was preoccupied with more eternal things.

Although I was pursuing a degree in Biblical Education, most of my classes for the first two years at Lee were foundational liberal arts courses: English, Survey of Civilization, Psychology, Art Appreciation, etc., plus a couple of Bible courses thrown in. I eagerly looked forward to my junior year when I would begin to concentrate on subjects that would help me more in the ministry.

At the same time, I sometimes wondered if a college education would actually be beneficial. Perhaps it would even be a detriment. There was a very strong sentiment in many Pentecostal churches that too much education was a hindrance to the working of the Spirit of God.
I was still in high school when I went to preach one Sunday in the mountains near Copper Hill, Tennessee, at Bell Town House of Prayer. This was a small independent congregation that was considering uniting with the Church of God.

I arrived with the pastor about an hour early at the little one room concrete block church located on a dirt road. It was winter and the place was cold. The pastor fired up the propane furnace to warm the building, and the first person to arrive was a man about 50 years old wearing bib overalls. We were sitting together on the pew closest to the furnace, trying to get warm, when he looked over toward me with a grin and asked, “Ye ain’t one of them thar college ‘eddicated’ preachers are ye?”

I was quick to say, “Nope, not me. I’ve never been to college a day in my life. I haven’t even graduated from high school yet.”

“Well, praise the Lord. I’m glad to hear that. Ye just be sure to stay away from them thar ‘semetaries,’ so the Lord will have a chance to use ye.”

I got that kind of advice often, even from pastors. By the time I was a junior in college, I had preached in about 100 churches all over the United States. Only a couple of those churches had pastors with college degrees.

Instead of enjoying my studies more in Bible College, I became even more frustrated. My three years at Lee were a tremendous learning time for me, but most of what I learned was outside the classroom. I felt there was very little being offered in my classes that would be of much practical use to me in the ministry.

I was taking a course on homiletics (preaching) taught by a man whom I considered a very weak and ineffective preacher. He had a Master’s Degree in Education, but his preaching experience was probably less than mine.

I was studying “Personal Evangelism” under a very fine woman, but I suspected she hadn’t witnessed to a sinner in years. She taught the subject from a negative approach. Her whole class was centered on telling her students how to debate doctrine with people in false religions. I had already read every book I could find on soul-winning and scores of books on different religions and cults. I had also knocked on thousands of doors telling people about Jesus. My experience and study had shown me that a different approach was far more effective.

Before taking her class, I had already personally taught soul-winning classes in dozens of churches, instructing people to be positive in their approach. I told them: “Don’t get into a doctrinal debate or tear down the belief of the other person. Instead, lift up Jesus.” I had seen hundreds of souls come to Christ by sharing Jesus with them. I never won anybody to the Lord by telling them they were wrong.

Another college course was on “Pastoral Theology.” The class was designed to be a practical one that could have been titled “How to Pastor a Church.” The teacher told us he had only served for a short time at one small congregation of about 20 people. I had already started two new churches myself and probably had much more hands on ministerial experience than he.

I shared my feelings with my father, but Dad was adamant that I stay in school. He predicted that I would be an utter failure if I didn’t graduate from college. I pointed out that he had dropped out of college himself to enter the ministry full-time.

“But that was another day,” he said. “People expect their preachers to be more educated now.” I wasn’t convinced he was right.

There was another even more compelling motivation to leave school and launch out into full-time ministry. As a true believer, I was convinced souls were dying and going to Hell all around me every day. Jesus was coming again at any minute. I genuinely believed that more likely than not, the rapture would take place before I could graduate. What a shame it would be, to be sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture about winning the lost to Jesus when the trumpet sounded! Instead, I felt I needed to be out there doing all I could to rescue the perishing before it was too late.

Chapter 12: That Old Time Religion

2009-01-14T21:28:00.000-05:00

Next to family, church was the most important influence in my life as a child. Church was not only a place to learn about God and worship Him; it was also the center of my social activities and the source of most of my friends and acquaintances.

My earliest memories are of services when I was a toddler at the Church of God in Leadwood, Missouri. But it was after we moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, that I was old enough to really become involved in church life.

For virtually all of my growing up years, I lived within a short walk to the North Cleveland Church of God, which happens to be the headquarters church for the denomination and also the oldest continuously operating local Pentecostal congregation in the world.

North Cleveland was a sizeable church, although not nearly so large as it has become today. There were between 500 and 600 people attending on a Sunday morning. This was decades before the birth of the current phenomenon of the mega-church. For the 1950s and ‘60s, it was a huge church.

Despite its size, in the 1950s North Cleveland operated in much the same way as did smaller country churches. There were only two paid people on staff, the pastor and the custodian. Everything that they didn’t do -- music, youth work, secretarial help, etc. -- was carried out by volunteers.

Worship at our church was frequent and fervent. On Sundays, there was Sunday School followed by Morning Worship and then an “Evangelistic Service” was held on Sunday evenings. Wednesday night was prayer meeting and Friday evening we met for YPE, the Young People’s Endeavor. Our family didn’t miss a service.

There were also other activities such as the Lamplighters Club and special functions for children and youth, often held on Saturdays. Revival meetings, with nightly services, were held about four times a year, and they often lasted for two weeks, unless the Holy Ghost got into the arrangements. In that case, the services were extended for an even longer period. In addition to the revival services, there were missions’ conferences, training courses, an annual church music school, and other special events. A dedicated church member could easily spend half or more of his evenings in church. We were dedicated church members.

Worship services were somewhat predictable, but varied, depending on how the Lord moved. Too much planning was frowned upon. A little forethought to a service seemed okay, but it was always important to leave room to let the Lord have His way. I’m not sure whether or not we believed in printed church bulletins, but we didn’t have one.

The church also didn’t have a regular trained choir. When service time came, the volunteer music director would get up and call people to the choir loft, which seated about 80 people. Adults and children were all welcome; I called it the “Whosoever Will Choir.”

Sometimes the music director had to do a little pleading if there weren’t enough singers. It wasn’t unusual for him to say, “Alright, we can’t start service until we get about ten more people in the choir. Come on now, we need a few more altos.” We always needed altos.

If not enough people responded, the music director would call a few singers out by name. Some of the good altos seemed to always wait until they were called upon individually. I think they just liked the attention.

Everything we sang was out of the red-back Church Hymnal, with shaped notes, which was published across the street from our church at the Publishing House. I knew every song in the book by heart, and I also knew its page number. I even knew the writers of some of the songs, men like Vep Ellis, because they attended our church.

After going to church several times a week for many years, most folks didn’t have to turn to the page in the hymnal. They knew that if #57 was called for, we were going to sing Amazing Grace, #120 was Victory in Jesus. And if the music director announced #86, I got really excited because that was one of my favorites: O Happy Day.

The congregation always sang along for every song. Those in the choir only served as song leaders.

In addition to the choir and congregational songs, there were always one or more “special singers” in a service. This could be a solo, quartet, or some other combination. Occasionally the music director would feel led to call on someone who had not been notified in advance to sing. Usually they were ready and willing; sometimes it took a little public prodding.

Different men took turns leading the music, but usually it was Brother McClain. He had a way of pausing between verses, and exhorting the congregation, laughing and crying and talking about how good the Lord is. There were times when he would look out over the congregation and say, “I notice we have the makings of a quartet here today. Brother Cross, come up and sing bass; Brother Melton, you can handle the tenor. Brother Thomas, come sing baritone, and I’ll furnish the lead.”

The four brethren would stand at the pulpit and thumb through the hymnal until they agreed on a song. Maybe it would be Just a Little Talk with Jesus; In the Sweet Forever, or Everybody Will be Happy Over There. The lyrics to the majority of the songs were about how weary life was here on Earth and how wonderful it was going to be When We All Get to Heaven. The folks in our congregation who were the most downtrodden rejoiced most when we sang the Heaven songs.

When prayer time came, the pastor would usually ask if anyone had a request. Several people in the congregation would speak up, telling of a relative who was ill, or some other need. There was almost always a request to pray for someone’s lost loved ones, and for those on the mission field and the battle field.

We prayed in unison, everyone praying aloud at once. The pastor might say, “Let’s all stand, and each one of you pray as though you were called on to lead in prayer.” The prayers were loud and long. Hundreds of people praying fervently at once is like only one other sound I have ever heard. That was when, at the age of 19, I stood for the first time beside Niagara Falls. I remembered the Apostle John had said God’s voice is “as the sound of many waters,” Rev. 1:15.
During congregational prayer was the perfect time for a potty break. If you hurried you could be out and back and no one would even know you were gone.

There were a dozen or more elderly ladies, mostly widows, who always filled the second and third pews in the front center section of the church. By watching them, I could pretty well gauge how the Holy Ghost was moving.

If Grandma Bryant, Sister Whitmire, or one of these other sainted pillars of the church got out her white handkerchief and began to wave it to the beat of the music, I knew the Lord was about to bless.

My young friends and I usually sat just behind these ladies. We took the waving hanky as our signal to begin clapping a little louder and singing with all our might, doing our part to encourage the Lord to move. If the music director felt the Spirit, and at such times he usually did, he might lead the chorus over and over again. I’ve seen him lead it seven or eight times without a break, each round with a little more zeal than the one before:

There is going to be a meeting in the air,
In the sweet, sweet by and by:
I am going to meet you, meet you over there,
In that home beyond the sky
Such singing you will hear, never heard by mortal ear
‘Twill be glorious I do declare!
And God’s own Son will be the leading One
At that meeting in the air.

Before we finished the chorus the third time, Grandma Bryant would stand and move out into the isle, her handkerchief hoisted like a flag. She waved her hanky and danced her way across the front of the church. Three or four of the other sisters would usually follow. Some of those who danced in the Spirit seemed to glide on air; others did a funny little jerk. However they did it, they danced before the Lord for the pure joy of being in His presence, and I always felt the Heavenly Father smiled down on us when they did.

As the sisters danced, I hoped fervently that the Holy Ghost would take over the service. That meant there would be no preaching today.

When the service got lively, it wasn’t unusual for someone in the congregation to let out with a loud, unintelligible shriek. This meant either that they were under conviction or they were getting a blessing. About this time, one of the brothers sitting over to the left in the “Amen Corner” might commence to running.

The usual route was to charge down one aisle, across the back of the church, and back up the other side at a full gallop. A second brother often followed the first, as if in hot pursuit. And if the Lord really got to moving, all four aisles of the church might have a runner at the same time. People accused us Pentecostals of running the aisles and swinging from the chandeliers, but they were wrong. We didn’t have any chandeliers.

When the saints got to dancing and running, you could pretty well count on the fact that Holy Ghost conviction was falling hard on any sinners or lukewarm Christians who might be present. If someone made a sobbing lunge for the mourner’s bench, the service was all over but the shouting.

Several saints would jump up and gather around the penitent seeker. The whole congregation would be either on their feet or on their knees by this time, and many would rush forward for prayer. I loved church when it was like that.

Revivals were especially fun. If the evangelist was good, and the Lord was blessing, it was not unusual for a revival to be held over for three or four weeks -- sometimes even more. Our family was almost always present.

North Cleveland drew the best evangelists in the country and a favorite of mine was T. L. Lowery. Brother Lowery was charismatic in every sense of the word. No Hollywood type caster could have dreamed up a more perfect image of an evangelist.

A Georgia native, who had pastored in the coal fields of southwestern Virginia, Lowery was long and lean, with a thick shock of black hair that he kept combed back in a greased wave that would fly like a Holy Ghost banner when he was under the anointing. He wore expensive suits and pointy toed shoes, and had a smile that melted the hearts of the women.

Because of his busy schedule, North Cleveland was only able to book Lowery for one week. He had a huge tent he set up for many of his meetings -- much larger than our church building, which accommodated five or six hundred.

The Lord moved so marvelously in Lowery’s meeting that he canceled some other engagements and stayed over for three weeks. Each night the church was packed beyond capacity. There was no problem filling the choir, and extra chairs were set up down the aisles and along the back of the church. On one end of the platform, a door was left open that led to a Sunday School room which was filled with people. On the other end of the platform, an open door led to the church office, which was also jammed with people. Others stood in the lobby and spilled out into the church lawn, unable to get inside. The local Fire Marshall said he was going to shut down the overcrowded meeting, but he was too afraid of the Holy Ghost to carry through with his threat.

Lowery had a specialty in praying for the sick and many people claimed to be healed in his services. One night a grey haired lady, whom I had never seen before, came to church in a wheel chair. She sat in the right aisle up near the front. Toward the end of his message, Lowery stopped and pointed his long forefinger at her. With a rasping voice he commanded authoritatively, “Sister, you there in the wheel chair, be healed! Stand up in Jesus’ name!”

The woman began to shake and weep. The congregation watched with baited breath as she placed a hand on each arm of the wheelchair and slowly pushed herself up. Standing there, she raised her face and both arms toward heaven and praised the Lord, while the congregation had a hallelujah breakdown. I never saw the lady again after that service.

Every night Lowery had a prayer line, and when he laid hands on people and prayed for them, he did so with a vengeance. Anyone could get in line. It seemed to me that during the course of the revival, half the population of Cleveland went through it. Some came for salvation, or for healing, and others sought to be sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost. Many just came for a blessing.

When Lowery prayed for people, he often ended with a loud, “In Jesus’ Name!” As he did, he would thrust his powerful right arm forward, palm extended, and give the person for whom he was praying a wallop on the forehead. Lowery hit so hard that you could hear the slap of his sweating hand against the brow of the seeker.

Many people fell backwards to the ground. A couple of men stood behind to catch the fallen, if they could, and lower them to the floor. After each person fell, Lowery gingerly stepped aside a few feet and prayed for another and another until once I counted more than thirty people lying on their backs across the front of the platform.

One night a reporter from the Cleveland Daily Banner came to the service and took a photo showing the floor full of people. After the picture appeared in the next day’s Banner, some of my friends at school asked me why they stacked people up like cord wood on the platform at our church. They wanted to know if the people were Holy Rolling. I told them they would just have to come out and see it for themselves to understand.

More than anything in the world I wanted feel the power of God that these people seemed to be experiencing. Some called it “falling under the power,” and others said it was being “slain in the Spirit.” Whatever it was, I was a candidate for the blessing. Once during the revival I got into the prayer line, along with scores of others, and slowly inched my way forward.

When my time for prayer finally arrived, I raised my hands, closed my eyes, and expected the Holy Ghost to strike. The Holy Ghost must have missed His cue, or else He was busy blessing someone else at that moment. I didn’t feel the Holy Ghost, but Brother Lowery hit me so hard I saw a flash of white light and my ears rang. I staggered but did not fall, although I desperately wanted to. It would be sacrilege to fall unless it was the Holy Ghost that knocked me down, and I didn’t think He needed my help or Brother Lowery’s. I walked back to my pew disappointed. It was only later that I learned many of the saints helped the moving of the Holy Ghost by doing a “courtesy drop.”

Sometimes before he prayed for a person, Brother Lowery would say into the microphone, “Tell me Sister (or Brother), what do you need from God tonight?” When he asked one lady, she reached up and touched first her forehead and then the back of her neck saying, “Brother Lowery, it’s where you prayed for me last night.” He was gentler with this sister the second time around lest he compound her prayer induced whiplash.

One night a visiting preacher stepped forward in the prayer line. As he did, Lowery paused, stood silent a moment, and then in a theatrical gesture proclaimed, “My dear Brother, I don’t need to pray for you. You need to pray for me.”

He handed the visiting preacher the microphone, and silently, dramatically lifted his hands to receive God’s blessing. The visiting preacher began to pray, reaching out as he did to touch Lowery gently on the forehead. As soon as contact was made, Lowery dropped like a rock.
Audible gasps could be heard across the auditorium. Those who were not already standing jumped to their feet. Lowery lay in a heap, quiet and motionless, for a full minute. Nobody moved, but I heard several in the congregation weeping and praying softly, “Bless him, dear Jesus.”

When Lowery stood again, he did so with a flourish and with what he called a fresh anointing. With his second wind, Lowery continued to pray for people until long into the night.

On the third and final Sunday morning of the revival, it was announced there was to be a water baptismal service. About 50 people had signed up to be baptized, but after another great move of the Holy Ghost that morning, several more souls decided they too wanted to follow the Lord in water baptism. I was one of them. I had already been baptized in water by my daddy when I was nine years old, at the Riverside Church of God in Atlanta. But that morning I wanted to make a recommitment to the Lord. Re-baptisms weren’t encouraged at our church, but neither was there any prohibition against going for a second dip.

The pastor announced that this morning’s baptismal would be different than usual. There was a small dressing room on both sides of the baptistery, which was a pool behind the choir loft. This morning there were far more people to be baptized than could be accommodated in the dressing rooms.

It was explained that all those to be baptized would form a single line along the left side wall of the church and enter the baptismal pool through the ladies dressing room, exiting on the other side, through the men’s room. Those who wanted to change clothes could do so in a restroom or in one of the Sunday School rooms. Since half of us who were being baptized had not decided until that morning to do so, it didn’t matter. We would just have to go home wet.

I was about halfway down the side of the church awaiting my turn for baptism, when suddenly I heard a loud bellowing in the right rear corner of the church. It was Mr. Griffith, the daddy of one of my friends. He was a self avowed sinner, and it was also rumored that he had a drinking problem.

Mr. Griffith came to church often and sat on the back pew with his wife, who was a devout Christian and church member. I had prayed for him many times, agonizing for his soul, because his daughter constantly requested prayer for the salvation of her daddy in youth group meetings.

Mr. Griffith had been to church several nights during the revival. It was a mystery to me how any man could just sit there and fight off the conviction of the Holy Ghost when the Lord was moving in such a powerful way. I’d watched him resist a hundred alter calls, unmoved.
But that morning was different. Griffith jumped up from his seat, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Oh Lord, I’m a sinner. SAVE ME!”

He then lowered his head and ran down the aisle like a charging bull. When he reached the platform, he surmounted it in a single leap. The astonished choir parted like the Red Sea, and Griffith bounded up the risers through the middle. The entire congregation was on its feet.
T. L. Lowery, watching from his waist deep position in the baptismal pool, was a masterful showman. He seized the moment. Dramatically raising his hands, palms forward, Lowery stepped to the side, making way for Griffith’s entrance into the soul cleansing water.

Not hesitating, Mr. Griffith plunged head first over the low glass barrier, belly busting into the pool with a tremendous splash. As he went down, Lowery pounced on him like a lion on its prey, and with both hands pushed him under. “In the name of the Father!” Lowery shouted above the tumult.

Griffith came thrashing to the surface, slinging snot and gasping for breath. Lowery shoved him down again, “In the name of the Son!”

Again Griffith fought and clawed his way to the surface, sucking air. “Wait, I’m not done yet,” Lowery roared even louder than before. “In the name of the HOOOOOLY GHOST!”
That time both men sank completely beneath the water. When they surfaced through the foam, they were hugging and snorting, shouting and sloshing water out onto the choir. The congregation went ballistic.

They say Brother Griffith never touched another drop of liquor from that moment until the day he died, many years later.

Chapter 13: Working for a Living

2009-01-14T14:32:00.000-05:00

Once, and only once in my life, my Dad gave me a dime. I remember it clearly because it was such an unusual occasion. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving and the whole family was loading into the car to go to the annual Christmas parade in downtown Cleveland. Dad made a big production of giving every one of us children a dime each, and telling us to spend it wisely. I did; I spent mine on chocolate.

Besides that one dime, I earned all the other money I ever got.

As young children, instead of receiving an allowance, we were rewarded a few cents for reading a book or memorizing a portion of Scripture. We were expected to perform daily household chores without pay. However, we might be paid for special tasks. Mowing the grass, with an old-fashioned hand-powered reel mower, or vacuuming the entire house, earned a quarter each.

Philip was an entrepreneur and devised many ways to make money. When the new Church of God Publishing House was built in 1954, Phil collected the boxes that the new desks came in and lined them across our back yard. He called it “Philip’s Motel,” and charged us younger children 5 cents a night to camp out there.

Philip also opened a store in our basement. He bought packs of candy at the grocery store, divided them up, and sold the pieces to us younger siblings, as well as kids in the neighborhood.

Philip invested his motel and candy store profits and bought sacks of plaster and rubber molds to make figurines. He painted them, and commissioned Sarah, Paul, Sharon, and me to sell them for him door-to-door. I don’t know if people bought the figurines because they liked them, or just to be nice, but we sold them all over town.

Philip got a paper route when he was about 13 and I was 10. He hired me to help him with his route and paid me 25 cents per day. Mom made sure that the first 10% of my earnings went to pay my tithe. Of the other 90%, I was only allowed to spend 25 cents per week, and the rest went into my savings account.

One week before my 12th birthday, Mom informed me she had talked to Mr. Bell, the Cleveland area circulation manager for the Chattanooga News-Free Press, and found me my own route. I began training the next day. On my birthday, I became an independent newspaper carrier. I kept that paper route for 3 years, delivering newspapers 7 days a week. Paul and I shared the route for much of that time.

Whenever I would go on a trip, such as to a camp-meeting with Dad or to youth camp, I would get one of my brothers or sisters to deliver the papers in my absence.

Even with my own paper route, I was still only allowed to keep 25 cents per week for spending money. To put that into perspective, at the time a coke was 6 cents and most candy bars cost a nickel. While I had my route, the price of a daily newspaper went up from 5 cents to 7 cents. The big Sunday paper was 15 cents. Some customers complained that 7 cents was too much to pay for a newspaper.

If I had left over newspapers after delivering to all of my 90 customers, I was allowed to keep what I made from selling the “extras” for spending money. I made sure I had 2 or 3 extras every day, but I had to pay for them, so that cut into my profits. I sold the newspapers by knocking on the doors of people along my route who did not take the paper. I carried the papers in a canvas bag slung over my shoulder and walked the route for the first two years. Then, with my own savings, I bought a new top-of-the-line blue Schwinn bicycle for $80. No one was every prouder of their bike.

Most of my savings went into my college fund. However, I was allowed to withdraw from my account to pay my way to summer youth camp, and to take trips with Daddy. I paid for my own meals when we went to the Church of God General Assembly. For three of the Assemblies I attended as a teenager, I paid for my own room at the YMCA, in both Memphis and Dallas.

When Paul and I went with Dad on a missionary trip to the Bahamas, we paid our own passage on the ship.

After three years of delivering newspapers, I got a part time job at Toby’s Food Store. I kept that job until I graduated from high school, working two afternoons during the week and all day on Saturday. I was paid $5 per day, or $10 per week. The two afternoons totaled about 8 hours which were counted as one day. On Saturday, I didn’t fare as well. I worked from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m., with only a short break for lunch. For that 13-hour day, I also got $5.

The manager at Toby’s was very good in letting me get off to take summer or weekend trips when I wanted to. He also paid me as well as I could have made anywhere else in town.
I was an all purpose grocery boy. Much of the time I bagged groceries and carried them out to people’s cars for them. When I wasn’t bagging groceries, I might stock shelves, sweep floors, unload trucks, or work in the produce or meat departments. There was never a moment to be slack or goof off.

After two years, I was promoted to grocery delivery boy and I enjoyed that job best. Toby’s, like most grocery stores in Cleveland at the time, made deliveries. People would call in their orders, and 2 or 3 people worked full-time filling them. Some deliveries were made by truck, but most were made by bicycle. I rode one of the bikes. It was a specially built, heavy duty bike with a small wheel in front to make room for an extra large basket.

I prided myself in peddling as fast as I could and developed a reputation of being one of the best delivery boys in town. I usually carried the groceries into people’s kitchens for them. I got to know just about every house in town, inside and out.

With the grocery store job, and having more need for spending money in high school, I gave myself a raise and kept out 50 cents per week instead of 25. The rest went into savings. I spent any tips I might get, although tips were very rare. It was a cause for rejoicing when someone gave me a dime for carrying out their groceries. That only happened 2 or 3 times a week.

In addition to working at the grocery store, I worked for a couple of years as a dishwasher in the high school cafeteria. I washed dishes for one hour, instead of having study hall, and for that I was paid 50 cents per day plus a free lunch. That money, along with the 35 cents Mom gave me every day for lunch money, also went into my savings account.

The summer I graduated from High School, a grocery chain, White’s Food Store, was opening in Cleveland. It was the first real supermarket in our town.

I applied for a job working full-time for the summer. When I went in for my interview, and the manager learned I already had 3 years of grocery store experience, he only had one other question: “What do you think about labor unions?”

I told the manager the truth. I had no idea what a labor union was, but somewhere I had heard someone say that unions were Communistic, so I was against them.

He hired me on the spot.

At White’s Food Store, I had to wear a white shirt and a purple bow tie to work. Also, they paid me the minimum wage of $1.25 per hour. I thought I was getting rich. That was more than twice what I had been making at the other grocery store.

My savings from 5 years of delivering newspapers, 2 years of washing dishes and 3 years of working at the grocery store, along with a partial scholarship, was enough to pay my college tuition. I was lucky that I was able to live at home.

When I entered college, I quit the grocery store so I could have all my Saturdays free to travel in ministry. During my freshman year at Lee, I found three, new part-time jobs. On Monday through Friday I worked during the lunch hour as a short order cook in the college snack bar. In the evenings on Monday through Friday, I was the janitor for the new kindergarten at the North Cleveland Church of God. Many times I did my cleaning very late at night, after a church service or some activity on the college campus.

My third job was as janitor of the Church of God Tennessee State Office, which was in Cleveland at the time. It was a small office building, with four rooms, and required cleaning only once a week. I was allowed to do my work anytime between when the office closed on Friday afternoon and when it opened again on Monday morning. Earl Paulk, Sr. was the State Overseer and the office building was beside his house. He understood when I didn’t clean the office until the wee hours of Monday morning, because I had been out of town preaching that weekend.

Later during my college years, I worked for a few months on an early evening 4-hour shift at a rug factory. I didn’t keep that job for long because it was too hard for me to get off when I was invited somewhere to preach.

When I traveled and preached with the Pioneers for Christ, I did not personally receive love offerings. However, if anything was left after travel expenses, some of the offerings went toward paying for the expenses of my summer witness team.

With these jobs, I not only worked my way through college, but also supported myself in every other way, except for a place to sleep and food to eat when I was home at mealtime.
All of my brothers and sisters had similar work routines. However, Dad and Mom did expect more from the boys, because jobs were easier for us to find than they were for the girls.

When I left college, I still had about $300 in my college fund. It was a nice nest egg that was a big help when I launched out into full-time ministry.

Chapter 14: Travels with Daddy

2009-01-13T20:59:00.000-05:00

When Dad traveled in his ministry, he disliked being away from his family. One of the areas in which he excelled as a father was in taking us children with him on his trips, much to our delight.

Usually only a few of us could travel with him at a time, but there were those rare occasions when the whole clan went together. One such time was when we were going to Atlanta to visit Grandmother and Granddaddy Conn.

It was a challenge to get a large family like ours into a sedan. Vans weren’t readily available in those days and we didn’t get our first station wagon until a few years later. On this particular trip, there were only ten of us children. The last two had not yet been born.

Dad sat behind the wheel of the Buick Roadmaster; Mom, holding the baby, rode “shotgun.” Philip sat between Mom and Dad with a younger brother on his lap.

Four of us bigger children were jammed across the back seat, and the remaining smaller children climbed in on top of us. Sometimes one of them might crawl up onto the back window ledge, and the others either sat on a bigger sibling’s lap, or dug out a spot for themselves on the floor.

There were no seat belt laws in those days. In fact, there were no seat belts, or at least I had never seen one.Atlanta was 120 miles south of Cleveland. Interstate 75 did not yet exist, so the only way to Atlanta was by a two lane road which led through the heart of several small towns. We had stopped at a red light in downtown Calhoun, Georgia, about halfway to Atlanta, when Mom spoke up. “It seems a little quiet in here. Who’s missing?”

“All right children,” Dad intoned, “sound off.”We all knew the routine. Philip said “One;” Sarah said “Two;” I said “Three; Paul said “Four;” Sharon said “Five.” Then there was silence. Number six, Raymond, was missing.

We made a u-turn and drove the sixty miles back home. There Raymond was, standing in the front yard, crying his eyes out. As we loaded him into the back seat and turned again toward Atlanta, Raymond sobbed, “I thought Jesus had come and I was the only one left behind.”

Dad usually called for us to sound off at the beginning of a trip, but occasionally he forgot. There was only one other time I remember us leaving someone behind. It was on one of the very rare occasions when the whole family went out to a restaurant together for a meal. We were almost finished with our dinner when someone noticed Raymond was missing again.

The trips we took with Dad were most often to his preaching appointments, but not always. When I was in third grade, Philip, Paul, and I got to miss a whole week of school to accompany him to Washington, D.C. Dad was going to the Library of Congress to do some research for a book he was writing and our teachers agreed to call it an educational trip and let us go with him. I didn’t see that the trip had anything at all to do with education. To me, it was just a lark.

We drove up to Washington, D.C. via the entire length of the famous Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive, from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Shenandoah National Park. Dad spent a couple of days at the Library of Congress, while we boys sat at a table and read. For the rest of the week, we toured our nation’s capitol.

My brothers and I were so eager so see all the sights that one morning we asked if we could please skip breakfast and go straight to the Washington Monument. Dad agreed. The line for the elevator to the top extended out the door and wrapped around the monument. We boys told Dad he could wait in line if he wished and we would meet him at the top. We started up the stairs of the 555-foot monument with enthusiasm.

About halfway up I began to feel very lightheaded, and so weak I was shaking. My brothers left me behind, so I slowly retraced my steps back down and found Daddy, who was next in line to go up the elevator. Just as I reached him, I fainted at his feet.

Dad drug me out into the fresh air, propped me up on a bench, and found me something cool to drink, and also something to eat. Until then, I did not know I was hypoglycemic. I don’t function well on an empty stomach. It was several years later, on another visit to Washington, that I first climbed all the way to the top.

Today, people are not allowed to ascend the Washington Monument on foot.Most of the big trips we took with Daddy were during the summer camp-meeting season. In the Church of God, every state had an annual camp-meeting. In many states, particularly in the South, they were held in large open-sided tabernacles and were attended by thousands of people. In areas where the Church of God constituency was smaller, the camp-meeting might be held in one of the larger local churches, a school auditorium, or a rented hall. The typical camp-meeting featured two main speakers; a morning Bible teacher and an evening evangelist. There were also other preachers who spoke in mid-morning and afternoon services. Dad was usually the Bible teacher, although he occasionally served as the evangelist.

When we were at camp-meetings, we children were required to attend the morning and evening services, but we would skip the afternoon service and do something fun, like go swimming or sightseeing. The meetings usually began on a Monday evening and Dad’s last sermon was on the next Sunday morning. That afternoon, he would drive back home with three very tired children and all our dirty laundry. Early the next morning, Dad would load up three different freshly scrubbed children and be off for his next appointment. He would do this for about eight or nine weeks every summer, and I always got to go along for two or three of them.

We went all over the United States. Mother usually had to stay home with the larger share of the children. However, after we were grown, she and Dad traveled all over the world together.

On the trips I took with Dad, we sometimes stayed in motels, but usually it was either in a preacher’s house or in a cabin on the campground. If the distance warranted it, we would stop at a motel en-route.Staying in motels was a very different experience then than it is today. There were no franchises. Every motel was a small “mom and pop” operation, and you didn’t even think of putting your money down until you had inspected the room.

When we knew we would be staying in a motel for the night, we children always anxiously read the billboards along the highway. We were looking for two things, “Free TV” and “Swimming Pool.” Television in our room was a special treat since we didn’t have one at home.

Not all motels had televisions, and many that did required you put a quarter in the slot to watch a half hour of programming. We had to be very careful with those quarter-eating TV’s. If we wanted to watch Amos and Andy for instance, we first had to know exactly when it was coming on and watch the clock. If we dropped our quarter in too late, we would miss the first part of the program. If we dropped it in too soon, our thirty minutes would be up before we saw how the program ended.

Even more desirable than a room with a television was a motel with a swimming pool, especially one that didn’t have any girls in it. All of us children loved swimming. We were allowed to swim with each other, but swimming with a girl who was not your sister was strictly forbidden.

One late afternoon in Meridian, Mississippi, Philip, Paul, and I checked into a motel with Dad. As soon as our suitcases were dropped onto our beds, we boys yanked out our swimming trunks and dashed for the pool.Just as we began our swim, I noticed a family drive up to the motel office. There was a little girl in the back seat of the car, looking out the window at us.

“Oh no,” I yelled to my brothers. “There’s a girl. I hope she doesn’t go swimming.”

We kept our eyes on her as she and her parents checked into the room beside ours. Five minutes later, out she came in her bathing suit, skipping across the parking lot in our direction.“Quick,” Paul yelled. “I think we have time for one more dive.”

In rapid succession, Philip, Paul, and I each ran to the diving board, plunged in, and swam furiously for the side of the pool. I was the slowest swimmer and the last one out of the water. Just a split second after I hoisted myself out, the little girl’s toe dipped into the pool. Safe! We boys trudged back to our room, grumbling to ourselves, and the little girl looked at us as if to say, “What’s wrong with me?” If both her foot and mine had been in the water at the same time, that would have been mixed bathing, and I would have had some heavy repenting to do when we got to camp-meeting. I wasn’t sure exactly why swimming with the opposite sex was a sin, but I thought it had something to do with people getting pregnant that way.

Once in Roanoke, Virginia, I was staying with Dad and a couple of my brothers in the biggest and newest motel I had ever seen. It was called the Holiday Inn. This place was so fancy it even had its own restaurant. One day we were eating lunch there with the Church of God State Overseer. He and Dad were talking about the marvelous new concept of the chain motel. “Just imagine,” the overseer said, “they’re going to be building these Holiday Inns all over the country, just like this one.”

The very idea boggled my mind. In large cities, we occasionally stayed downtown in a high-rise hotel. In Chicago, on our way to the Wisconsin camp-meeting, Dad asked the desk clerk to give us a room as high up as he had available. We got a room on the 22nd floor. The view from up there, down over the city and out across Lake Michigan, took my breath away and made a small town boy feel very sophisticated.

That evening, Dad walked us boys down State Street, through skid-row, to a service at the famous Pacific Garden Mission. Another time, we stayed on the top floor of a downtown hotel in Miami, Florida. We happened to be there on New Year’s Eve, on the night of the Orange Bowl Parade. The parade made a turn right under our window, which was a special thrill for me as a 15-year-old.

When we traveled with Dad, eating in restaurants was also an adventure. There was no fast food and no franchise eateries in those days. The first McDonalds I ever saw was in Wyoming, after I was an adult and had moved away from home. Like the motels, every restaurant was a local establishment and you never knew exactly what to expect.

We were on a tight budget for meals on those trips. The rule was that you ordered one of the least expensive items on the menu. I sometimes agonized over whether to have a hamburger or splurge and go for a cheeseburger. Often I ordered an egg sandwich or a grilled cheese because they were even cheaper. To this day, I never read a menu without looking at the prices first.

Philip, Paul, and I were in a restaurant with Dad on a camp-meeting trip to Covington, Louisiana, and had just finished eating our hamburgers. That’s when the waitress came by our table and announced they had fresh strawberry shortcake for dessert. She looked at Dad and asked, “Sir, would you like to have some strawberry shortcake?”

“No, thank you.”

Turning to Philip and Paul she asked each of them in turn, “Would you like any strawberry shortcake?”

I was squirming in my seat by now and fearing what I saw coming. If the waitress asked me whether or not I wanted any strawberry short cake, I saw only two options. I could say “no,” and go to Hell for lying, or I could say “yes” and risk the wrath of Daddy and my brothers for violating our travel code and busting the family budget.I gritted my teeth and awaited the dreaded question.

“And how about you, Son, do you want any strawberry shortcake?”

Not wanting to face either the wrath of God or that of my family, I gulped, “I want it, but I ain’t gonna get it.”

Dad was embarrassed. “Bring it to him,” he told the waitress, curtly.

As she disappeared into the kitchen, three sets of eyes glared across the table at me. I felt like I was going to cry. The strawberry shortcake looked beautiful and it tasted great, but I didn’t enjoy it at all.

Back in the car, Dad reprimanded me. “Son, if you’re going to travel with me, then you’ve got to abide by the rules. Why did you embarrass me like that? We’ve discussed this before, and you know we can’t afford to order dessert.”

Philip and Paul quickly jumped into the fray; only they were harder, calling me things like “jerk” and “stupid idiot.”

They all asked me, “Why didn’t you just say ‘No’?”

I was sobbing now. “But I would go to Hell if I said ‘No.’”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You won’t go to Hell for not eating strawberry shortcake.”

It took me an hour to finally get them to understand that if the waitress had asked if I was going to order any strawberry shortcake, I would have said no. But, she didn’t put it that way. She asked, “Do you want any strawberry short cake?” And to say I didn’t want any would be a lie.

Finally, I got them to understand my position, but I never was sure they agreed with it. I had all the makings of a great Fundamentalist. I took everything literally.

During the years Dad served on the General Executive Committee of the Church of God, the camp-meeting trips took on a different character. He was first elected to the Committee when he was only 32, and I was 7. Back then, the Editor-in-Chief of Church of God Publications was an Executive Committee position. Later, church polity was changed and the Executive Committee consisted of the General Overseer, Three Assistant General Overseers, and the General Secretary-Treasurer.

In every camp-meeting across America, it was tradition to have at least one Executive Committee member pay an official visit and bring a message. That meant Dad often traveled to as many as four different camp-meetings in a single week. I especially enjoyed those road trips.

On one such trip, Dad was a full day’s drive out from Cleveland, on his way further west, when he got a call from the General Overseer ordering him to return home immediately. Dad was First Assistant General Overseer at the time. The General Overseer told him he was no longer permitted to carry his children with him on official camp-meeting visits. None of the other Executive Committee members did. “This is God’s business -- church business,” the General Overseer said, “not a family vacation.”

That trip was ruined, but later other ministers appealed to the General Overseer to reconsider his position, so he allowed us to begin traveling with Daddy again.

Some ministers, those who considered themselves more dedicated and righteous than Dad, criticized him for always having us children with him. But there were others, and I believe the majority, who said Dad was setting a good example and they enjoyed seeing us with him.

On those trips, as the official representative of the Executive Committee, Dad would preach the same sermon at every camp-meeting he attended for the entire summer. After hearing the same message several times, I pretty well had it memorized.

On a southwestern trip, we went first to Bald Knob, Arkansas, for Tuesday services, then on to the Oklahoma camp-meeting on Wednesday. Dad preached in Weatherford, Texas, on Thursday, and then on Friday we made the long drive across west Texas, on a two lane road, with no air conditioning.

On that seemingly endless, hot, dusty drive Dad taught us a little poem:

The sun has riz,
The sun has set,
And here we is
In Texas yet.

Somewhere on the high plains of west Texas, Paul fell asleep and slumped across our invisible line down the middle of the back seat. According to our agreement, I had permission to hit anything on my side of the line, and I gave him a wallop. Agreement or not, Dad didn’t allow hitting. He stopped the car and told me to get out and lean over the trunk. He took off his belt and got ready to drive the foolishness of fighting out of me.

About that time, a small police patrol airplane flew in very close, swooping down and circling so low over us that we could see the facial features of the pilot. Hope sprang within me. Maybe the cop was going to land and tell Dad he couldn’t beat me. However, when the pilot saw that we weren’t broken down, but that Dad was just disciplining one of his kids, he waved, tipped his wings, and flew on down the highway. I held the distinction of being whipped in more different states than anyone else in the family.

On Saturday and Sunday, we were at the New Mexico camp-meeting in Roswell. In the previous four days, I had heard Dad preach the same sermon three times, plus I had already heard it at least about half a dozen times before that trip.It was my favorite of all Dad’s sermons: “The Five Realms of Human Affection.” It was a message about love, and at that time I don’t think I had ever heard anyone except Dad preach an entire sermon on the subject. Most camp-meeting evangelists preached about the Second Coming, Holiness or Hell.

While Dad was delivering his “love” sermon at the New Mexico camp-meeting, I sat on the front pew between the State Overseer and the evening evangelist. As the sermon progressed I would lean over, first to the overseer and then to the evangelist, and tell them what was coming next.

“Okay,” I would whisper, “here comes a funny story about this sassy little lady who shook her finger in his face and said, ‘Brother Conn, you can’t shut the mouths of God’s witnesses.’” Dad would repeat what I had just said, word for word.

I whispered again, “Now he’s going to get on an imaginary grapevine and swing all the way across the platform from one end to the other.”

Sure enough, after the congregation finished laughing at Dad’s funny story, he took hold of the imaginary grapevine and swung across the stage. The preachers on either side of me were all ears.

After the service, the overseer and evangelist both went out to eat with Dad, me, and my brothers. Over lunch, the other preachers laughingly told Dad how I had filled them in during his sermon. He failed to see the humor in it. Later that day, I got a strong warning from Daddy. I was to never again sit beside a preacher, especially a State Overseer, while Dad was up front preaching.

Camp-meeting was church big league. It was like the mightiest local church revival you ever experienced, doubled seven times over.

Where there might be an aisle runner or two in a local church, at camp-meeting you could sometimes see a dozen or more at once, streaking through the wood shavings that covered the tabernacle floor, leaving dust trails in their wake. Also, at camp-meeting you could hear world-class screamers. They had to have a special anointing to be heard above the din of the huge crowds. Most people screamed when they were getting a blessing, like when we were singing about Heaven, but not always.

The best I ever heard was at the Tennessee camp-meeting near Chattanooga. The crowd was so large that I couldn’t see who she was, but I’ll never forget the way she could scream -- and her timing was perfect.

The evangelist had ended his sermon and was pleading for lost souls to come to the altar. He was describing the agonies of Hell, and the excruciating, unending cries of the damned -- eternally alienated from God -- without hope.

Suddenly, from somewhere in the back of the tabernacle, there came the longest, most blood curdling shriek I had ever heard. It was even better than a Rebel Yell -- full of pathos and agony. It sounded like the last despairing cry of a doomed soul, chest deep in Hell and sinking fast.

That one incredible scream flushed a hundred sinners out of their seats and down to the altar. It even made me want to get saved all over again.

Even more amazing than the screamers were the tongue talkers -- especially those who gave forth messages that were followed by an interpretation. Speaking in tongues was a common occurrence in Pentecostal worship. Most of it was not intended for public display, even though it might be overheard. It was simply an ecstatic utterance, or prayer language, that was a private communication between the person talking in tongues and God.

A message in tongues was something different altogether. Many times I have seen it happen in such amazing fashion that it defied all logic or explanation. Thousands of people could be praying aloud, with a roar that would drown out the loudest screamer. Then suddenly, with no discernable prompting, every voice would fall silent -- except one. Over the hushed congregation, that one melodious strain would gush forth like a verbal artesian spring, in a language no one could understand.

After the utterance ended, all would remain perfectly still and quiet for a brief moment. Then, from somewhere in the vast congregation, another single voice would rise, this one in English, with a tone which was both comforting and authoritative. This was the interpretation.

I was at a statewide meeting in Somerset, Pennsylvania, on one such occasion. The message in tongues was given right at the end of an afternoon missions sermon about reaching the lost for Jesus. I happened to have a pen and paper with me, so I wrote down the interpretation as it came forth: “If you could see what My eyes see -- if you could hear what My ears hear -- you would know the urgency of the hour. I have looked for you but could not find you. For know this, your time is short. The time is near when no man can work. Go bring forth fruit.”

A hush fell over the congregation, but this time the silence was punctuated with sobs and groans of anguish over lost souls. The preacher seized the moment and gave an invitation. Hundreds rushed forward to pray. Many knelt at the mourner’s bench, while others prostrated themselves on the floor to seek the face of God.

Whenever such an utterance in tongues and interpretation was given, I felt I had heard the very voice of God. Pentecostals don’t put such messages on a par with Scripture; they accept them as a confirmation of what God has already spoken.

It was at the camp-meeting in Wimauma, Florida, that I first felt the Holy Ghost, when I was 15. Saturday night was youth night, and about 400 of us young people were lined up outside the huge open-air tabernacle awaiting our cue to begin the service. At seven o’clock sharp, the band struck up and we marched into the tabernacle, 200 of us down each side, and up to our pre-arranged positions in the mass youth choir.

From the choir loft, I looked out over the immense crowd and saw all 6,000 seats filled. Thousands more overflowed the tabernacle, sprawling in lawn chairs out under the Palmettos and Longleaf Pines.The choir began to sing “Like a mighty army moves the Church of God….”

The service had just begun, but people were already shouting “Hallelujah!” and waving their hankies or raising their arms in praise. Some were laughing in the Spirit; others were weeping -- or both laughing and weeping at the same time.

I was overcome with such emotion that glory bumps popped up over my entire body. It was electric, like nothing I’d ever felt before. I’d heard people talk about feeling the Holy Ghost all my life. They said it was something like electricity flowing all over your body and that’s exactly what I was experiencing. I’d prayed a thousand times that God would let me feel the Holy Ghost the way other people said they felt Him. That night my prayers were answered. I lifted my hands toward heaven and shouted aloud. “Hallelujah!” The Holy Ghost was the greatest feeling I had ever had.

Three months later, I experienced an identical feeling and it shattered my theology. It was my first week as a student at Bradley Central High School. The entire student body and faculty, more than 2,000 strong, were gathered in the gymnasium for a pep rally. The high school band struck up a tune and the football team ran out to the center of the gym floor in full dress. The cheerleaders and majorettes followed -- cavorting, twirling their batons, and shaking their pom-poms.

We all stood and began to sing. “Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light…”

Suddenly, somewhere between the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air, goose bumps flooded over me just like the glory bumps I had felt back at the Florida camp-meeting. I was confused. What was happening? I knew it couldn’t be the Holy Ghost because I wasn’t even thinking about God. I was doing quite the opposite -- watching the majorettes and gallantly trying to fight back the demons of lust. Maybe I hadn’t felt the Holy Ghost in Florida after all.

Twice I traveled alone with Dad to camp-meetings -- one in Columbia, Maryland, and the other in Bessemer, Alabama. Dad wanted to have a special bonding time with just me. I was pleased with the attention, but preferred to travel with some of my brothers along. They were more fun.

I was 16 when Dad and I went to the Alabama camp meeting together. After the Saturday morning service, he and I shared lunch and had a little talk. Dad told me that I was at that stage of life when I might want to find a girlfriend. Saturday was youth day at the camp-meeting, and the service that evening was to begin with the traditional youth march and mass youth choir.

Dad said he was going to leave me at the campground all day long by myself while he went back to our motel and rested. When he returned for the evening service in a few hours, he wanted to see me with a date.

I was excited and nervous about the prospects. I had sat with a few girls in church before, but I didn’t have a special girlfriend, and didn’t know anyone in Alabama. I hung around the campground all afternoon and struck up a conversation with a few boys, but mostly stayed to myself.

Around four o’clock in the afternoon I was sitting on a bench beside the tabernacle, trying to think of a way to meet a girl, and watching a pair of them who had been walking back and fourth across the grounds. The one who had caught my eye was a very attractive, tall brunette, who looked about my age. Her friend was younger and not as pretty. The two girls walked past me at least four times that afternoon. All I could muster was a shy grin and “Howdy.”

I never said “Hello” because that sounded too formal. I never said “Hi” because with my speech impediment, “Hi” was a word I couldn’t say very well.

My eyes longingly followed the tall brunette as she walked by, for what I feared might be the last time, toward the cafeteria. Then, my luck suddenly changed in a way that was nothing short of a miracle. She turned, leaving her friend standing there watching from a distance, and walked directly toward me. I could hardly believe it. She was not only headed my direction but she was looking right at me. Our eyes met, but only for a moment. It was more than I could stand; I had to glance away.

In another instant there she was, standing just three feet away. “Hi, my name’s Ruth. What’s yours?”

My heart was fluttering. “Howdy, I’m Stephen.” I tried to sound nonchalant.We did some small talk about what a nice day it was and how good the services had been at camp-meeting. Then, Ruth nodded toward her friend, 100 feet away.

“That girl over there is Theresa, and I don’t know if she wants me to tell you this. But, she said you were cute and she would like to sit with you in church tonight.”

My heart sank. Ruth seemed so close yet so far away. The camp-meeting would be over the next day. I would probably never see Ruth again, so what did I have to lose? I decided to risk getting my fragile ego bruised and go for the gold.

“That’s flattering, Ruth, but actually I was hoping maybe you would sit with me in church tonight.”

Ruth’s eyes brightened and there was a note of glee in her voice she couldn’t disguise. “Oh, really! That’s very nice of you. I would be pleased to sit with you.”

We made arrangements to meet in front of the tabernacle one hour later so we could visit for a while before the youth march at six. Ruth fairly skipped back to tell the dejected Theresa the news. It was my lucky day.

I had been on the campground all day long, sweating in the 90 degree heat. In preparation for my big date, I went to the men’s room and swiped myself down as well as possible with wet paper towels and combed my hair. Then, I went to the canteen and bought a giant fifteen-stick pack of Double-Mint gum. At least I wanted my breath to smell fresh.

Ruth was radiant when we met in front of the tabernacle, five minutes before our scheduled time. She was dressed in a fresh, frilly pink and white dress that enhanced her beautiful, natural complexion.

“Why, thank you,” she smiled when I offered her a stick of my gum. “I think I will have some.”

An hour later, when we filed into the tabernacle with the youth march, and mounted the stairs to the choir, we had to pass right in front of Dad, who was seated on the platform. I was so proud of my beautiful date, and I could tell from Dad’s grin that he was proud for me too.

That night, during the middle of the service, a ferocious summer thunderstorm came up. In a deluge of rain and hail, all the people who had been sitting outside in lawn chairs ran for cover. The wind blew so hard through the open sides of the tabernacle that umbrellas popped up all the way across the congregation. Then, the power went out.

I was glad we were in the choir loft, sheltered from the wind and rain. It was still daylight outside, but with the heavy cloud cover it was almost dark in the tabernacle. With the roar of the driving rain on the roof, and no microphone, the evangelist really had to strain his gut that night. Not a single screamer or runner showed up to help him. He yelled until he lost his voice.

The Spirit was dampened for that service, but I didn’t mind. With the preacher’s back turned to the choir, we could understand little of what he was saying, so Ruth and I just sat there in the twilight and passed notes back and forth until it got too dark to read. Then she started whispering in my ear. When she did that, and her warm breath was against the side of my face, I had a heavenly sensation. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Holy Ghost. Before the service was over, we went through my entire pack of Double-Mint.

Dad traveled overseas frequently, but only once did I get to accompany him outside the United States. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of Church of God world missions, January 1, 1960. In January, 1910, R .M. Evans and Edmond S. Barr took the first Pentecostal message from Florida to the Islands. To commemorate the event, the Church chartered an entire ocean vessel, the S.S. Bahama Star, which carried more than 500 passengers from Miami to Nassau. Another ship carried an additional 200+ Church of God folk on the trip, for a total of about 750.

In 1960, there was no cruise industry as it exists today. The Bahama Star was a passenger ship which had previously made trans-Atlantic crossings. It had just been refurbished and ours was the “maiden voyage” for the re-named vessel on its new Miami-Nassau run.

When we pulled into the dock in Nassau, a large throng of Bahamian brothers and sisters were on hand to greet us. They were clapping their hands and singing “We are soldiers in the army of the Lord,” and “Sing ‘till the power of the Lord comes down….”

In addition to attending services in Nassau, we also did some sightseeing. One afternoon, while Dad was in meetings, Paul and I rented bicycles and explored some of the island on our own.

The most exciting part of the trip was when the ship’s boiler exploded on our return voyage to the United States. Paul and I had set our alarm clock so we could get up about 30 minutes before daylight. We wanted to see the sunrise over the ocean. As we were getting dressed, suddenly the power on board the ship went off. Emergency lights came on in the hallways, and porters ran frantically through the ship, banging on every door and yelling: “The ship’s on fire! Put on your lifejackets! Everyone to the lifeboats!”

Panic ensued. Pajama clad people with wild eyes and messy hair were rushing up to the top deck, fumbling with their life jackets as they went. After considerable commotion for about 20 minutes, it was announced that the fire had been extinguished and the ship was in no danger of sinking. However, we had no power and were adrift. The current of the Gulf Stream was carrying us northward.

It took 12 hours for a couple of tug boats from Miami to reach us, and then another 12 hours or more for them to tow us back. The kitchen was not in operation because of the lack of power, and most of the food supplies on board were depleted anyway. However, snacks were served.

A few people kept their life jackets on and stayed on the top deck near the lifeboats all day long. Most of the passengers relaxed, enjoyed visiting one another, and made the best of their unexpected day at sea. For a part of the afternoon I fished off the back of the boat, with tackle given me by some of the crew. I didn’t catch anything, but saw lots of flying fish. It was one of the most exciting days I had ever had.

Chapter 15: Memphis, Elvis, and the General Assembly

2009-01-12T21:51:00.000-05:00

Of all the trips I took with Dad, my favorites were to the Church of God General Assembly, which was held every other year in August. Mother also went to the General Assembly. A babysitter stayed with the younger children in Cleveland.

The General Assembly was, and is, the biennial worldwide gathering for the Church of God. Even as a kid, it was for me a time of reunion with friends (mostly other preacher’s kids) I had met all over the United States in traveling with Dad to local churches, conferences and camp-meetings. It was also good to see so many grown-ups I knew. I knew preachers, missionaries and others who had paid visits to the denominational headquarters in Cleveland, and also the North Cleveland Church. It seemed to me that the Church of God was just one big family, of which I was a vital part.

Mom and Dad’s policy was that you had to be 12 years old before you could attend the General Assembly with them. As luck would have it, my 12th birthday fell on the off year, which means that my first Assembly was when I was 13 and Paul was 12. It seems we did everything together.

The General Assembly was exciting not only because I saw so many friends there, but also because it was held in a big city convention center, with 12 or 15 thousand people attending. If camp-meeting was the church big leagues, then the General Assembly was the Super Bowl.

The best dancers, runners, and screamers in the entire church of God exercised their gifts at the General Assembly. I loved to sit as high as possible in the balcony so I could get a bird’s eye view of everything that went on. One of the most amazing things I ever saw at a General Assembly was in Dallas, Texas, when I was 17. There, while a featured choir was singing a spirited number, a young man across the balcony from me stood and began to shout, hands raised high in the air. In the Spirit, he danced down the stadium-like stairs all the way to the rail at the bottom level of the balcony. To my horror, he leapt right over the rail. To my great relief, he landed on his feet in the aisle, about 12 feet below, and joined with the other shouters on the main floor.

The thing I liked most about the General Assembly was the incredible amount of freedom I had there. Dad and Mom were both very busy in meetings the entire week, so we teenage children were expected to attend the services on our own. The requirement our parents gave us was that we were to attend the youth events and evening services. This left plenty of time to explore and sightsee.

The first General Assembly I attended was in Memphis, Tennessee, at the Ellis Auditorium, and our family stayed in the Claridge Hotel. Although we lived in Tennessee, Memphis was a six hour drive away and was a whole different part of the country to me. Tennessee is such a long state, stretching from the Smoky Mountains to the Mississippi River, that parts of east Tennessee are closer to Ontario, Canada than they are to Memphis.

I roamed downtown Memphis, the streets, parks, and the Mississippi Riverfront. I climbed to the top of every tall building in town and found a way onto the rooftop to check out the view. I learned to ride the city buses and visited the Memphis Zoo, the Aquarium, and other exciting spots. I explored much on my own, and some of it with friends and siblings. The amount of freedom I enjoyed was in a greater measure than anything I had ever experienced before and I found it exhilarating.

One afternoon, at that first General Assembly, I got together with six other kids I knew from Cleveland who were also in Memphis with their parents. Maude Miller, the mother of Helen Faye, one of the girls in our group, asked if we would like to drive out and see if we could find Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley.

Elvis was at the peak of his popularity and living at Graceland at the time. It was definitely not the tourist attraction it has become today and was off-limits to uninvited guests. We all eagerly piled into Sister Miller’s sedan and went off hoping to get a glimpse of the home of The King. We found it.

Sister Miller stopped in front of Graceland’s wrought iron gates and we all hopped out, gawking to see what we could see. A security guard told us Elvis was in town, home on leave from the Army, and was due back to Graceland any minute. We decided to wait around for a while in hopes of seeing his car as he passed by. In the next half hour, 25 or 30 other people also gathered.

Once, a delivery truck pulled up and the security guard opened the gate. When he did, I made a quick dash past the guard and grabbed a handful of grass from Elvis’ lawn. Now I had a souvenir.

A short time later two long, black limousines turned into the drive. The gate swung open, but the limos stopped. The left back window of the front limo rolled down, and there was Elvis.

“Hi, Folks,” he grinned. “It sure is a nice day, isn’t it?”

Elvis was immediately deluged with people wanting to shake his hand and get his autograph. He never got out of the limousine, but seemed to enjoy himself, taking at least 20 minutes to shake every hand and do a little small talk. He signed dozens of autographs. Many fans expressed their regret that he had lost his beloved mother, Gladys, just a few days earlier.I remember feeling sorry for Elvis because he had just buried his mother.

I thought he was a very gracious gentleman to stop and chat with us under such circumstances. I got three autographs; two on the back of bank deposit slips Maude Miller gave me and one on the back of my hand. I then poked my head into the second limousine, and asked, “Who are you guys?” Three of them were members of Elvis’ band. An older man said he was Elvis’ daddy. I got his autograph too.

When I started back to school a few weeks later, in 7th grade, I sold those autographs for 25 cents each. What idiots those classmates of mine were to give me a whole quarter each for little slips of paper with a man’s name on them.

As a 13 year old boy, the 1958 General Assembly of the Church of God in Memphis, Tennessee, marked one of the first great spiritual disillusionments of my life. I had always been led to believe that God spoke to people at the General Assembly, dictating the church rules and policies which were taken back to every local church to abide by.

The specific place where God spoke to the church was in the Ordained Minister’s Council. Everyone could come to the worship services at the General Assembly, but in those days, the Ordained Minister’s Council was closed to all except credentialed ministers. No observers were allowed.

After God told the Ordained Minister’s Council what He wanted them to do for the next two years, on the last full day of the convocation, the General Assembly met and approved it. The General Assembly consisted of any and all Church of God members who cared to attend, including laity. However, only male members, 12 and older, could vote.

Even though I wasn’t legally allowed inside the Ordained Ministers Council, I was intent on seeing what it was like when God handed down His orders. I found a back way, up a fire escape route, to the darkened top balcony in Ellis Auditorium. On hands and knees, I crawled in behind the seats. Peeking out between the cracks, I was amazed at what I saw and heard. It was nothing like I expected.

I thought the inside of Ellis Auditorium, with more than 2,000 ordained ministers on the main floor, was going to be something like the Holy of Holies in the Temple that King Solomon built. I expected the very Shekinah Glory of the Lord to be present. I wondered exactly what method God would use in giving the Ordained Ministers his instructions. Would He speak in an audible voice? Would it be through unknown tongues and interpretation, or perhaps through a word of knowledge or prophecy? For all I knew, it might even be something like the way God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

What I saw shook my childish faith. Grown men with blue “Ordained” badges pinned to their lapels, were yelling at each other. It sounded like a fight -- which it was. Men whom I had seen preach and shout at camp-meeting, weeping over lost souls and praying in the altars -- men who talked about love and Holiness -- were having an angry shouting match.

The hot topic that week was the wedding band. Since the early days of the Church of God, it had been against official church teachings for any member to wear jewelry. That teaching was based primarily on I Peter 3:3-4 “Whose adorning let it not be the outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel. But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.”

I had heard that verse used by preachers to denounce the evil of wearing jewelry, and my Sunday School teachers had used it to defend the teachings of the Church. The first time I ever questioned it was when I was no more than 7 or 8 years old and I asked Mama if my sisters were going to Hell because they wore pig tails. The Bible says you’re not supposed to plait your hair, so it was obvious to me pigtails were sin.

Mama said that back during Bible times, women wove gold and silver strands into their plaits and it was the jewelry God was concerned about.

When I was twelve, we were discussing this verse in Sunday School and I told my teacher that something seemed wrong with our interpretation of that Scripture. The way I saw it, if any wearing of gold was a sin, then it was also a sin to put on any apparel -- to wear clothes. If God doesn’t want us to wear any gold, then He also wants us to go around naked.

The teacher told me I should quit talking such foolishness and just keep the teachings of the Church. After all, these teachings had been given to us by the Lord Himself through his ordained ministers.

On the agenda that year was a motion for the Church of God to make a single exception to the prohibition against jewelry by allowing church members to wear a wedding ring. The debate was long, loud, and heated. Some of the more liberal brethren said that by not wearing a wedding band, the married members of our church opened themselves to unwelcome advances from those of the opposite sex, who might think they were single. They said a wedding band did not serve the purpose of ornament or decoration, but it was a symbol that showed a person was married.

The conservatives were the most impassioned. With sweating red faces, bulging veins, and frantic expressions, they warned that through this small change in the teachings, the door would be opened for the spirit of Jezebel to enter the church. They said people wouldn’t be satisfied with just that one concession, but the next thing you knew our women would want to wear engagement rings.

They warned that soon we would be allowing class rings and birthstone rings. Eventually, God forbid, our women would be piercing their ears and bobbing their hair. To allow the wedding band would be just one small step down the long, slippery slope toward liberalism and worldliness. By the time our slide ended, we would become just like the Methodists and other once-Holiness churches that had lost their first love and gone a-whoring after the things of the world.

The moderates offered amendments they hoped would satisfy both sides. They wanted to stipulate that if we allowed the wedding band, it be specifically stated in the Minutes that only a plain band would be acceptable. There could be no engravings, stones, or decorative designs on the band.

It was decided, by an excruciatingly close vote, that the Ordained Minister’s Council would recommend to the General Assembly that the wedding band be allowed.

On the streets of Memphis, in the hallways of Ellis Auditorium, and in every hotel lobby in town, folks were talking about the wedding band. Normally it was a given that the vote of the General Assembly would simply be a perfunctory “rubber stamp” of the recommendations of the Ordained Minister’s Council -- but not this year.

It was rumored that many pastors, on both sides of the issue, made urgent calls back to their churches, appealing for their members to drop whatever they were doing and get themselves to Memphis by Saturday for the vote of the General Assembly. The very future of the Church of God was at stake. The cherished doctrine of Holiness lay in the balance.

For the General Assembly session on Saturday, Ellis Auditorium was packed. Excitement was in the air. I overheard some say that there were people in the meeting with wedding bands in their purses or pockets, ready to put them on the moment the vote was announced, if the recommendation prevailed. Others predicted the denomination would split over the issue. Many were angry. Others simply seemed hurt and in despair that the church, which they loved and believed in so much, was on the brink of destruction.

Microphones were placed throughout the large auditorium. Any male member of the Church could speak. The moderator called our attention to the challenge before us and pleaded for order. He said our General Assembly was the second largest deliberative body in the United States, second only to the National Education Association. Larger denominations, and even most smaller ones, had representative assemblies. Ours was wide open.

The recommendation of the Ordained Minister’s Council was read. It stipulated that the teaching prohibiting the wearing of jewelry was to be amended by the inclusion of the words: “This does not apply to the wedding band.”The debate that ensued was a repeat of what I had witnessed from my hiding place in the balcony during the Ordained Minister’s Council -- only the crowd was much larger and this time laymen joined the fray, speaking on both sides of the issue.

When the moderator finally called for a vote, he reminded the Assembly that only male members in good standing with the Church of God, aged 12 and older, could vote. Those in favor of the motion would say “aye” and those opposed “no.”

The vote on both sides was thunderous, but it sounded to me like the “no” vote was louder.

The moderator said it was too close to call, so he asked for a standing vote. I was sitting in the balcony with my brother, Paul. He was 12 and I was 13. We proudly stood up in favor of allowing the wedding band.

Tellers were stationed in each section of the auditorium to count the votes. The man who counted our section was obviously in opposition to the measure, and when he saw two young boys standing in support of the wedding band, he was visibly upset. He walked up to us and questioned us intently.

“Boys, what are your names? Who’s your Daddy? Where do you live? How old are you? Are you members of the Church of God? Which church do you belong to? When did you join?”

After we answered all his questions, he dutifully marked down two votes in favor of the measure.

The motion to allow Church of God members to begin wearing wedding rings narrowly passed. However, for more than 20 years thereafter I still heard some traditionalist ministers preach against it. I knew pastors who would only allow their members to wear a wedding ring if they joined the church after August, 1958. They said those who joined before that date had vowed to abide by the Church Teachings which were in effect at the time they became members. To wear a wedding ring would break their vow to God and the Church of God, so for them it was still a sin.

More than a dozen years later, when I was in my twenties and preaching revivals in South Carolina, the State Overseer strongly advised me that if I wanted to have any success preaching in his state, I should take off my wedding band. I did, for many years.

For as long as I could remember, the week following a General Assembly was a time when many of my friends and acquaintances moved. Almost every two years we got a new pastor, with new pastor’s kids, because their appointments were given at the General Assembly. And in Cleveland, in addition to our local pastor, there were numerous church officials and their families who were re-assigned, either into or out of the “Holy City,” at the General Assembly.

As far as I was concerned, these appointments came directly from God. I often heard the ministers -- whether coming or going -- say they accepted their appointment as the will of God.

Every time Dad and Mom went to one of these biennial meetings, they prepared us children by telling us there was a very good chance we would be moving the week after they got back. We could move anywhere -- just like I saw my friends move every two years. I was always sad to see my old friends go, and eager to see what the new crop of church officials’ kids would look like.

Miraculously, we never moved away. Dad was either elected or appointed to five different positions in the denomination, all of them in Cleveland, so we moved from one parsonage to another, but we stayed in town. That was unusual, and to this day Dad holds the record of having the longest tenure at church headquarters of any minister.

Chapter 16: Learning About Girls

2009-01-11T19:42:00.000-05:00

There were only four of us in the Buick Roadmaster that dark Sunday evening: Dad, Philip, Paul, and me. Dad had taken us boys with him to Georgia for the weekend where he had been the guest preacher at a church near Atlanta.

Phil was riding shotgun with Dad. Paul and I shared the back seat. Because both of us were sleepy, I had volunteered to lie on the floor and give Paul the seat. I enjoyed snuggling on the floor. Just as I was settling down into the cozy pallet I had made for myself, Dad broke the silence.

“Boys,” his voice carried a tone that let me know what was to follow was unusually important. “You’re getting a little older now, and I think it’s time I told you where babies come from.”

Instantly, I was wide awake. I was nine years old and this was a question I had been asking my parents for half of my life. The only answer I had ever received was “You’ll have to wait. We’ll tell you when you’re older.”

Philip was 12 years old and I think he already knew about the origin of babies, but he wasn’t allowed to tell. It seemed unfair to me that Paul was going to learn the secret of this great mystery at the same time I was. He was only eight.

Dad continued by explaining to us that God had created people as male and female, and he described the difference in their anatomies. That was elementary. I had known about the human anatomy for as long as I could remember. After all, you can’t live in a house with so many brothers and sisters and not know those things. But I couldn’t see how that could relate to where babies come from.

“Babies,” Dad said, “grow from a tiny seed that God plants deep inside of Mommy’s tummy.” I knew that storks didn’t bring babies, and I had heard in church that they are a gift from God, but this stuff about a seed inside Mom was totally new to me.

Dad’s voice was deliberate and a bit strained, as if he were cautiously choosing every word. “When a man and a woman get married they sleep in the same bed together.” Then he went on to explain exactly how God put the seed into the woman. He said that was called sexual intercourse.

This was difficult to comprehend. I found the idea intriguing, but thought it was a shame that all of this happened while you were sleeping. I had heard the term “sexual intercourse” but wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, although I thought it had something to do with hugging and kissing without your clothes on. Now I learned it was what God caused married people to do in their sleep. I thought, when I grow up and get married, I’m going to just close my eyes and pretend to be asleep so I can see how it feels.

This previously forbidden knowledge made me think I was very grown up. Dad told us we were to keep the information to ourselves and not share it with our younger siblings, who were too young to understand.

I didn’t talk about sex or having babies with my younger brothers and sisters. I didn’t talk about it to anybody at all. But as time went by, I began to realize there was more about sex that I needed to know. Most of it I learned from other boys, and also from books.

When I was a young teenager, Dad would ask me from time to time if I had ever kissed a girl. I hadn’t. When he asked that question, it was always with a very stern voice which carried with it an implication that kissing was wrong. I knew that kissing was permitted between a husband and wife, because Dad and Mom were very openly affectionate toward each other. I saw them kiss many times.

There were at least a few people in our church, including one of my Sunday School teachers, who felt a man and woman should not kiss until after they were married, or at least engaged. I’d heard a few church people boast that they did not kiss their spouse until the moment the preacher pronounced them husband and wife. Any display of friendliness or affection between a man and woman was strictly taboo in church.

Frequently in churches I attended, the preacher would get up and say, “Everybody, turn to your neighbor and greet them in the Lord. Brothers, hug the brothers and shake the sisters hands; Ladies, hug the ladies, and shake the men’s hands.” A friendly hug between a man and a woman was unthinkable. Christians just didn’t do that.

In addition to hugging each other, a few of the folks in church also greeted one another with a “holy kiss.” This was according to the Scriptures (Romans 6:16, II Corinthians 13:12). Of course, men only kissed men and women only kissed women.

I knew which men in the church were kissers, and studiously avoided them. Occasionally when I was visiting a church where I did not know the people, some man would catch me on the lips before I could duck. Most of the men who did this were older brethren, and it seems they all had yellow teeth, bad breath, and were in need of a shave.

I didn’t think kissing a girl was sin, and often thought I would like to try it. But I was horrified of what Daddy might do if I ever did and he found out.I began dating at about the age of 15. What I called a date then would not be considered a date by most young people today. All I did was just sit with a girl in church, or maybe have a pre-arranged “date” to meet a girl and hang out with her during a church social activity.

Summer youth camp was one of the best times for meeting girls. Every year at camp, on the last evening, there would be a “date night” which simply meant that boys and girls could sit together for church service, followed by a social time at the snack shop, and then a movie.

My youth camp girlfriend for my 14th and 15th summers was Nita from Kingsport. She was the cutest girl I had ever seen. We were pen pals for the entire year between those two summer camps. On date night that second year, we were standing behind a tree which shielded us from the floodlights that beamed out from the snack shop. I wanted to kiss Nita so badly that I ached, but at the same time I was terrified by the thought. My concern was twofold: How do you kiss a girl? And, how would I answer Dad the next time he asked if I had ever done it?

Nita must have sensed my desire to kiss her. We were looking into each others eyes, whispering low and saying how much we were going to miss each other after camp was over for another year. Then Nita opened her mouth slightly, closed her eyes, and moved her face to within an inch of mine. I could feel the warmth of her breath and she looked more beautiful than any sight I had ever seen. I cleared my throat, swallowed hard, said something really stupid, and stumbled out from behind the tree and into the light.

It was two and a half years later that I got my first kiss. I was already preaching and was heavily involved in the Lee College Pioneers for Christ Club, although I was still a junior attending public high school. I had met my first serious girlfriend, Sylvia, when we had been together on a Pioneers for Christ “Invasion,” going door-to-door, winning souls for Jesus.

Sylvia was a brunette from Oneonta, Alabama, a college freshman, and two years older than me. We dated for about three months. Most of our dates consisted of going to church together on campus. After the service, students were allowed to walk to the canteen or the Student Center together until curfew at 10 p.m. On Friday and Saturday nights, the curfew was 11 p.m. A boy was not allowed to walk his girlfriend all the way to her dormitory. A yellow line down the center of the street was the goodnight point. A dormitory monitor stood at the line to be sure no one lingered too long, and that there was no touching.

In the Student Center, there was a “six inch rule” which was strictly enforced. A student council monitor was always on duty, with a ruler in hand. Every 20 minutes he or she would walk around the room, where students were sitting on couches and chairs, and announce “Hand check.” Everyone raised both hands to show they were not touching their date. Holding hands was strictly forbidden, and a violation resulted in demerits. The number of demerits given depended upon the seriousness of the offense. Get 100 demerits and you were expelled from school.

If the student council monitor thought someone looked like they were sitting too closely together, he would use the ruler to be sure they were a minimum of six inches apart.

As Sylvia and I became more and more intimate in our relationship, I finally got up the nerve to reach out one night and touch her on the hand. I had placed my overcoat on the couch between us in anticipation of my bold move. She reciprocated, and we began holding hands regularly, always under the coat. We were never caught.

One of our favorite date activities was to practice our soul-winning techniques. One of the things that attracted me to Sylvia was that she shared my intense devotion to the Lord. During these times, we would take turns playing the part of the sinner. First, I would witness to her, and she would answer me with some of the many objections we had learned to anticipate when we were out knocking on doors and telling people about Jesus. Then, we would reverse rolls and I would play the part of the sinner, allowing Sylvia to sharpen her witnessing skills.

We would do this for a couple of hours at a time. During these witnessing practice sessions, I didn’t hold Sylvia’s hand. It was hard to concentrate on the things of God when her hand was in mine.

Until just the year before, students had not been allowed to date off campus unless they were accompanied by a faculty chaperone. Some old-timers criticized Lee for going liberal and “letting down the Holiness standard” when they relaxed that law and began to allow students to double date. A couple could not leave the campus together without signing out, and without having at least one other couple along.

Sylvia and I were on a double date with another couple of students one Saturday night. We had been to a revival service together, and were on our way back to the campus. Sylvia and I were in the back seat, unashamedly holding hands, but still sitting about six inches apart. I wanted to kiss Sylvia so badly. It was exactly seven days before my 17th birthday. I hadn’t proposed marriage to Sylvia, but I was definitely thinking in terms of possibly being with her forever.

That night, as we were going down a dark country road with the radio playing Southern Gospel music, I decided to take the plunge.I clumsily made a lunge for Sylvia, mouth puckered but tightly closed, and planted a quick peck on her lips. They were warm and soft, but I fairly bounced off, not lingering at all. I knew nothing about open mouth or tongue action kissing. I knew even less about women. To my great relief, Sylvia didn’t recoil or slap me. She smiled and reached out to hold me now with both of her hands. In a few minutes, we were back on campus.

I was experiencing a flood of confused feelings. There was a tinge of guilt in that maybe I had done something wrong, overshadowed by the elation of my first kiss that made me feel light and giddy. Also, in the back of my mind there was the nagging fear of how I would answer Daddy the next time he asked me if I had ever kissed a girl. I would have to tell the truth and take the consequences. Fortunately, he never asked me that question again.

As I said “goodnight” to Sylvia at the yellow line in front of Nora Chambers Hall, I muttered to her with fumbling words, “Sylvia, you’re the first person I’ve ever kissed, and I hope you’re the last.”

She just said “Goodnight.”

The next afternoon, in a rather matter-of-fact telephone call, Sylvia broke up with me. I was devastated. I had kissed her and to me that meant we would in all likelihood get married someday. I apologized profusely for being so forward as to kiss her the night before. I asked if she had been offended and if so, to please forgive me and I would not be so presumptuous as to kiss her again.

She said that the kiss was okay, but she just thought we shouldn’t see each other again because of her own personal reasons. That was it. No more discussion.

A couple of days later, one of Sylvia’s friends told me she didn’t want to date me any more because I didn’t know how to kiss.

I continued to date Lee College girls for the next couple of years, while I was still in high school. One of those girls was kind enough to teach me how to kiss.

In my freshman year at Lee, I met the girl who would become my wife. Our dating routine consisted mostly of attending church and going to college activities together.We dated for well over a year and became engaged to be married. One evening, we were sitting together on a couch in the Lee College Student Center. We were the required six inches apart and were not holding hands. However, that evening I dared to lean over and give her a short peck on the lips. Unknown to us, Ray H. Hughes, the college president, was watching through a window.

Almost immediately after the kiss, I heard the door opening and looked up to see Dr. Hughes appear. He stood in the doorway for a brief moment, looking directly at us until he was sure we had seen him. Then he waved, turned, and left.

We felt sick to our stomachs. As innocent as that kiss had been, we knew we had been caught and shuddered at what the consequences might be. The next day I was walking across campus and saw Brother Hughes. As we passed, he gave me a knowing smile and said, “Hello, Stephen.” There was no mention of the night before. I knew he would not ignore the matter, and my stomach was in knots as I wondered what would come next.

Ray H. Hughes was a man I had known very well since I was a small child. Our families had gone on picnics together; many times I had played with his children in their house and yard. I had been in countless camp-meetings across the country where he and my dad were the preaching team. I had even been out on Lake Chickamauga with Dr. Hughes in his motorboat with my brothers and his sons where he had taught us to water ski. But I knew none of that would help me now. Ray H. Hughes could be harsh, dictatorial and unyielding; I was horrified of him.

For three long days I waited for the other shoe to drop, expecting to be called into Dr. Hughes’ office to give an accounting for myself. The call never came. Instead, I received a letter on his official letterhead, a copy of which had been sent to the college dean. Without a hearing, I had been given 40 demerits for “conduct unbecoming a student.” Furthermore, I was banned from the Student Center for the remainder of the school year. My fiancé’s letter was even more severe. Not only did she receive 40 demerits and a ban from the Student Center, but she was also fired from her part-time job at the college switchboard. Hughes called her “unfit to sit at the doorway of Lee College.”

The next morning in chapel service, Dr. Hughes publicly told of the incident, without giving our names. He said we were an example and that other students should take notice that no displays of affection between a boy and girl would be tolerated on campus. No one was exempt, he warned, saying that the young man involved was the son of a high ranking official in the Church of God. Dad was, at that time, the First Assistant General Overseer, the second highest executive position in our denomination.

Everyone turned and looked at me.

Chapter 17: Who's Afraid of the Holy Ghost?

2009-01-10T20:03:00.000-05:00

As a kid growing up in the Pentecostal church, I was horrified of the Holy Ghost. Or more precisely. I was very afraid of what might happen to me if I ever blasphemed the Holy Ghost.

In revival meetings and at camp-meetings, a favorite sermon topic of many evangelists was “The Unpardonable Sin.” This is a sin so grievous that once you commit it, you can never ever be forgiven. It’s much worse than lying, stealing, committing adultery or even murder. Pardon can be found for all other sins, but not this one. The sin that can’t be forgiven is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.

I’m not sure why evangelists chose this sermon topic so much. Maybe because it was one of the best hot buttons for getting people into the altar. Or maybe it was the sensational stories they could tell of people who had purportedly committed this heinous sin.

I heard evangelists tell of people who came to a revival altar and prayed with agonizing tears night after night but still God would not forgive them. These doomed souls had crossed God’s line of no return and were irretrievably on their downward spiral toward Hell. They had blasphemed the Holy Ghost.

Exactly how someone went about blaspheming the Holy Ghost was something I was unsure of. More than one evangelist said it was making fun of people who were talking in tongues, but I didn’t think that was right. I personally knew people who had poked fun of Pentecostals, and later became one themselves.

Still I was very concerned about people like Johnny, a young man in our church whose father, like mine, was a Church of God general official. Johnny came to church but he didn’t even claim to be a Christian. Once during a revival when things got to moving in a big way, with people dancing in the Spirit and speaking in tongues, Johnny began mocking the people who were shouting. He laughed and yelled out “Hot Dog for Jesus!”

The evangelist stopped in his tracks. From the pulpit he forcefully pointed his finger at Johnny and shouted into the microphone, “Young man, you there on the back row. I heard that, but more importantly, God heard that. You’d better be very careful, Son. You’re treading on dangerous ground. Don’t blaspheme the Holy Ghost. If you do, you’ll commit the unpardonable sin.”

The evangelist had everyone’s attention now. He told us that if anyone made fun of someone under the influence of the Holy Ghost, that was blasphemy and there was no hope for that person’s soul. From that moment on, no matter how much they repented and plead for forgiveness, they were doomed to the eternal lake of fire.

The one thing in life I most definitely never wanted to do was blaspheme the Holy Ghost.

In our church we believed in the Trinity, which means there is only one God, but He exists in three persons, spiritual personalities: the Father (God), Son (Jesus), and the Holy Ghost, or Holy Spirit. I never understood that three-in-one Trinity business, but I accepted it.

So the Holy Ghost was part of God and I wanted all of God in my life. I desperately wanted to be filled with the Holy Ghost, yet I was horrified that in the very process of seeking to be filled I might somehow blaspheme Him. To me, the Holy Ghost was the part of God that was ultra touchy and also held a grudge. Offend Him once and you were doomed forever. Our church taught that there were three separate and distinct blessings or “works of grace” that were available from God. They were Salvation, Sanctification, and the Baptism in the Holy Spirit.

The part about being sanctified was always confusing to me. Also, there were differences of opinion, even among the preachers, as to whether sanctification was a one time experience, or something you continued to work on your whole life. The people I respected most said it was “progressive,” – something you kept working at. It was about living a life of Holiness.

When altar calls were given at church there were usually at least two separate appeals. The first one was for lost souls who wanted to be saved, and the second call was for those seeking to be filled with the Holy Ghost. For nine years I went forward every time the second invitation was given.

I never saw anyone get the Holy Ghost quietly. It only happened when the noise level was high and people had prayed themselves into frenzy. The way you knew they received the Holy Ghost is that they began speaking in tongues. I was taught that if you spoke in tongues, you had the Holy Ghost, and if you didn’t speak in tongues, you didn’t have Him. In my mind tongues and the Holy Ghost were almost synonymous. There were more gifts of the Spirit than just tongues.

Tongues was the least of the gifts – the bottom rung of the ladder - and you couldn’t climb any higher in the Spirit until you received that gift.

I went to the altar and sought the baptism of the Holy Ghost literally hundreds of times. People said God wanted to fill every Christian with the Holy Ghost, but at the same time it seemed He had to be coerced into doing it. There was talk about “tarrying” for the Holy Spirit, and we had tarrying services where people stayed on their knees until late into the night, waiting for the Holy Ghost. Sometimes He showed up for other people, but not for me.

People often warned me that when I sought the Holy Ghost I must not speak in tongues on my own. To do so might be blasphemy. I should just wait on God and when the Holy Ghost got ready, He would do the speaking.

This advice was constantly reinforced by the testimonies and sermons I heard. I thought that whenever my time came, and I spoke in tongues, that I would lose all control, and maybe even lose consciousness.

One man at church gave a testimony that was typical of many I heard growing up. He said that when the Holy Ghost hit him, he went out like a light. He had no idea where he was or what he was doing. He said that when he came to, about an hour later, he was laying flat on his back in the aisle of the church and asked what happened. People told him that he had received the Holy Ghost. They said he had shouted, danced, walked the backs of the pews, ran the aisles, and had a regular Holy Ghost hoedown. And all the while he was speaking in tongues. The man vowed and declared that he had no recollection of what he had done while he was under the power of the Holy Ghost, but people told him about it later, and “in the mouths of two or three witnesses” he knew he had received the Holy Ghost.

However there were others testified that they didn’t lose consciousness when they were filled with the Holy Ghost. They simply lost control. They would open their mouth and try to say something in English, but it would come out in another language. Try as they may, it was impossible for them to speak in English.

One camp-meeting evangelist had the people standing on there feet and cheering when he told the story the disc jockey from a Tennessee radio station who got the Holy Ghost in one of his revivals. He said that man got such a powerful case of the Holy Ghost that when he was on the air the next day he was still speaking in tongues. He would open his mouth and try to make an announcement in English, but it would come out in tongues. Holy Ghost tongues were going out all over the city. The disc jockey was totally possessed by the Holy Spirit.

I wanted to be possessed like that. Whether I lost all consciousness or simply lost control of my tongue was God’s option. Whatever God’s will might be, I was at His command.

I was 15 and we were in one of the frequent revival meetings at North Cleveland when I decided that this was going to be my night. It was do or die; I was going to get the Holy Ghost that night or die trying. I would prevail before God and not take “No” for an answer.

When the invitation was given I found a good spot at the altar and hunkered down for the long hall. I began by confessing all my sins and asking God to sanctify me anew. Then I asked God to fill me with the Holy Ghost. There were at least half a dozen brothers in the church praying especially for me that night. They were gathered around, yelling in my ear and slapping me on the back, as if to knock the Holy Ghost into me. The evangelist and pastor both came by to pray for me as they worked their way around the altar, praying for all the seekers. The evangelist put both of his big hands on my head and shook it violently while he spoke in tongues over me. I even got a shower of his saliva in the process. I felt sure God would answer this mighty man’s prayer and pour out His Spirit upon me, but He didn’t.

Someone on one side of me said, “Just hold on, Brother Stephen. Hold on!”

I was holding on to God alright. If it took all night, I was determined to get the Holy Ghost that night.

Another brother shouted in my other ear, “Just let go, Brother Stephen. Let go!” I wasn’t sure of what I was supposed to let go of. I’d already confessed all my sins and let them go.

Another prayer warrior yelled, “Let Him speak, Stephen. Just let Him speak.” So maybe that was what letting go meant; I was to loosen my tongue up so the Holy Ghost could grab hold and speak. I stuck my tongue out as far as it would go, and let it hang as loose as it would hang. I shook my head so fast it made me dizzy, trying to get my tongue to loosen up. I wanted the Holy Ghost to have no problems when he decided to take over and start speaking through me.

I’d been praying for well over an hour now and was drenched with sweat. I’d gone through several Kleenexes people had stuck in my hand. I hadn’t opened my eyes, because I didn’t want to be distracted or get my mind off the Lord. This was going to be my Holy Ghost night.

Even though I didn’t look around, I could tell by listening that most of the people had already gone home for the evening. This wasn’t unusual. Many times a seeker would stay in the altar long after everyone else had left except, for a few prayer warriors who felt led to stay and help them pray through.

There weren’t as many hands being laid on me now, but at least two men were still with me. One was holding up my right arm my right arm and the other was holding up my left arm. Both of these brothers were still praying for me as hard as I was praying for myself.

“Just forget about speaking in tongues, Brother Stephen.” I heard one of them say. “Just praise the Lord. He’ll fill you in His time. He’ll speak when He comes.”

I began to say “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus….” I must have spoken His name a thousand times. As I did, I tried to visualize myself in His very presence. Surely Jesus would hear me and send the comforter – the Holy Ghost.

Then I switched over to saying “Glory, glory, glory….,” Next came “Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah …..” On and on, faster and faster, I repeated the praises to God until my tongue got twisted, then I took a deep breath and started again. I’d seen others receive the Holy Ghost this way, but it didn’t work for me.

The one thing I absolutely was not going to do was speak out in tongues. I was adamant that the Holy Ghost was going to do the speaking, because I didn’t want to risk blaspheming Him. “Don’t YOU speak in tongues,” I had heard people say all my life. “Let HIM speak.” That’s the only way it could be.

After more than three hours of prayer, I was emotionally and physically exhausted. My arms ached from being lifted so long, even with the help of the brothers who had held them up for me. I was so hoarse I could hardly speak at all, much less in tongues.

I got up and sat on the front pew behind the altar. I saw Bob Crane and Josh Thomas, two of the great prayer warriors of the church sitting on the pew in front of me. I glanced at the clock on the wall and it was a few minutes after midnight. The three of us were the only ones left in the church and all of the lights were already turned out except those directly over the altar.

We started to laugh. I felt such a bond with those men at that moment. It was as if we had been in the trenches together doing battle –which we had. I felt cleaner and closer to God than ever before.

Bob Crane spoke up, “You sure came close tonight, Brother Stephen. You may not have gotten the Holy Ghost tonight, but I believe you got sanctified.”

At least my efforts had not been in vain. I was sanctified, which was at least half way to the Holy Ghost. It felt great.

I continued to seek the Holy Ghost, but after that marathon session in which I was sanctified, I became discouraged more easily. It just seemed so futile. I wanted the Holy Ghost and God knew I did, but I figured maybe it just wasn’t His time.

I talked to Mother about it, and she said I should never give up but just keep seeking God until He answered my prayer.

“But, Mom,” I said, “Sometimes I don’t even feel like seeking the Holy Ghost any more. It’s too difficult. Sometimes I’m not in the mood to pray that hard.”

Mother’s advice was that I go to the altar every time an opportunity is given. “If you feel like seeking the Holy Ghost, then go forward and seek the Holy Ghost.” She said, “And on those times when you don’t feel like seeking the Holy Ghost, that’s when you REALLY need to go to the altar. When you get there, ask God to help you WANT to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Unless you hunger and thirst after righteousness, you’ll never be filled.”

I did exactly what Mama said.

On more than one occasion I was in the altar, not wanting to be there at all, but dutifully praying that God would make me want to be there. Once, when I was in the altar but not in the mood to pray, a group of prayer warriors gathered around and began trying to whoop up the Spirit. I must have had six pairs of hands laying on me, but I was tired of praying and tried to get up. I couldn’t move. All those heavy hands were holding me down. I prayed, under my breath, “Lord, please let these people get discouraged and give up and get their hands off me. I need to go pee.”

Immediately I realized that what I said might not be pleasing God, so I said, “Cancel that prayer God. Thy will be done.” I didn’t want God to think I was being disrespectful.

It would be another year before I finally received the Holy Ghost and spoke in other tongues for the first time. It happened in an altar at church, but I wasn’t even seeking the Holy Ghost that night. I was praying very quietly and no one was praying for me.

It was at a “Youth Witnessing Rally,” led by a group of Lee College students at the Oak Hill Church of God in West Virginia. I was 16 at the time and a sophomore in high school.

The young man who preached that night didn’t even talk about the Holy Ghost. In his message he challenged the Christian young people to dedicate their lives to being soul winners.

When the invitation was given, it was for everyone who wanted to become a soul winner to come forward for prayer. I went up to the front, but instead of standing with all the others in front of the pulpit, I found a corner over on the far right side of the altar and knelt all alone.

I felt terribly frustrated that night, because I had been trying my best to win souls to the Lord for several months, yet without success. I’d told hundreds of people about the Lord, but I had never had a convert. There wasn’t a single notch on my Bible.

I prayed, “Oh God, all these kids up here are telling you they want to become Your witnesses. Well, I have been witnessing for you, Lord, but I’m no good at it. People are going to Hell because I don’t have what it takes to convince them to accept Your salvation.”

I told God that I guessed what I was really asking Him for that night was power to be a better witness. As I prayed very quietly, my head buried beneath my hands, I remembered a scripture I had learned in a soul winning class: “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me….” Acts 1:8.

“So, Lord, when I ask You for power maybe what I’m really doing is praying for the Holy Ghost again.”

Another verse of scripture came to my mind. It might be the most familiar verse in all of the Pentecostal movement: “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Acts 2:4.

In that moment I saw something in that verse I had never noticed before, though I had heard it a thousand times. The subject of the sentence was THEY. The Bible says THEY began to speak with other tongues, not the Holy Ghost began to speak. They did the speaking but the Spirit gave the utterance, or told them what to say.

I decided to do something that I found absolutely horrifying. To me it was far more risky than skydiving or riding a bull in the rodeo. It was more like playing Russian roulette, with only a 50-50 chance of surviving. No matter how high the risk, I was desperate and I was going to take it. I was going to speak in tongues.

If I was wrong, I would blaspheme the Holy Ghost, and burn in Hell forever. But if I was right, I would receive the Holy Ghost and have more power with God than I had ever known before. I would speak in tongues, and take the consequences.

First, I prayed a little longer. “Lord, get ready. I’m about to speak in tongues. Please Lord, please forgive me in advance if what I’m about to do is the unpardonable sin. And God, please judge my heart, and if you find any impurity there, stop me before I blaspheme. Now God, I’m going to ask you one more time to give me the Holy Ghost. Then I’m going to open my mouth and speak forth whatever comes out. It’s up to You to make it come out right. Your job is to give me the utterance.”

I was so scared I thought I might faint. I hoped they wouldn’t find me dead there in the corner after the altar service, struck down like Ananias and Sapphira. Once before I had told the Lord that I wanted the Holy Ghost “do or die.” This time I meant it more than ever.

I took in a deep breath, and prayed: “Lord, I receive the Holy Ghost.” Then I quietly began to speak softly in a language I had never learned before. I was thrilled. I was still breathing and I was talking in tongues. It was just flowing out of me. God and I were doing it together. It was me speaking but He was giving me the words - the utterance – as I spoke.

I prayed in tongues for about ten minutes and then I got up off my knees and stood with the rest of the congregation for the benediction. No one knew what had happened to me. I was filled with the Holy Ghost and I was thrilled all the way down to my toes, but I still didn’t tell anyone until the next morning. First, I wanted to ponder these things for a while in my heart.

Chapter 18: Answering the Call

2009-01-09T22:23:00.000-05:00

By the time I was 16, and a sophomore in high school, church was consuming a larger and larger amount of my time. Not only was I in church every time the doors were opened for services, but I was also beginning to take a leadership roll.

One Sunday morning, I was sitting in the Senior High Sunday School room, waiting for class to begin. The superintendent of the children’s department of the Sunday School poked his head in the door and motioned for me to come out into the hall. Sister Atchley, the teacher of the 4-year-olds class, was in the hospital having a baby, and he wanted me to fill in for her.

The superintendent said he had seen me help take care of my younger brothers and sisters and thought I could handle the job. I ended up teaching that class for a about a year. I had 15 rambunctious, inquisitive, 4-year-olds, and I loved being their teacher.

Shortly after taking that class I was asked to lead the Jr. Boys Lamplighters Club. Since I had already completed both the Jr. and Sr. levels of Lamplighters, they thought I could handle the job. I gladly took on that job too. One night a week, I led the Junior Lamplighters in memorizing Bible verses, learning crafts, playing games, and helping them earn “flames,” our equivalent to merit badges.

The Lamplighter’s was a club the Church of God had developed as their own scouting-type program. The Assemblies of God, a sister denomination, asked our national leadership for permission to adapt the Lamplighters Club for their churches. They were flatly refused, being told that if they wanted to have a Lamplighters Club, all they would have to do was join the Church of God. We were exclusive like that.

Over the years the Lamplighters Club became archaic and eventually ceased to exist. In the meantime the Assemblies of God began their own program called the Royal Rangers, and fortunately for the Church of God, the Assemblies weren’t as stingy with their program as we were with ours. Today many local Churches of God, and other congregations of different denominations, use the Assemblies of God Royal Rangers program.

My advisor was Geneva Carroll, a dear sister who worked at the Publishing House. She was the curriculum writer for Junior Lamplighters materials, and she gave me the latest lessons, even before they were published, so I could test them for her. I was proud to be the counselor for the denomination’s “Pilot” Lamplighters Club.

That same year, I took on a third job at church when I was elected president of the youth department of the Family Training Hour. The church had ceased having Friday night Y.P.E. (Young People’s Endeavor) in favor of a departmentalized Wednesday night program.

We had a couple of volunteer adult sponsors for the youth department, but they primarily served as chaperones. I had the total responsibility of planning and leading the Wednesday night service for about 50 youth.

For one Wednesday night service, I invited the newly formed Lee College Pioneers for Christ Club to present the program. Little did I suspect the life-changing impact their presentation would have for me personally.

The Pioneers for Christ, under the tutelage of a Lee language professor, Charles R. Beach, gave us a 30 minute presentation on the importance of soul winning. Then a group of the students stood across the front of the fellowship hall and asked all who would to come forward and go witnessing with them – at that very minute – door to door in the neighborhood near the church.

Most of the youth responded, leaving only a few behind with our sponsor/chaperones. I was teamed with a Lee junior, about 5 years older than myself, Darlene. We were dropped off, along with another team, a few blocks from the church on Maple Street. One team took one side of the street, and we took the other. Our assignment was to knock on doors and do what we could to win souls for Jesus, before we were picked up again 30 minutes later.

Darlene assured me she would do all the talking and I could just stand beside her for prayer support. She rapped on the first door.

“Good evening, ma’am, My name is Darlene and this is Stephen. We would like to ask you a personal question. Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour?”

The lady told us that she had been born again and was on her way to Heaven. We went on to the next door.

The man who answered immediately asked us inside, and Darlene asked about his salvation.
“I’m afraid not,” the man replied. “Being a Christian is hard. I plan to get right with God before I die, but not right now.”

The man had the look of someone who had led a rough life. His wife sat in one corner of the room holding a baby, and two other little children were on the couch. We never were offered a seat. There were no empty seats in the sparsely furnished room.

The man stood in the center of his living room and fidgeted while Darlene quoted scripture to him and explained the “Way of Salvation.” My attention was caught by the pot-bellied coal stove on one end of the room. It was glowing hot, and the door of the furnace was ajar enough that I could see the burning coal. I could think of nothing but Hell, and the eternal damnation this poor man would endure if we did not succeed in winning him that night.

Darlene pled; the man resisted. One of his little girls ran across the room and held to his leg, eyeing us defensively.

I glanced again at the glowing hot coals, then back at the man, and could contain myself no longer. “You don’t want to go to Hell, do you?” I blurted out.

Angrily the man retorted, “If I go to Hell, that’s my own damn business! Now, you just get out of here. You’re not welcome in my house.”

Our ride back to the church was waiting out on the street in front of his house. The returning teams each gave a brief report of their witnessing efforts that night. One reported a soul saved. Everyone rejoiced; and we were dismissed.

Something about that night - the man standing there denying God, the burning coals, and the sad looking little girl clinging to his leg, haunted me. I began to pray daily, and several times throughout the day, that God would help me to be His witness. I could hardly bear the thought that people in my own neighborhood were on their way to Hell. Something deep inside my heart cried out that God would help me snatch those souls from Hell before it was too late.

A few weeks after that first door-top-door witnessing experience, I was walking across the Lee College campus and ran into Charles R. Beach, the professor who had started the Pioneers for Christ Club. He asked me, seemingly off the cuff, “Stephen, how would you like to go on an invasion to Athens, Georgia, with me this coming weekend?” He said he was also inviting my brother, Paul, and my sister, Sara, to go.

I had no idea what an invasion was, but I loved taking trips. I said I would love to go.
A team of two dozen of us met the following Saturday morning at 4:30 a.m. in front of the Lee College Cafeteria. A student cook had prepared an early breakfast for the team. Thirty minutes after we had met, we piled six each into two cars and headed south.

By 8:45 a.m. we were at the Athens Church of God, a little white frame building in a poor section of Georgia’s University City. A handful of church members had gathered to meet us.

The day started with a soul winning class for about an hour. Techniques for door-to-door witnessing were demonstrated by some of the students. Then we divided up, two-by-two, and spent the rest of the morning knocking on doors and telling people about Jesus. I was placed with Bob, an experienced student who did all the talking. We met a variety of responses that morning, but didn’t win a soul.

Ladies from the church had lunch waiting when we returned at noon. After we ate, the team went downtown, to a prominent spot with heavy traffic, right across from the University of Georgia. We were going to have a street service.

One of the students played an accordion. Another led the team as we sang, “Oh, victory in Jesus, my Saviour forever, He sought me and bought me with his redeeming love….”
A couple of students stepped forward and at the top of their lungs gave their testimony of how they had been saved.

A female student sang a solo: “Without Jesus, you won’t make Heaven.”

Harold Jones was the designated preacher for that afternoon. He had a strong voice and I still remember how it boomed out as he talked about the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima, and how sudden destruction would come upon all of those who rejected God.

People passing by glanced our way briefly, then turned and hurried on their way. After Harold finished preaching, the team fanned out for a “track brigade.” We walked up and down every street in town, passing out gospel tracks to everyone who would take one. Very few people stopped to hear what we had to say. But that was okay. We had planted the seed of the Gospel; we had sounded a warning. Their blood would not be on our hands.

After the street service, the team divided into two groups. One went to a nursing home, and the other to the Clarke County Jail, where arrangements had been made in advance for us to hold services.

We were back at the church by 3:30 p.m. After a time of prayer, we went back out for another 90 minutes of house-to house witnessing.

This time I went with yet another experienced student, James, and he struck oil. A young mother was eager to give her heart to the Lord just five minutes after we knocked on her door.

I watched and listened in awe as James expertly led her in the sinner’s prayer, and she confessed that she had received Jesus Christ as her personal Saviour. Through her tears, the young woman thanked us profusely for coming by and leading her to Jesus.

As we walked to the next house, James said now it was my turn to do the talking. I balked. My reluctance had much less to do with my shyness, than it did with my conviction that an eternal soul would be in the balance.

Brother Beach taught us that every time we knocked on a door we should do so with the attitude that this would be the last chance that soul would have to be saved before it was everlastingly too late. We should witness as a dying man to dying men, or women. We were not to leave anyone until we had exhausted every effort to win them for Christ.

I told James I would never do the talking as long as the person knocking on doors with me might be even slightly more experienced, and potentially more effective than me. When the success or failure of our witness had such dire eternal consequences, it would never be appropriate to send in the B team.

James did the rest of the witnessing that afternoon. I listened, watched, and prayed.
That night at the church, the Lee students presented a special soul-winning rally. At the close of the service, an invitation was first given for sinners to be saved. Then a second invitation was given for people to come forward and commit themselves to be witnesses for Christ.

After the service, all of us in the PFC group were assigned to stay with different members of the church. Paul and I went home with a graduate student at the University of Georgia, and stayed in his apartment.

The next morning, every class in the church’s Sunday School was taught by a Lee student. The regular curriculum was preempted that day as the students taught soul-winning.

At 11:a.m., for Morning Worship, we had “The Countdown Service.” It was rehearsed and planned down to the minute.

The PFC Club filled the choir loft. The pastor gave a welcome and turned the service over to us. The invasion director stood and said dramatically: “This is the countdown service. In exactly 30 minutes you will be given an opportunity to do something that the angels in heaven would love to do, but they can’t. You’re going to be given the opportunity to tell someone about Jesus.”

From the choir loft our group counted down: “Ten, nine, eight, seven…. When we hit zero the pianist struck a cord and we all sang “Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more about Jesus….”
After the song, the student leader stood again said, “In exactly 26 minutes you will be given the opportunity to do something that the people in hell would give anything in the world to do, but they can’t. You’re going to have the opportunity to witness to a soul about eternal salvation.”

Two students stood and gave brief testimonies about how wonderful it was to be a witness for the Lord. The student leader announced again, “In exactly 24 minutes you are going to be given the opportunity to share the Gospel with someone who may have never heard.”

We sang another song: “Souls are crying, men are dying, won’t you lead them to the cross….”
“In exactly 20 minutes you are going to have an opportunity to obey the command of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. You are going to have the opportunity this morning to do your part in fulfilling the great commission, by going into your own neighborhood and preaching the Gospel to every creature.”

A student preacher now mounted the pulpit and gave an energetic exhortation, challenging every Christian to be a soul winner. After 15 minutes he asked all of the PFC team to come down from the choir and stand across the front.

All who would were invited to come forward, take one of us by the hand, and we in turn took them out to witness door-to-door in the neighborhood around the church. I was excited. This would be my very first time to actually talk while out witnessing, but I would be the most experienced person on my team. All of us had been pre-designated about five doors to knock on that morning. Depending on who we found at home, and their response, we might witness at one house or all five.

I took a young man from the church with me. Our five houses started right behind the church. We found three people home, but none were responsive. I was pleased to hear the sound of my own voice telling someone else about Jesus. I used a little track called “The Way of Salvation,” as an outline, and just shared the Gospel as I had heard others do it.

While we were out witnessing, one student preacher stayed behind to give another short sermon to those who remained. His thrust was strongly evangelistic, because it was presumed that if any lost people were in the service that morning, they would still be sitting there in the pews.

When we returned to the church, around noon, people were praying in the altar. As other teams arrived back at the church, we were each asked to give reports. Two different teams reported that they had won a soul to Christ that morning. Many people returned to the altar, and once again prayed for the lost of their community, reaffirming their commitment to be witnesses.

That weekend had a profound impact on me as a high school sophomore. A few weeks later, when Brother Beach asked if I would like to go on another invasion, to Huntsville, Alabama, I was eager to go.

During the weeks between and following those two soul winning weekends, I began to feel God was calling me to preach. I really thought I was the least likely candidate for the ministry there could be. Up until that time, for many years, I had said I wanted to be a National Park ranger when I grew up. I had not yet completely overcome my speech impediment, and I was far too shy to be a good preacher.

The one thing I did have was a passion for souls. It was motivated more by a vision of Hell than one of Heaven. I was convinced that the vast majority of humanity was on the broad road to destruction, and no matter what I did for a living, the primary goal of my life was to snatch as many souls from Hell as I possibly could, before it was too late. The uncertainty of life, and the belief that Christ could return at any moment, gave me a sense of urgency.

Now that I had learned to witness, I wanted to be able to spend my full time sharing with Gospel. But it wasn’t up to me. God would have to let me know whether or not he wanted me to be a preacher.

I decided that it would be a good idea to fast, as well as pray, concerning my decision. For a few weeks, I fasted lunch. When the lunch bell rang at Bradley High School, I would go out and sit on the football bleachers, just me and God, and pray.

I also wanted to fast at home, but didn’t see how I could do it. Mom would notice if I didn’t come to the breakfast or dinner table. Then I would have to tell her I was fasting, and to me that would nullify any good that might become of it. The Bible said you were to fast to be seen of God and not of men.

I found a solution for fasting on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Those were the two days I was working after school at Toby’s Food Store. On those days I got home at night after the family had finished supper, and Mom always left my meal on the stove for me.

I would go into the kitchen, serve my plate, stir the food around, and then when no one else was in the kitchen, I would flush my dinner down the garbage disposal.

As I was praying about the ministry I hoped I would hear an audible voice from God. I had heard testimonies of men being called to preach that way, but I knew an audible voice wasn’t necessary. Some preachers said they just knew in their hearts that God had called them. In my heart I wanted God to call me, but I thought it would be presumptuous to announce my calling unless God showed me in some special way.

I began to pray, “God, if you want me to be a preacher, then let someone invite me to preach. If they do, I will. If no one ever invites me, then I’ll be a park ranger and just witness for you when I can.”

After praying that way for a couple of weeks, it occurred to me that even if someone did invite me to preach, I had no idea what I would say in my sermon. So I revised my prayer. “God, if you want me to be a preacher, have someone invite me to preach, and give me a sermon.”

I was invited to go with the Lee College PFC on a third invasion, but this one was bigger than the two pervious ones. It was over a long weekend school vacation, and the team was going to be visiting churches in three different churches towns in West Virginia: Oak Hill, Beckley and Crab Orchard.

It was on this invasion, in the Friday night service at the Oak Hill Church of God, that I was filled with the Holy Ghost and spoke in other tongues for the very first time. I was thrilled with that new experience, and felt that I was now better equipped than ever before to serve the Lord.

On the following Saturday afternoon, our PFC team was holding a service in the Raleigh County Jail in Beckley. We were in a hallway, separated by bars from about 20 inmates.

During the service, Brother Beach turned to me and said, “Stephen, I’ve just been told by the warden that there are a few prisoners on the floor below us. As soon as we finish singing here, I want you and Jim (the accordion player) to go with me. We’ll have service on the other floor while we leave the others here to finish service here. Jim’s going to sing and I want you to preach.”

God had half called me to preach. I told Brother Beach I would preach, but I didn’t have any idea what I would say. I didn’t have a sermon.

Beach handed me a “Way of Salvation” track. I had that track memorized, and used it every time I went door-to-door. He said, just use this track as your outline. When I introduce you to preach, just step up and pretend you just knocked on a door and the people opened it. Give the men the “Way of Salvation.”

A tingle of excitement swept all over me. In a most unexpected way God had answered both of my prayers. I had an invitation to preach, and a message to deliver.

Jim played the accordion and sang Victory in Jesus. Brother Beach shared a brief testimony, and announced, “Now Stephen Conn is going to step up and share the Word of God with you.”
There were only four men looking back at me from behind the bars. I suddenly began to tremble from shear fright. My “Way of Salvation” track shook so violently I couldn’t read a word of it, and my voice quivered. I talked for exactly four minutes and gave an altar call: “If anyone wants to be saved, come up to the bars and we will pray with you.

The men stared back in silence, but I noticed one of them wiping a tear from his eye. I was encouraged that maybe at least God had touched his heart and maybe someday the seed I had planted would bear fruit.

Almost five years later Charles Beach and I were sitting in a restaurant in Salt Lake City, Utah, where we were a two man evangelistic team, conducting a revival in a local church. Brother Beach told me that he had invited me to meet him in Utah because I was the best preacher the Pioneers for Christ had ever produced, and he wanted the best with him in trying to reach the Mormons with the Gospel.

And then for the first time he confessed to me something his reaction to hearing my first attempt at preaching on the way out of the Raleigh County Jail, that Saturday afternoon almost five years earlier. He had turned to Jim, the accordion player, and said, “That boy isn’t called to preach. He just doesn’t have what it takes to make it in the ministry.”

Chapter 19: Banana Box Religion

2009-01-09T20:41:00.000-05:00

During the same time I was trying to decide whether or not I should become a preacher, I was concerned that if I did enter the ministry I wanted to be sure I was preaching the right doctrine, and in the right church.

In high school I had friends who were of different denominations. Some of them sincerely thought I was lost and on my way to Hell because I didn’t belong to their church. They seemed to intelligent, honest people, honest, who were just as sincere in their beliefs as I was in mine.

One was a beautiful brown-eyed girl, Barbara, who sat in front of me in English class. To look at her one might assume Barbara was a Pentecostal. According to her own denomination’s teachings, she had long hair, wore long sleeves, and no makeup or jewelry. She was a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

Barbara and I were friends, and we had several discussions about religion. She told me that, as much as she liked me as a friend, and didn’t want to hurt my feelings, she had a responsibility to tell me that I would be eternally lost unless I started worshipping on Saturday instead of Sunday. She also said I had to stop eating pork, if I wanted to be saved.

Just like me, Barbara had scripture verses to back up everything she believed.
Another friend, Waymon, was in my physical science class. Waymon and I had many long and heated discussions about religion. He was planning to become a preacher in the Church of Christ. Waymon knew the Bible well, at least in the narrow areas of his expertise. He told me I was lost because I had not been baptized properly. I told him my Daddy, a Church of God preacher, had baptized me, and that T.L. Lowery had baptized me again for good measure.

According to Waymon neither of those times counted. He said I had to be baptized by a Church of Christ preacher, because they got their authority directly through apostolic succession. He also said our church was wrong because we used instrumental music in our services.

Once Waymon passed a note to me during class, asking me to write something in tongues and interpret it for him. The note dismayed me, because he clearly did not understand the nature of this spiritual gift. The teacher interpreted our note, and forbid us to discuss religion any more in his class.

One of the biggest surprises is that I met a young Pentecostal man who told me I was lost because I had been baptized the wrong way. He was a member of the United Pentecostal Church, which is often referred to as “Jesus Only.” They do not believe in the Trinity and accuse other Christians of having three Gods. This young zealot told me that the only people who were saved were those who had been baptized in “Jesus’ name.” He was adamant that I was bound for eternal damnation if I believed in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as one God in three persons.

One day I asked my United Pentecostal friend, “What about that time when the Apostle Stephen was being stoned to death. He looked up into Heaven just before he died and said “I see Jesus, standing at the Father’s right hand.” If the Father and the Son are not separate, how do you explain that?’

Nonplussed, he answered, “If you whop somebody up the side of the head with a stone, they’re likely to see anything.”

In high school I also became exposed to Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others who all felt they alone were the true followers of Christ.

It troubled me that, if I were honest with myself, I had to admit that I was Pentecostal because I was raised that way. I wondered that if I had been brought up in another denomination, would I believe in their teachings as strongly as I believed in the Church of God?
“So God,” I prayed, “If You call me to preach, You’ve got to also tell me where (in which denomination) you want me to preach, and which message You want me to deliver.

I continued praying that prayer for years – even after I was in the ministry. I wanted to be absolutely certain I was in the right church. At the same time, I couldn’t wait until God showed me the right way before I began winning souls. How could I just sit by and let people die without God, while I tried to figure out the finer points of doctrine. I focused on telling people about Jesus, and not just get them to go to my church.

While I waited for God to show me which church was right, I began investigating on my own. Except for one time, when Mom let some of us children go to First Baptist Church to see a Billy Graham film, I had never been to any kind of church except the Church of God. I decided it was time to see what the others were like.

My first foray was to Maple Street Baptist Church, just a few blocks from North Cleveland. I snuck away one Sunday morning and didn’t tell anyone where I was going. The service at Maple Street Baptist surprised me in that it was hardly any different from the Church of God. They sang the same songs, the preacher yelled just like a Pentecostal, and his message would have been perfectly acceptable in my own church. The only difference was that the women at Maple Street had shorter hair, and they wore a little makeup and jewelry. I also knew they didn’t believe in speaking in tongues, but we didn’t speak in tongues at every service in the Church of God either.

I next visited a Seventh Day Adventist church. They were just a bit more reserved in their expression than most Church of God folk, but they looked more like us than the Baptists did. The only real difference I could see was that they had church on Saturday.

I went to a Christian Science meeting, and considered it to be the dullest church meeting I had ever attended. And from the things they were teaching, I thought they were out of touch with reality.

I visited a Catholic Mass, which was all in Latin, with lots of standing, kneeling and mumbo jumbo. At one Catholic Church I attended with some friends, they showed me a little room on the side of the sanctuary, with a curtain for the door. They told me that was the confession both, so I went in and knelt on the little kneeler in front of a screen.

A voice on the other side of the screen asked if I had come to make a confession. I said, “Not exactly, Father. I came to ask you how I could be sure I was going to Heaven when I die.”
I already knew I was going to Heaven, but I just wanted to get his version of how a person could be saved.

“Are you a Catholic?” the priest asked.

“No sir, I’m Protestant.”

He explained to me that in order to go to Heaven, I would first have to go to catechism classes. He instructed me of the time and place they were held. After I completed the classes, he said I could be baptized into the Catholic church, and then I could come back, make my confession, and everything would be okay.”

“But Father, what about right now? What if I should die tonight? Is there any way I could get to Heaven by this afternoon.”

“Is your conscience bothering you?” He asked. “Is there some particular sin you’re worried about?”

“No Sir, I just want to be sure that if I died I would go to Heaven.”

“Well, Son,” he sounded a little impatient now, “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. If your conscience is clear then you should be alright.”

Later, when I was witnessing door-to-door one afternoon, a woman stood in her doorway and told me she was a Jehovah’s Witness.

“Then tell me something,” I asked her, “According to your religion, how can I be sure I will go to Heaven when I die?”

“Oh, forget that. Only 144,000 people are going to Heaven and they’re already there. Heaven’s full.”

“Then am I going to Hell?”

“No, there isn’t a Hell. Don’t worry about that.” she assured me.

“Then what happens to us when we die?”

She explained to me that there was another spiritual state, better than Hell but short of Heaven, where I might go when I died, but there was no way I could be sure I was going to make it. The best I could do would be to join the Watchtower Society and then start going door-to-door witnessing for Jehovah instead of Jesus. She said the harder I worked the better my chances of making it, but I wouldn’t know for sure what my eternal destiny would be until after I was dead.

Not only did I began attending other churches and talking with others about their religion. I extended by my search by radio and the U.S. Mail.

Every day after sunset, our local Cleveland radio station went off the air, and powerful stations for distant cities could be picked up. I listened to preachers on WCKY in Cincinnati, WLS in Chicago, and WWL in New Orleans. But my favorite was XERF, a maverick station beaming its million-watt signal from just across the Mexican border, with a mailing address in Del Rio, Texas.

The late night radio waves were the domain of such preachers as Herbert W. Armstrong, Pasadena, California, and A.A. Allen, Miracle Valley, Arizona. I wrote to these and many more, asking them to please mail me information on what they believed and why. They all responded with packets of tracts, books, and even an anointed prayer cloth.

In the library at Bradley High School was a little blue and yellow volume called “Handbook of Denominations in the United States.” I checked that book out, and from the addresses I found there I wrote the headquarters of dozens of denominations:

Dear Sir,
I am searching for the truth. I want to be sure that I am in the right denomination. Will you please send me information on what your church believes, and why you believe it?

None of my requests went unanswered. I received personal replies from the top bishop in many denominations. They were all thrilled that God was leading me into the truth as they taught it, and they were certain that the Holy Spirit had directed me to write them.

I was so deluged with materials that I made a file from an empty Banana Box. When that one was full, I filled a second Banana Box. I kept the boxes in my room, and spent many hours reading and studying all the materials that I had collected.

One evening Dad came up to my room and asked me what was in the Banana Boxes. When I told him, he looked perturbed. He didn’t order me to get rid of the boxes. He just said sternly, “Son, you shouldn’t waste your time reading all that false doctrine. Instead of studying what other people believe, you should be studying the things that you believe.”

I thought that was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard my daddy say. I didn’t know what I believed, so how could I study it. I only knew what I had been taught as a child. God had called me to be a preacher, and had decided that I wasn’t going to make a final choice as to which church I was going to preach in until I knew what every church believed. How could I reject another belief until I knew what it was?

The more I studied, the more confused I became. To complicate matters, I was already preaching almost every weekend. But I never violated my conscience. I vowed to God that I would only preach the things I felt sure about, and I would just ignore those areas of doctrine about which I had questions.

I was invited to speak one night for the MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship) at the First Methodist Church in downtown Cleveland. They were studying different religions, and my assigned topic was: “What the Church of God believes, and why.”

I took this opportunity very seriously, and decided the first thing I needed to do was study what the Methodists believed. Then I could focus on the differences between the two.

A friend of mine at high school, Rufus Triplett, was a Methodist preacher’s kid. At my request, He borrowed a book of Methodist doctrine from his Dad’s library and brought it to me.

I was amazed at what I read in that book. According to it, the Methodists believed almost exactly the same as we Pentecostals, with the exception the gifts of the Spirit, such as speaking in tongues.
So when the
big night came, I stood in front of 30 Methodist young people and told them that the Church of God believed exactly the same way they did when it came to being born again, sanctification, and holiness.

They had no idea what I was talking about. Some of them had heard about the new birth, but not a one of them had a clue of what I was talking about when it came to the Wesleyan doctrines of Sanctification and Holiness. Those things were in their books, but apparently nobody was preaching them any more.

My search for the right church was based on the premise that somewhere there was in existence a church or religious organization which was more right than all the others. I felt sure one group had a corner on God’s truth, and I was determined to sift through the teachings of more than 250 denominations to find which one it was.

It never occurred to me in my prayers and searching to consider whether any church or religion was right. In my prayers, I never thought of asking God whether or not He was a part of organized religion at all.

I was making poor progress in sifting through all the beliefs of all the different churches. Although I was sincere in my own beliefs, I knew that sincerity was not enough. Proverbs 14:12 says ‘There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” The possibility of being sincere but wrong was a thought that frightened me.

After about three years of study, I was more confused than before I began. Surely, I thought, there must be some key to recognizing the truth. And then I found it.

In the Bible I discovered a passage that shows how a person can know assuredly that he is in the right church. Jesus gave the promise that there would be those distinguishing signs which identify the true believers. It was God’s stamp of approval – His mark of identification.

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” (Mark 16:17-18)

I noted the plural pronoun “them” in these verses. It indicated that the five signs listed would follow the body of believers, but would not necessarily be product of each individual.

And I saw, or at least heard about, all of these signs in the lives and practices of Pentecostal Christians. So I assumed we must be right.

Not only did I often hear people speaking in tongues, but I spoke in tongues myself. I had been in revival meetings where the evangelist purported to cast devils out of a person. I had seen a young man convulsed as if by an unseen force, as the minister commanded demons to come out. After they departed, the formerly possessed person fell limp and repentant at an altar of prayer.
Although I could not swear that I had ever been healed, I often heard people in church testify that they were healed. And I remembered how one of my younger sisters, Sharon, had recovered from tetanus (lockjaw) after Doctors said she would not live, when she was only three years old.

When it came to taking up serpents or drinking any deadly poison, I noticed that these signs were prefaced by the word “if.” I considered these to be promises from God that if a Christian were to be bitten by a poisonous serpent or accidentally ingest poison, that person would come to no harm.

As I traveled and preached on these verses people came up to me and shared their stories. In Crab Orchard, Tennessee, a pastor told me that the former pastor’s son had been bitten by a poisonous snake, a Copperhead, which he accidentally stepped on while the snake was coiled on the front steps of the parsonage. The church folk gathered around and prayed for their preacher’s boy, and he came to no harm.

After I preached in Aiken, South Carolina, a farmer told me that his little daughter had swallowed a mouthful of deadly DDT insecticide, thinking it was Kool-Aid. After he prayed for her, she suffered no ill effects.

This was all the proof I needed. I was in the right church. God had revealed that his true believers were the Pentecostals, by giving them these signs – God’s own stamp of approval.
But as I studied more, I began to see some problems with my reasoning. For starters, the very authenticity of the 16th chapter of Mark was in question. This passage did not exist in the earliest known copies of the New Testament. Many Bible scholars thought the verses about signs following believers we never spoken by Jesus at all, but were added to the text, perhaps by some over zealous scribe, many years after it was originally written.

That troubled me, but I assured myself that surely God was in control of His Word, and He would not allow any such tampering with it against His will.

Also, as an avid outdoorsman, I was aware that a pit-viper does not always deliver a dose of venom when it strikes. And I also knew that the Copperhead was the least lethal of all of America’s poisonous snakes, and that the vast majority of people bitten by Copperheads make a full recovery, even without treatment.

For a long time I still could not explain the incident of the little girl swallowing DDT. Having read books such as “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson, I was convinced that DDT was surely one of the most deadly substances known to man. But later I read several articles which told of Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, a professor from San Jose State University in California, who debunked Carson’s theory about the deadliness of DDT. He proved his claims by ingesting a teaspoon full of the insecticide before his startled audiences at the beginning of his lectures. Despite swallowing the insecticide, the good doctor was still healthy enough to climb mountains at the age of 83.

This knowledge shot holes in my original theory about signs following believers, but I had little time to worry about it. My course had been set. I was too busy preaching and winning souls to Jesus to stop and reconsider the things I believed.

Chapter 20: Snatching Souls from Hell

2009-01-08T20:29:00.000-05:00

After my first feeble attempt at preaching, in the Raleigh County Jail, I was very discouraged with my poor performance. I decided that maybe I wasn’t called to preach after all. Maybe that invitation to preach, and the sermon that seemed to miraculously fall into my lap, was just a fluke.

So I prayed and told God that if He ever wanted me to preach again, all He had to do was have someone invite me to preach. I promised God that any time I was ever asked, I would preach. If I were never asked again, I would never preach again, but under no circumstances would I announce that I was called to preach, or ask someone to let me preach.

About six weeks later the second invitation came. I had been going to the Bradley County Workhouse in Cleveland, every Sunday afternoon that I was in town, with Bill Wooten, a Lee ministerial student, who held services there. My part in the service was to help with the singing and then witness to the men and pray with those who desired prayer at the close of the service. One Sunday after the workhouse service Bill asked me if I would bring the message the following week. I agreed.

I studied and prayed much the next week and prepared myself as best as I could. As before, my sermon would be “The Way of Salvation.” The service was held in a large room in the workhouse where about twenty men sat on their bunks and listened. When I was introduced to preach, I stepped forward, and the sound of my own voice surprised me. I thought I actually sounded like a preacher, and people were listening to what I had to say. I did better than that first effort in Beckley. This time I preached for 7 or 8 minutes. During the course of the summer I preached three times at the workhouse, and each time I thought I did better than before.

The next fall, although I was only a junior at Bradley High School, I was invited me to go on another invasion to the tiny village of Cohutta, Georgia. A street service was scheduled, and they needed a preacher. The invasion leader heard that I had been preaching some at the workhouse, so he asked me to do the street service. The thought of preaching on a street corner made me a bit apprehensive, but remembering the promise I had made to God, I said I would do it.

Downtown Cohutta consisted on a garage, a general store, and a small cluster of houses – not the ideal street service venue. Our team set up in front of the garage, facing the General Store, and began to sing. When I got up and started preaching not a soul was in sight. However, during the course of my message, a few people drove by slowly and gawked, and a couple of people walked in and out of the General Store, casting a glance our way. I hoped maybe they heard something that touched their heart.

During the fall long weekend at Lee, a Pioneers for Christ team was traveling to southeastern Louisiana, and I was invited. It was a small team, only six of us in a car – three girls and three boys.

We held services in Baton Rouge, Covington and Hammond, Louisiana. Because there was no one else on the team to lead singing, I was assigned that task. It was the first time I ever led singing in church.

On Sunday morning we had a “Countdown Service” scheduled in Bogalusa. I was asked to be the one who stayed after the others went out to witness at 11:30. My message to those who did not go out witnessing was the only thing I knew how to preach: “The Way of Salvation.”

Bogalusa Church of God was a fairly good sized church, with about 200 people present that morning. They had come expecting to hear a college ministerial student. Instead they heard a high school junior give his first church sermon. I was elated that I did better than I expected.
After that weekend I began to travel with the Pioneers for Christ frequently. On regular weekends we traveled to churches within a five hour radius of Cleveland, in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. On long weekends and school holidays we went much further.

I never told anyone I was called to preach, but the word must have gotten out, because invitations began to come in frequently. I never turned a single one down for any reason, unless I was already scheduled to preach somewhere else that day.

An elderly black lady, who lived just off East Inman Street in Cleveland, was a shut-in, and wanted to have preaching service in her home. For many weeks I took a group of the North Cleveland youth group with me and we held Thursday night services for Sister Johnson, and neighbors who she would invite to come.

When school was out that summer, I took over the responsibility of the Bradley County Workhouse service on Sunday afternoons. When I was out of town preaching in a church, I found someone else to fill in for me.

During that same summer, I organized a local Pioneers for Christ Club out of the youth group of our church. After the workhouse service every Sunday afternoon, we divided up into teams of two and went door-to-door witnessing. Sometimes there would be a dozen of us, and sometimes only 3 or 4, but a few went witnessing with me every Sunday.

During my senior year at Bradley High School I was made one of the invasion directors for the Lee College PFC, even though I was not yet in college. I was in charge of leading witnessing teams to towns such as Andrews, North Carolina; McCaysville, Georgia, and Fort Payne, Alabama.

During this time I began to develop other sermons, and my favorite sermon topic was soul-winning. The promise I had made the lord to preach every time I was invited is one I took very seriously. After I started attending Lee College, my opportunities increased. The Pioneers for Christ not only held weekend invasions, but also regular services in nursing home, jails, and street corners, in several locations within a 30 or 40 mile radius of Cleveland.

I also began to be invited to preach at area churches for youth rallies, revivals, or regular Sunday worship services.

One November afternoon, during my freshman year at Lee, I was at Walker Hall, a men’s dormitory, studying with some friends. A telephone call came on the phone in the lobby. It was the young people’s president from the Oak Grove Church of God, wanting to know if there might be a student preacher who could come and speak for their youth service the following Friday night.

The guy who answered the phone came to the room where I was studying, with three other student preachers, and asked if any of us wanted to preach. The other three all turned the opportunity down. They had dates for a special function that was going to be held at Lee that Friday night. I had a date too, but to me I would be reneging on my promise to God if I turned down an invitation to preach. I went to the telephone and accepted the invitation.

I told my girlfriend that we could either break the date, or she could go with me. We found another couple to double with us and the four of us planned to go to Oak Grove for the Y.P.E. service.

That Friday afternoon, a few hours before the service, I was in the Central Avenue Barber Shop getting my hair cut. A man came running down the street, burst into the barber shop, and blurted out, “The President’s been shot! The President’s been shot!” He turned and ran on down Central Avenue, spreading the news to every business along the way. One of the barbers turned on the radio, and we heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

It seemed the whole world stopped revolving. The event planned for Lee College that night was cancelled, as were many thousands of events throughout the United States. The entire country was in shock and mourning.

But it was still to be church as usual at Oak Grove, a rural church in northern Hamilton County, about 20 miles from Cleveland.

The only mention made of the President’s assassination that night was during prayer request time. A man stood and said, “I guess you all heard about our president being shot. It’s too late for us to pray for him, but I just want us to pray for that there woman (Jacqueline Kennedy) and them there kids.”

In the service that night it was obvious that we had three sinners present: two teenage boys and an older man. They were sitting, sour faced, on the back row, and did not participate in the service at all. Everyone else in the church was jumping and thumping, praising God in typical Pentecostal style.

When I was introduced to preach, I stepped up to the pulpit, and with total but misguided sincerity, I announced: “I’m not here to preach to you folks who already know the Lord. This sermon is for you who are lost. And when I am finished and give the altar call, I expect to see every sinner that’s here tonight, come to the altar and give your heart to the Lord.”

I then read my text - Hebrews 2:3: “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation.”
Next, I bowed my head and prayed earnestly that God would take the message I was about to deliver and use it to pierce the heart of every sinner or backslider in the building, and bring conviction that would lead to their salvation.

I opened my eyes from the prayer saw that the back row was empty. All three of my sinners had escaped, and it was to late now to change my sermon.

The 40 or so saints who were still with me, looked to the back of the building, and then back up to me, with very concerned expressions. I heard someone whisper aloud, “Bless him, Jesus.”
Brother Ritchie, the pastor, who was sitting on the front row, turned and fell on his knees at his seat. He didn’t get back up until after I had finished preaching.

I decided there was no turning back now. I suspected that the three sinners might still be standing out on the front porch, taking a smoke. So I preached Hell and Salvation loudly enough that they could hear me if my suppositions were right. When I gave the altar call, I plead for the sinners to come back in the door and walk down the aisle. They didn’t.

After the service was dismissed, I walked out into the chilly autumn night and there, on the front steps of the church, were all three of my sinners. I tried to catch their eye as I passed them, but they all turned and looked the other way.

During my freshman year at Lee I took on two ministry projects for the school year. Every weekend, except when I was leading a Pioneers for Christ invasion, I would round up a group of Lee students and we went to Athens, Tennessee, about 30 miles north of Cleveland, for a regular street service. We always carried a public address system, musicians, and a student preacher.
On the weekends I was traveling I found student preachers at Lee to take over for me. Two brothers who helped were Ronnie and Steve Brock, from Lindale, Georgia.

We always sat up in front of the McMinn County Courthouse. One of the ladies who worked in the county clerk’s office would open a window so we could plug in our equipment. We could usually count on a few folk to take a seat on the benches around the court house and listen to us.
I was discouraged that we didn’t have many converts from those services. However, one Saturday, after we had been having services for more than six months, we were joined as we were setting up by a well dressed businessman from Athens. He told us he was the local State Farm agent, and said he had been listening to us every Saturday from his office window, on the second story above a shop on the court house square. Through our witness he had made a re-commitment of his life to the Lord. Every Saturday, for the rest of the school year, he always joined with us, helping us sing and giving his testimony during the services.

After holding the street service on Saturday mornings, I went to Gum Hollow on Saturday afternoons for soul-winning. Gum Hollow was the site of Cleveland’s city dump, and where about 200 of the very poorest people in the county lived in a shanty town. This was Appalachian poverty at its worse.

Many of the people of Gum Hollow were squatters, with no real home of their own. They lived in makeshift shelters constructed of materials they had scavenged from the dump. A few years later, after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty, the shanties were bulldozed, the dump was replaced with a sanitary landfill opposite side of town, and the people were put in government housing. But in those days the people of Gum Hollow were fending for themselves.
I have a vivid memory of watching a little blond haired, blue eyed girl, about 6 years old, rummaging through the dump. She found the remains of a hard boiled egg in somebody’s garbage, and popped it into her mouth. The only other place I ever saw a scene like that was many years later on a missionary trip to Haiti. My heart went out to these whom I called “The last, the least, and the lost” of Cleveland.

Dudley Dixon, and older Lee Student, shared my desire to minister to these people. We recruited some other help and began holding Sunday morning services. Dudley wasn’t a preacher, but he was a good businessman, and he had a vehicle. It was an old Bell Telephone truck, painted olive drab, with a lighter green splotch where the Bell had been before the phone company got rid of it.

Every Saturday afternoon Dudley and I, with whoever we could find to help us, went door-to-door witnessing to the people of Gum Hollow. The poorest of them lived in lean-to structures built of refrigerator cartons, and with dirt floors. In these the only means of heat in winter was a fire in the middle of the floor, with the smoke finding its way out of a crack in the ceiling.
Dudley took his old telephone truck to places of business and solicited food items which we gave out to these families, in addition to telling them about Jesus.

On Sunday mornings we would make a round of the neighborhood, waking people up, and telling them we would be back in about an hour to pick them up for Sunday School. Then we would go to Fike Funeral Home and pick up a load of folding chairs, which they let us borrow, and come back and set up for church. Our first few services were held under a large Oak tree in a vacant overgrown lot.

While I sat up the chairs Dudley would go back around the neighborhood, making several trips, shuttling people to church. We bribed them to come by offering free food.

Within a few months we were having as many as 100 people in our services. Needing a more permanent place for worship, Dudley made arrangements to rent a small four-room house on a ridge overlooking the hollow, and we moved our services there. Someone donated an old upright piano, which we sat up in the living room. A woman who was an excellent pianist and singer, Delilah, volunteered to help with the music. Lee College students taught the Sunday School classes.

In good weather we sat up our funeral home chairs in the front lawn of the little house. When it was cold or raining, we jammed as many people as we could inside. They filled all four rooms. I stood in a small hallway in the center of the house when I preached. From that vantage point I could turn to see into every room of the house.

Dudley recognized the need of a permanent facility, so he worked diligently to raise funds from local businessmen. An empty lot a few doors down from the little house was purchased and we built a simple but attractive concrete block building for a permanent church. We called it the Hillview Church of God.

The front of the church was concave, with a high concrete platform in front. I sometimes preached from that platform, with speakers blaring out over Gum Hollow.

After Dudley and I both moved away from Cleveland, the building was taken over by the North Cleveland Church of God, which operated it for many years as a mission.

The Lee College Pioneers for Christ sent out summer witnessing teams each year to work in home missions. At the beginning of my freshman year, Charles Beach asked me if I would be available to lead one of the teams the following summer. He gave me a choice. I could either lead a team to plant a new church in Montana, or in Hawaii.

I volunteered for Montana because I really wanted to go to Hawaii. But I was afraid that my desire to go the islands was a selfish one. To me, the will of God was always the thing you wanted to do least. So it must be God’s will for me to go to Montana.

Even before I felt God was calling me to preach, I was afraid to pray too hard for God to have His will in my life. If I did I was sure he would tell me to marry an ugly woman and go to Africa as a missionary.

The team of seven students who were to accompany me to Montana was chosen several months before the end of the school year. In preparation we had to raise all of the money to support ourselves for the entire summer. Also, we prepared by learning to work together as a team, by traveling on several PFC invasions. These included a nine-day trip over Spring Break, in which we ministered in churches in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

By the time school dismissed for the summer we were primed and ready to go to the Big Sky Country. We had an old Desoto automobile, loaned to us by a used car dealer in Lenoir City, Tennessee. We filled both the trunk and a car-top carrier with luggage, gospel tracks and song books, and headed toward the Rocky Mountain Northwest.

Chapter 21: On the Road for Jesus

2009-01-07T20:57:00.000-05:00

Our Pioneers for Christ summer witness team chose Dillon, Montana, as the target city for establishing a new church for three reasons. There was an empty church building we could rent; a former Church of God family lived in the town, and Dillon was more than 60 miles from the nearest Pentecostal church, of any denomination.

The former Church of God family invited us to stay in their home for our first night in Dillon. They said they would pay a visit to some of our services; however, they were happily involved in a local Baptist church, so were not interested in being charter members of the new church we were starting.

Dillon was a college town of about 4,000 people, located in the scenic Beaverhead Valley in the southwestern corner of Montana. When we arrived in early June, snow-capped mountains could be seen in every direction from the town. There were a variety of churches in Dillon, but Mormons were predominant.

I was only 19 at the time, having just finished my freshman year in college, and I had full responsibility of the team for the entire summer. No one on the team was older than 20 except for Aaron Lavender, who was in his early 30s. He was a student who had returned to school after he felt called to preach as an adult. Aaron had less experience than I did. Our official adult sponsor was the State Overseer, J. E. DeVore, who lived a few hundred miles away in Billings. He came to visit us only one Sunday during the summer.

On our first full day in town, I found a trailer which we rented for the three girls on the team. At a second-hand store, we bought two used mattresses which the four of us boys spread on the floor of the basement in the church building and that was where we slept. We did not have a bathtub or shower in the church. We took sponge baths during the week. On Saturday afternoons, we went downtown to a hotel where they allowed us to bathe for 50 cents each.

The church building was a small white frame structure, completely furnished with pulpit and pews. The only problem was the roof leaked. We bought a large plastic sheet and completely covered the roof with it. The tarp didn’t look too good, but it kept out the rain.

Although there were no church members, and no immediate prospects for any, we scheduled a Vacation Bible School for our first full week in Dillon. The team went house-to-house throughout the town, inviting kids to Bible School. Our attendance each day ranged from 8 to 12 children and we considered it a great success.

I had a sign painted at a local sign-shop and also put notices on the radio and in the weekly Dillon Tribune announcing that on the week following the Vacation Bible School, we were having an Evangelistic Crusade.

Both during the Bible School and the Crusade, our team spent five hours per day in door-to-door witnessing, trying to lead people to the Lord, and also inviting them out to services. We took Mondays off from our witnessing activities to take our clothes to the Laundromat, and also to do a little sightseeing.

While I was out knocking on doors, someone told me there was a Spirit-filled Episcopal priest in Dillon who spoke in tongues. I had never heard of such a thing before. The Charismatic Renewal in mainline churches had hardly begun yet, and everyone I knew of who spoke in tongues was a member of a Classical Pentecostal church. I took a couple of the team members with me to meet the Episcopalian. We found him in his garden, wearing shorts and smoking a pipe. “Yes,” he said, “I’m filled with the Holy Ghost. I speak in tongues; and we also lay hands on the sick and pray for them in our church.”

Until that moment, I believed a person who wore shorts, smoked a pipe, or violated any other of the legalistic teachings we Pentecostals held dear, could not have the Holy Ghost. I still wasn’t so sure, but it gave me something to think about.

Within a few weeks, our team had knocked on every door in and around Dillon. We had gathered a congregation of about 20 people. We continued holding Sunday services and they were going well. The team then felt free to branch out from Dillon for three weeks, Monday through Friday.

In the towns of Big Timber and Miles City, we conducted Vacation Bible School at the local churches in the mornings, went door-to-door witnessing in the afternoons, and held revival services in the church during the evenings. At the Church of God in Billings, we took part in the Montana State Camp-Meeting, with our team being responsible for three afternoon services. I was thrilled to have my first opportunity to preach in a camp-meeting.

I also left the team in Dillon for one week, with Aaron in charge during my absence, and traveled alone by bus to preach Sunday services in St. Paul Park, Minnesota. From there, I rode with the pastor, Doug Slocumb, to Wisconsin, where I was the evangelist at the Church of God StateYouth Camp.

The highlight of the summer came when our team, along with about seven other Pioneers for Christ summer witness teams, descended upon Dallas, Texas, the third week in August. Each team worked out of a different Dallas area church. We were assigned to Oak Cliff, the largest Church of God in the city. Our team conducted a five day Pioneers for Christ Invasion at Oak Cliff, doing door-to-door witnessing, teaching soul-winning classes, and leading in special weekend services.

That Sunday morning, I was the designated preacher. Most of the denominational officials of the Church of God were already in town for the General Assembly, which would begin on Monday at the Dallas Convention Center. That Sunday, the entire Executive Committee and also numerous church department heads and State Overseers came out to be in our morning service at Oak Cliff. It was the first time my dad ever heard me preach.

After the General Assembly, Aaron Lavender returned to Dillon to become the first pastor of the new church we had started. I caught a ride to Erie, Pennsylvania, where I had been invited to conduct a revival during the last week of summer. Then, I returned by bus to Cleveland and to Lee College.

During my second year at Lee, my grades suffered as I devoted more and more time to ministry. Hardly a weekend went by when I was not traveling somewhere to preach. I did not have an automobile, so I had to go by bus, borrow a car, or find a friend to take me. I longed for summer to come when I could travel further and preach more.

I had invitations to preach revivals that next summer in many places, including some of the larger churches in the denomination. Also, the State Overseer of the Church of God in the Dakotas, John D. Nichols, asked if he could schedule me to preach in South Dakota. Charles Beach wanted me to meet him in Utah to witness to the Mormons. I turned down the offers from the bigger churches and headed west, where the churches were small and far between. My motives in doing so were mixed. For the same reason that I chose Montana over Hawaii the summer before, I felt God’s will was surely the hard place. However, the prospects of traveling and preaching on the high plains and in the Rocky Mountain states was very alluring.

On the Thursday following the last day of school, I caught a Trailways Bus with a one way ticket to the tiny town of Mound City, South Dakota.

Preaching in the Dakotas was a different experience for me. The people there obviously loved the Lord, but they were much more reserved in their worship style than I felt they should be. I tried my best to teach them to clap their hands, pray louder, and be more enthusiastic in their praises to God. They just tolerated me as an overzealous young man from the South.

I preached in a total of seven churches in South Dakota, all of them Church of God, except for a German speaking Assembly of God in Shelby. I learned that these reserved Dakotans of Scandinavian stock might not be as expressive as we Southerners were, but they were every bit as conservative.

At the Church of God in Tolstoy, I heard the story of a rancher who had begun to wear a wedding ring following the General Assembly of 1958. A short time later, he had jumped down from the loft in his barn and caught his ring on a protruding nail. The fourth finger on his left hand had been yanked off. The whole church was sure that despite the new Church of God ruling, God was showing them He still didn’t approve of wedding rings.

The greatest lesson I learned in South Dakota was that there is more to being a Christian than just getting saved and then winning others to the Lord.

I was scheduled for a week-long revival in Coal Springs. I had looked Coal Springs up in an unabridged atlas before I left Cleveland and it was reported to have a population of 5. When I arrived, I found only one person living there, Dan Black, a single young man who was the pastor. I asked him about the population of five and he told me that the former pastor and wife had 3 children.

Coal Springs consisted of a “T” junction in the highway, with a Lutheran Church on one corner and a Church of God on the other. The Church of God had a parsonage for their pastor, attached to the church. The Lutheran church was pastored by a man who drove in from a distant town.

The next closest building to the two churches was a ranch, about a mile away. This was the high open plains, where ranchers measured their spreads in square miles, and where antelope (pronghorn) could be seen racing over the endless prairie. Amazingly, we had good crowds of 60 to 70 people at the Coal Springs Church, all of them ranchers from the surrounding area.

Every sermon in my repertoire was either geared toward winning sinners to the Lord, or challenging Christians to go out and witness to the lost. In Coal Springs, everybody for miles around was already saved.

I asked Pastor Black what was the possibility of our finding a sinner. He knew of only one man within 30 miles who didn’t go to church. That man lived in the small community of Meadow, population 12, a few miles away. Dan and I went to visit the suspected sinner, but he wasn’t interested in what we had to say.

In Coal Springs, I developed my first sermons that were designed to encourage the saints, rather than just win the lost. It was my first faltering step toward developing a pastoral ministry.

Lemon, South Dakota, was the highlight of my ministry in that state. On the North Dakota border, and with a population of just over 2000, Lemon was the largest town in the region. It was also the largest church I preached in all summer, with more than 200 people attending services. They had a fine building on a prominent corner of town and even had a trained robed choir. Two well known Church of God preachers, David Bishop and Paul Walker, have roots in that church.

One night during my revival in Lemon, a young Lutheran boy came to the service with his Church of God friends. He told me it was his first time to ever be in a Pentecostal church. That young man came to the altar, was filled with the Holy Ghost, and spoke in tongues. He became so excited he ran all the way around the auditorium, jumping, shouting, and praising the Lord.

That kind of unbridled expression was something I had never done myself in church, but I saw others do it often -- except in the Dakotas. I personally didn’t shout simply because God had never done it to me. People testified that when the Holy Ghost got a hold of them, they lost all control and shouted in spite of their best efforts to hold still. I wished God would take control of me in that way, but He never did.

I took this young man’s demonstration as proof that running the aisles and shouting was a genuine work of the Holy Spirit. How else would this Lutheran, who had never even seen anyone shout, have done what he did unless it was the Holy Ghost working through him?

After a revival in Gettysburg, South Dakota, I had a two-week revival scheduled in Hastings, Nebraska. I could not make bus connections to Hastings. So, I decided to hitchhike. I arose at daylight on Monday morning and thumbed several rides totaling 438 miles, just making it to the church in time for the service that evening.

I enjoyed hitchhiking. I was given rides by policemen, drunks, traveling salesmen, hippies, and even a truck that was painting the line down the middle of the highway. I saw every ride as an opportunity to witness for the Lord. Some of the people who gave me rides were religious fanatics who picked me up so they could try to win me to their particular brand of Christianity.

One of my rides was with a cowboy driving a pick-up truck and wearing a wide-rimmed hat and boots. When I told him I was an evangelist on my way to preach a revival, he drawled, “Well, Son, I wouldn’t feel too bad about that if I was you. I’ve preached before, and I suppose if times got hard I’m not too good to try it again.”

The church in Hastings was very small. It met in a neat but nondescript building with no sign outside identifying it as a church. The pastor, Buford Lingerfelt, told me they couldn’t afford a sign.

On my second day in town, with the pastor’s permission, I went to a local sign painter and ordered a new sign for the church at a cost of $52. That night at church, I announced what I had done and said I was going to pay for the sign myself out of my love offerings, but I wanted to give the people a chance to help. I placed an empty offering plate on the altar and said anyone who wanted to contribute could come by and drop in their offering after the service. The total amount given came to $2.37.

The pastor in Hastings lived with his wife and baby in a small apartment in the basement of the church. Because of their cramped quarters, they had arranged for me to stay with some church members for the duration of the revival.

Since I had no transportation, the good people I stayed with were kind enough to give me the use of one of their automobiles. It was an old 1950 Chevrolet which had once been green, but now was more of a rust color. The man said he had bought the car about a year earlier for $25.

Preaching in Hastings was hard, not only because of the small crowds, but also because I didn’t have enough sermons to last two weeks. I had to dig to come up with new material.

When the revival ended, my offerings for the two weeks totaled just a few cents over $50. That was a little less than the sign had cost me, but I was glad I had helped them get it. I was proud of the Church of God and wanted the whole town to know who we were. The sign, with its blue and gold Church of God shield, looked good on the front lawn of the church.

God made my gift up to me. The people, whose car I had been driving during my stay in Nebraska, felt led of the Lord to give the vehicle to me to help in my ministry. I couldn’t have been more proud as I drove my very first car back to South Dakota and from there to Colorado. I even liked the rust on it because I thought that was befitting the humility of a true servant of God.

I was scheduled to preach in three churches in the Denver area, including one which had services in Spanish. Since most of the people there understood English, I preached without an interpreter.

From Colorado, I drove to Sandy, Utah, a suburb on the south side of Salt Lake City. This was the site of a small Church of God which met in a storefront, complete with folding metal chairs and a homemade plywood pulpit. The Sandy church had been started just a couple of years earlier by a Lee College summer witness team.

The pastor in Sandy supplemented his income by keeping four retarded foster children, which also boosted the church attendance. He lived several miles away, so I spent the week sleeping on a cot in the back of the church. I was responsible for providing my own meals, out of the $17 the church gave me in love offerings that week.

Utah was a highlight of my summer because it was there I met up with Charles R. Beach, the Professor from Lee College who had started the Pioneers for Christ Club. Brother Beach was my mentor; he had a far greater impact on my ministry than anyone, including my own parents. He was a true believer, who was convinced that the world was on its way to Hell without Jesus, and it was up to him to rescue as many souls as possible before it was too late. For several months during the previous school year, he and I had talked about going to Utah to witness to the Mormons.

Brother Beach was in 3 or 4 of my services in Sandy. On those nights, he played the piano. Although his ability as a pianist was very limited, it was better than anyone else in the church. One night while he was playing and the congregation of about 15 people were singing, two young ruffians threw open the door of the little storefront chapel and tossed some trash down the aisle. “You’re False! You’re False!” they shouted. “If you were the true church, you would have a nice building like the Mormons!”

That made my day; I felt ten feet tall. I was being persecuted for righteousness sake. I knew, according to God’s promise, my reward in Heaven would be great.

From Sandy, Brother Beach and I went to Ogden, to the only other Church of God in Utah. The Ogden church had a woman pastor, and was housed in a large brick building which had formerly been a Mormon church. There were about 35 people in the congregation.

One night during my revival in Ogden, a journalist came and took photos of the service. She was doing an article on the Pentecostals. I was excited to think that God was using her to help us spread the truth in this Mormon dominated state.

A couple of men from Pocatello, Idaho, visited the meetings in Ogden, and invited me to come to Pocatello for the Sunday evening service at their church, after my meeting concluded in Ogden on Sunday morning. They said they could not afford to pay me, but I could stay with one of them and the other would give me a free haircut. I was excited about preaching in Idaho. I also needed a haircut.

After the service in Pocatello, I had five days before I was due in Washington State, where I had meetings booked in Pasco and Prosser, in Washington’s Yakima Valley. In ten weeks, I had only had two nights off, so I welcomed the break. I was also very glad I had an automobile. I headed for Yellowstone National Park, where I camped two days in my car. One night, I stayed beside a natural hot spring. I warmed my Vienna Sausages for dinner by making a noose of my belt, wrapping it around the can, and dangling it into the spring.

I also got much too close to a black bear in Yellowstone. I had the front window of my car cracked open just an inch, on the passenger side, and was poking Pecan Sandies between the teeth of a very large bear, his claws hanging over the top of the glass. That was great fun until the glass collapsed. I suddenly had the bear’s entire head and forearms inside the car. I scooted over to the driver’s side as quickly as possible, started the engine, and took off. I was going about 20 miles per hour before the bruin dropped out.

The motor of my car blew up near Twin Bridges, Montana. I had it towed to a garage but the mechanic said it couldn’t be fixed. The only thing worth salvaging on the car were two almost new recap tires. The mechanic offered me $15 for the tires and said he would put the car in the junk yard.

I was thankful for the $15, and also for the use of the car for the six weeks of the summer that I needed it most. Taking my suitcase and stepping out to the highway, I stuck my thumb in the air and soon caught a ride heading west.

Two days later, after spending the night in a $2 room above a bar somewhere in the panhandle of Idaho, I arrived in Washington. The church in Prosser was a good place to culminate my summer’s ministry. It was a relatively strong church, with about 100 people in attendance each night. Two students that I knew from Lee College were there, so I was among friends.

During my revival in Prosser, I preached at night and worked during the day harvesting grapes. The man who owned the vineyard made me a supervisor over a group of migrant workers and gave me a fair wage. Harvesting grapes paid better than preaching. As I worked in the vineyard, I prayed that none of the grapes I picked would be made into wine, but would only be used for grape jelly and communion juice.

The Lee students in Prosser were more than happy to take me back to Cleveland, in exchange for sharing in the gas expense. We broke down in Rawlins, Wyoming, and had to spend an unexpected 24 hours there. We stopped in Bonner, Kansas, to pick up another Lee student. Otherwise, the trip home was uneventful, but fun.

From the beginning of my junior year at Lee College I was very restless. My mind was on ministry far more than it was on my studies. During that year, I served for several months as Associate Pastor of the Church of God in Dayton, Tennessee, while taking classes. I also had an agreement with the Dayton church which allowed me to go out and preach one week per month in evangelistic crusades.

In one of those crusades, at the Spring City Church, we had a water baptismal service on Sunday afternoon. It was in a rushing mountain stream coming off of Walden’s Ridge. I lowered a very large sister under the water, and just as I did she either got happy and started shouting or got scared and began doing the back stroke. I never was sure which it was, but the swift current was carrying her downstream.

I had to dive under that woman and push her back up to where she could get a footing on the slippery rocks. God saved her soul and I saved her life.

I felt I was wasting my time in school, especially considering the imminent return of Jesus to earth. I thought it was more than likely He would come again before I graduated. Souls were at stake, and time was short to reach them.

I dropped out of school to enter the ministry full time.

In August, 1965, I was in Dallas, Texas, to attend the Church of God General Assembly. I went to lunch one day with Robert White, State Overseer of the Church of God in Montana and Wyoming.

Brother White told me there were two churches open in Montana. He said he was having a difficult time finding pastors and would be very pleased to appoint me to either one of them. Then, as an afterthought, he told me there was also a church without a pastor in Casper, Wyoming. Brother White was very honest with me and said either of the Montana churches would be a much better appointment. The Casper congregation had declined to the point of becoming inactive. No services had been held there for several months. What few members were left in Casper had scattered, and he wasn’t sure if any of them could be persuaded to return. The church had a white frame building, a former Church of the Nazarene, but they were in arrears in payments and the bank was threatening to foreclose.

I told Brother White that Casper was where I wanted to go.

Looking across the table at me, he said, “Stephen, I’m not asking you to go to Casper. I wouldn’t ask anyone to go to Casper. There’s nothing there. But if God tells you to go to Casper, I won’t stop you.” He also said he wasn’t in a position to offer me any financial assistance, but that he would give me all the prayers and moral support he could.

Just two days earlier, my dad had been elected General Overseer of the Church of God, the highest executive position in the denomination. Some of my friends told me that now I had it made. With his influence, I could really go places in the Church of God.

My emotions and motives were mixed. I wanted to see souls saved; I also wanted to get as far away from my daddy as possible. Deep down inside, perhaps more than anything, I wanted to go out and prove him wrong for all the times he said I would never make it in the ministry. I wanted to build a great Church of God, in a part of the world where the churches were few and small and far between.

One week later, over Dad’s adamant objection and prediction that I would fail, I loaded up the few possessions I had into a small U-Haul trailer, and moved to Casper.

Childish things were behind. New adventures lay ahead.

Afterword

2009-01-07T19:02:00.000-05:00

The church in Casper, Wyoming, was successfully revived, and within one year we went from having our church property in foreclosure to being debt free. One of my converts in Casper became the new pastor of that church when I later moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

During the next forty years of ministry, I was instrumental in pioneering twelve new congregations and I served as pastor of one of them for 15 years. My ministry carried me into all 50 states and to 42 countries, on 5 continents.

As different doors of opportunity opened, I was ordained into three major denominations: Church of God, Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptist Convention. In each of them, at various times, I served as a church planter, pastor, evangelist and denominational leader.

In my ministry, I served in rural areas, small towns, sprawling suburbs, and inner-city ghettos. I ministered to the homeless and to the affluent; the weak and the powerful. I stayed in dirt floored bamboo huts in third world countries and twice I was a guest of the President of the United States at the White House.

Now, with much encouragement from friends and family, and the help of my beautiful wife, Karen, I have shared this story of my beginnings. I trust it will serve as a record of the classical Pentecostal church as I once knew it, and that it will also be a glimpse into the mind and making of a young man who grew up Pentecostal.