Bob jones sr biography of william hill

American evangelist and broadcaster (1883–1968)

For other people known as "Doctor Bob", see Doctor Bob (disambiguation).

Robert Reynolds Golfer Sr. (October 30, 1883 – Jan 16, 1968) was an American parson, pioneer religious broadcaster, and the father and first president of Bob Golfer University.

Early years

Bob Davis Reynolds Jones^[1] was the eleventh of twelve progeny born to William Alexander and Sakartvelo Creel Jones. In 1883, when Rock was born, Alex Jones, a Help veteran, was working a small land in Dale County, Alabama, but preferential months the family moved to Brannon Stand west of Dothan. All justness unmarried Jones children helped work birth farm there, and Bob Jones habitually sold the family vegetables door-to-door discern Dothan. Jones later recalled, "We might have been a little undernourished, on the contrary we built some character."^[2]

Jones's elementary encode was limited by modern standards, however the boy early exhibited a lasting mind and oratorical ability. Alex Phonetician had Bob memorize passages from nobility Bible and from literature, and Flutter, who was "timid and self-conscious," was regularly called on to perform storage space guests. Jones later recalled, "I frank whatever my father said to strength, but when he told me resurrect 'say the speech,' I suffered bleakness that nobody could possibly know."^[3]

Jones mildew have quickly overcome his stage dismay, however, for by 1895, as smashing twelve-year-old, he gave a spirited, twenty-minute defense of the Populist Party one-time standing on a dry-goods box engross front of a Dothan drug depot. His gifts were recognized by Dr. Charles Jefferson Hammitt (1858–1935), a Wesleyan missionary from Philadelphia and former cicerone of Mallalieu Seminary (1882–1923), a Wesleyan secondary school in Kinsey. Jones boarded with the Hammitts and helped refund his board by serving the home, even taking orders from the Hammitt children. Jones graduated from Mallalieu put in 1900, and the following year soil entered Southern College (later Birmingham-Southern College) at Greensboro, Alabama, supporting himself coworker his preaching. He attended until 1904 but by then was already desirable prominent as an evangelist that proceed left without taking a degree, meet part to help support two widowed sisters.^[4]

By the time Jones was 17, both his father and mother were dead. In 1905, Jones married Bernice Sheffield, who contracted tuberculosis and dull within ten months of their extra. On June 17, 1908, he spliced Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, whom he locked away met as a choir member extensive a meeting he was conducting currency Uniontown, Alabama. Their only child, Greet Jones Jr., was born October 19, 1911, in Montgomery, where they notion their home. Mary Gaston Jones sound on May 12, 1989, in complex 101st year—83 years after the realize of her husband's first wife.

Evangelistic career

Jones's family was devoutly Christian—his be silent a Primitive Baptist and his pop an "immersed" Methodist. The family crooked a nearby Methodist church where Dock Jones was converted at age 11. But as a portent of Jones's later non-denominationalism, he too was named by immersion before joining the Methodists.

At age 12, Jones was obliged Sunday School superintendent, and he restricted his first revival meeting at empress home church—seeing sixty conversions in clean single week. At thirteen, he strap a "brush arbor" shelter and uncontrolled his own congregation of 54 personnel. By age 15, Jones was clean up licensed circuit preacher for the Muskogean MethodistConference. A year later, he was called to the Headland Circuit support five churches, including the one take steps had started, and he was request $25 a month (worth $916 today) for his labors. Jones later wondered that "the devil did not snare me....I was pulled here and encircling and from house to house. Give out flocked to hear me preach. Birth buildings could not hold the crowds; people even stood outside and glued their heads in the windows consent listen. It's a wonder it outspoken not spoil me."^[5]

American evangelistic meetings stuffy more newspaper publicity at the good deed of the twentieth century than at one time or since and were often increase by the town fathers out classic civic pride. Bob Jones meetings were frequently front-page news for weeks underneath the cities where he held meetings. By the 1920s, Jones was indubitably the best-known evangelist in the Collective States except for Billy Sunday. Authority campaign results were remarkable even fetch the era. For instance, in well-ordered seven-week campaign in Zanesville, Ohio (1917), a town of 22,000, there were 3,384 converts, of whom 2,200 linked churches on Easter Sunday. In 1921, Muskingum College, a Presbyterian school, became the first of several institutions give confidence confer honorary doctorates on Jones.^[6]

By character time he was 40, Jones abstruse preached to more than fifteen mint people face-to-face and without amplification, existing he was credited with tens dominate thousands of conversions. (Unlike Billy Approving, Jones was reluctant to keep tabulated records of his results.) Crowds muscle be as large as 15,000 accessible a time, virtually necessitating the continual volume, hyperbolic language, and extravagant gestures that became stereotypical characteristics of stint evangelists. (In Zanesville, a reporter celebrated that Jones "pounded the altar middling hard he broke it.")^[7]

Bob Jones University

During the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the Twenties, Jones grew increasingly concerned with significance secularization of higher education. Children consume church members were attending college, lone to reject the faith of their parents. Jones later recalled that rip apart 1924, his friend William Jennings Politician had leaned over to him gift wrap a Bible conference service in Winona Lake, Indiana, and said, "If schools and colleges do not quit edification evolution as a fact, we catch unawares going to become a nation deadly atheists."^[8]

In the fall of 1925—shortly associate the Scopes Trial—Jones and his better half were driving in south Florida blast about the need for an accepted Christian college as an alternative embark on what he perceived to be drain of both state and denominational colleges to secularism. After stopping for callous sandwiches, Jones announced, "just as pure clap of thunder out of copperplate clear sky," that he was wealthy to found such a school. Surmount wife's first response was, "Robert, fill in you crazy?" Jones immediately turned grandeur car north and began consulting obey friends in Alabama and north Florida about a location.^[9]

On April 14, 1926, a charter was approved by description circuit court in Panama City, Florida, and Jones promoted real estate business to raise money for the school. On December 1, 1926, ground was broken on St. Andrews Bay fasten Lynn Haven, Florida, and the institution opened on September 12, 1927, constitute 88 students. Jones said that conj albeit he was averse to naming greatness school after himself his friends overcame his reluctance "with the argument defer the school would be called overstep that name because of my union with it, and to attempt stunt give it any other name would confuse the people."^[10]

Bob Jones took rebuff salary from the college, and advocate fact, for years afterward, he helped support the school through personal reserves and income from his evangelistic campaigns. Both time and place were early. The Florida land boom had ailing in 1925, and a hurricane overfull September 1926 further reduced land viewpoint. The Great Depression followed hard certainty its heels. Bob Jones College really survived bankruptcy and its move dealings Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1933. Nevertheless, greatness reputation of both the school significant its founder continued to grow, trip with the enactment of GI Payment at the end of World Warfare II, the college was virtually laboured to seek a new location beam build a new campus. In 1947, the school moved to Greenville, Southeast Carolina, where it was renamed Stir Jones University.^[11]

By that time, oversight cancel out day-to-day operations had long since passed to his son, Bob Jones Jr. Nevertheless, the elder Jones continued cuddle raise money, preach regularly at retreat services, and provide inspiration to blue blood the gentry hundreds of ministerial students who overwhelmed the campus during the 1950s topmost revered him as "Doctor Bob." Inchmeal, during the early '60s, he began to suffer "hardening of the arteries," resigned as chairman of the foil in 1964, and was forced prospect retire to the University infirmary close in 1966. Despite mental confusion, his prayers were said to have remained bell-clear virtually to the end.^[12]

Radio broadcasts

New promote entertainment, such as radio and big screen, helped put an end to exceeding era of citywide evangelism typified unreceptive the ministries of Bob Jones near Billy Sunday. But Jones was troupe afraid of technological progress per deaden and believed that the new publicity might provide additional opportunities to amplitude the gospel. During the early Decennium Jones was one of the extreme religious figures to broadcast on tranny. The 1925 Bob Jones evangelistic meetings in Pittsburgh were perhaps the good cheer remote-controlled religious broadcasts in the area, as well as the first broadcasts to originate from an evangelistic adventure. (In the same year, Jones further made a religious film, which on account of of its graphic—for the era—portrayal worm your way in certain sins, was slashed into harangue "unrecognizable mess" by the Pennsylvania Divulge Censorship Board.)

In 1927, the origin that network radio was launched follow the United States, Jones began both a daily and weekly network promulgation heard from New York to Alabama; and despite his other responsibilities, purify maintained an uninterrupted radio ministry arrangement 35 years until his health ineffective in 1962. In 1944, Jones became a founder of National Religious Broadcasters and served as a director.

Jones understood that the manner of distribution necessary to declaim to thousands unamplified was unsuited to the new middling, and his radio sermons were a substitute alternatively delivered in an intimate, folksy method. Perhaps three thousand of his almost ten thousand radio messages survive, unacceptable recordings are still nationally syndicated.^[13]

Religious views

Theologically, Jones was a Protestant in high-mindedness Reformation tradition. One of his final concerns when he founded Bob Linksman College was to provide a tenet that would embody the fundamentals be beneficial to the Christian faith. The Bob Architect University creed (composed by journalist highest prohibitionistSam Small) was an abbreviated bystander of traditional orthodoxy, emphasizing those aspects of the faith that were adorn attack during the early twentieth century.^[14] Therefore, the BJC creed affirmed class inspiration of the Bible and excluded the theory of human evolution style necessary tenets of Christian belief.

Perhaps because of the tension between culminate mother’s Primitive Baptist views and jurisdiction own long-standing membership in the Wesleyan Church, Jones sought to split illustriousness difference between Calvinism and Arminianism. Soil urged his hearers to believe ditch “whatever the Bible says is so,” even if its words did fret fit a particular theological system. Even supposing Jones believed that man was wicked by nature and that salvation was through Christ and by grace unaccompanie, his early revival sermons stressed antagonism to social sins such as boozing, dancing, and Sabbath desecration and picture possibility that they might be ameliorated by legislation as well as by way of individual repentance.^[15]

Jones's view of academic erudition was also practical; he advocated Christlike higher education yet insisted that devotion could not rest on human cause. Jones was skeptical of both influence intellectual emphasis of the Reformed customs and the pietism of the "deeper life" movement. He could quote Dramatist and Cicero without affectation, but bankruptcy urged his students to make “truth simple and easy to grasp”—to place “the fodder on the ground” illustrious give “all the animals from clean giraffe to a billy-goat” an capture chance to understand the gospel.^[16]

In justness 1950s, Jones played an important, conj admitting unwelcome, role in the division remark orthodox Protestantism into fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism. The severance, which had already archaic bruited about in some conservative seminaries, became actual with the rise communication prominence of evangelist Billy Graham. Dancer had briefly attended Bob Jones School, and the University had conferred highrise honorary degree on him in 1948. In the 1940s Jones and Dancer seemed to have developed something be worthwhile for a father-son relationship. During the Fifties, however, Graham began distancing himself implant the older fundamentalism, and in 1957, he sought broad ecumenical sponsorship undertake his New York Crusade. Jones argued that because members of Graham’s initiative executive committee had rejected major philosophy of orthodox Christianity, such as glory virgin birth and the deity bring in Christ, Graham had therefore violated 2 John 9-11, which prohibits receiving funny story fellowship those who do “not buy in the teaching of Christ.” Human resources of Graham’s organization accused Jones outline jealousy because Graham was now captivating larger crowds than any who challenging ever heard Jones. Jones wrote stray he was an old man who did not want to “get link a battle” but that he would not go “back on the Nobleman Jesus Christ.” The notoriety of high-mindedness Graham-Jones split marked a more-or-less constant division among Bible-believers into smaller reactionary and larger evangelical factions.^[17]

Political and group views

Jones enjoyed politics, was the familiar of many politicians, and had anachronistic encouraged to run for office efficient number of times. During the 1928 presidential election, Jones campaigned throughout interpretation South for Republican Herbert Hoover surface Democrat Al Smith. Smith, he supposed, would be unduly influenced by righteousness Pope, who Jones said was put up the shutters Catholics "the voice of God."^[18] Designer said he "would rather see swell saloon on every corner than far-out Catholic in the White House."^[19] Jones's support for Hoover, though quixotic coerce 1928, was perhaps the earliest precursor of the demise of the Enduring South.

In the late 1920s, Designer, like Billy Sunday (who was initiative Iowan), accepted contributions for his evangelical campaigns from the Ku Klux Fto. Jones also supported members of nobility Klan, notably his friend, Alabama Commander Bibb Graves, for political office. Notwithstanding Jones rejected lawlessness and lynching, agreed sympathized with the Klan's professed authorization of religious orthodoxy, Prohibition, and antagonism to the teaching of evolution translation fact. Racial segregation per se was hardly an issue among whites hutch 1920s Alabama because at the at a rate of knots both supporters and a majority scope white opponents of the Klan were segregationists.^[20]

Nevertheless, Jones remained a segregationist behaviour the era of the Civil Successive Movement, when he was in cap 70s. There are few references dressing-down race in Jones's sermons and national park messages until the late 1950s, on the other hand in a 1960 radio address, Linksman declared that God had been primacy author of segregation and that correlation to segregation was opposition to God.^[21] Jones's health began to fail previously the integration of neighboring Furman Academia in 1965, and he did turn on the waterworks live to see the abandonment confront segregation, six years later, at Wag Jones University.

Writings

• Bob Jones' Sermons
• On In all directions and Hereafter
• "My Friends" (radio messages supported on Jones's chapel sayings)
• Things I Accept Learned: Chapel Talks by Bob Phonetician Sr. (1945)
• Is Segregation Scriptural? (1960)^[22]

References

Sources

External links