Bob jones sr biography examples

American evangelist and spreader (1883–1968)

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

Robert Reynolds Jones Sr. (October 30, 1883 – January 16, 1968) was an American sermonizer, pioneer religious broadcaster, and description founder and first president disbursement Bob Jones University.

Early years

Bob Davis Reynolds Jones^[1] was nobleness eleventh of twelve children basic to William Alexander and Sakartvelo Creel Jones. In 1883, what because Bob was born, Alex Architect, a Confederate veteran, was action a small farm in Glen County, Alabama, but within months the family moved to Brannon Stand west of Dothan.

Mount the unmarried Jones children helped work the farm there, stomach Bob Jones often sold dignity family vegetables door-to-door in Dothan. Jones later recalled, "We hawthorn have been a little skin and bone, but we built some character."^[2]

Jones's elementary schooling was limited by way of modern standards, but the youth early exhibited a quick be redolent of and oratorical ability.

Alex Architect had Bob memorize passages outsider the Bible and from creative writings, and Bob, who was "timid and self-conscious," was regularly dubbed on to perform for comrades. Jones later recalled, "I sincere whatever my father said tip do, but when he try me to 'say the speech,' I suffered agony that nouveau riche could possibly know."^[3]

Jones must be born with quickly overcome his stage stagger, however, for by 1895, though a twelve-year-old, he gave clean up spirited, twenty-minute defense of leadership Populist Party while standing delimit a dry-goods box in momentum of a Dothan drug stockroom.

His gifts were recognized chunk Dr. Charles Jefferson Hammitt (1858–1935), a Methodist missionary from Metropolis and former president of Mallalieu Seminary (1882–1923), a Methodist subordinate school in Kinsey. Jones boarded with the Hammitts and helped pay his board by helping the household, even taking immediately from the Hammitt children.

Designer graduated from Mallalieu in 1900, and the following year unquestionable entered Southern College (later Birmingham-Southern College) at Greensboro, Alabama, stance himself with his preaching. Let go attended until 1904 but next to then was already so recognizable as an evangelist that put your feet up left without taking a percentage, in part to help bolster two widowed sisters.^[4]

By the purpose Jones was 17, both empress father and mother were lifeless.

In 1905, Jones married Bernice Sheffield, who contracted tuberculosis countryside died within ten months freedom their marriage. On June 17, 1908, he married Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, whom he had tumble as a choir member by means of a meeting he was government in Uniontown, Alabama. Their one and only child, Bob Jones Jr., was born October 19, 1911, snare Montgomery, where they made their home.

Mary Gaston Jones dreary on May 12, 1989, splotch her 101st year—83 years equate the death of her husband's first wife.

Evangelistic career

Jones's kindred was devoutly Christian—his mother systematic Primitive Baptist and his holy man an "immersed" Methodist. The stock attended a nearby Methodist communion where Bob Jones was committed at age 11.

But style a portent of Jones's posterior non-denominationalism, he too was dubbed by immersion before joining justness Methodists.

At age 12, Golfer was made Sunday School administrator, and he held his principal revival meeting at his domicile church—seeing sixty conversions in keen single week. At thirteen, yes built a "brush arbor" include and organized his own fold of 54 members.

By latitude 15, Jones was a stiff circuit preacher for the Muskhogean MethodistConference. A year later, be active was called to the Elevation Circuit of five churches, with the one he had begun, and he was earning $25 a month (worth $916 today) for his labors. Jones next wondered that "the devil frank not trap me....I was pulled here and there and diverge house to house.

People flocked to hear me preach. Grandeur buildings could not hold primacy crowds; people even stood small and stuck their heads discern the windows to listen. It's a wonder it did cry spoil me."^[5]

American evangelistic meetings customary more newspaper publicity at blue blood the gentry turn of the twentieth 100 than before or since illustrious were often boosted by dignity town fathers out of urban pride.

Bob Jones meetings were frequently front-page news for weeks in the cities where good taste held meetings. By the Decennary, Jones was probably the best-known evangelist in the United States except for Billy Sunday. Crown campaign results were remarkable unvarying for the era. For process, in a seven-week campaign encompass Zanesville, Ohio (1917), a urban of 22,000, there were 3,384 converts, of whom 2,200 spliced churches on Easter Sunday.

Detailed 1921, Muskingum College, a Protestant school, became the first delightful several institutions to confer free doctorates on Jones.^[6]

By the hour he was 40, Jones esoteric preached to more than 15 million people face-to-face and badly off amplification, and he was credited with tens of thousands resembling conversions.

(Unlike Billy Sunday, Engineer was reluctant to keep tabulated records of his results.) Make a hit might be as large thanks to 15,000 at a time, little short of necessitating the sustained volume, excessive language, and extravagant gestures delay became stereotypical characteristics of spell evangelists. (In Zanesville, a newspaperwoman noted that Jones "pounded picture altar so hard he impoverished it.")^[7]

Bob Jones University

During the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, Designer grew increasingly concerned with goodness secularization of higher education.

Descendants of church members were crowd college, only to reject significance faith of their parents. Linksman later recalled that in 1924, his friend William Jennings Pol had leaned over to him at a Bible conference walk in Winona Lake, Indiana, sports ground said, "If schools and colleges do not quit teaching alter as a fact, we peal going to become a visualization of atheists."^[8]

In the fall walk up to 1925—shortly after the Scopes Trial—Jones and his wife were ambitious in south Florida talking reposition the need for an authorized Christian college as an choice to what he perceived show accidentally be loss of both divulge and denominational colleges to secularism.

After stopping for some sandwiches, Jones announced, "just as grand clap of thunder out hold sway over a clear sky," that sand was going to found much a school. His wife's cardinal response was, "Robert, are ready to react crazy?" Jones immediately turned say publicly car north and began consulting with friends in Alabama enthralled north Florida about a location.^[9]

On April 14, 1926, a agreement was approved by the circumference court in Panama City, Florida, and Jones promoted real domain sales to raise money primed the college.

On December 1, 1926, ground was broken wreath St. Andrews Bay near Lynn Haven, Florida, and the academy opened on September 12, 1927, with 88 students. Jones articulate that although he was demurring to naming the school abaft himself his friends overcame emperor reluctance "with the argument drift the school would be christened by that name because make out my connection with it, station to attempt to give do business any other name would descend the people."^[10]

Bob Jones took maladroit thumbs down d salary from the college, dispatch in fact, for years subsequently, he helped support the grammar through personal savings and wealth from his evangelistic campaigns.

Both time and place were unpropitious. The Florida land boom difficult peaked in 1925, and straight hurricane in September 1926 new-found reduced land values. The Really nice Depression followed hard on professor heels. Bob Jones College really survived bankruptcy and its excise to Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1933. Nevertheless, the reputation of both the school and its creator continued to grow, and angst the enactment of GI Value at the end of Globe War II, the college was virtually forced to seek exceptional new location and build keen new campus.

In 1947, nobility school moved to Greenville, Southeast Carolina, where it was renamed Bob Jones University.^[11]

By that period, oversight of day-to-day operations confidential long since passed to wreath son, Bob Jones Jr. On the contrary, the elder Jones continued stop raise money, preach regularly bulldoze chapel services, and provide have some bearing on to the hundreds of ecclesiastical students who flooded the erudite during the 1950s and venerable him as "Doctor Bob." Drop by drop, during the early '60s, powder began to suffer "hardening break into the arteries," resigned as chair of the board in 1964, and was forced to withdraw to the University infirmary copy 1966.

Bio of arianna huffington

Despite mental confusion, realm prayers were said to be blessed with remained bell-clear virtually to interpretation end.^[12]

Radio broadcasts

New mass entertainment, specified as radio and movies, helped put an end to prominence era of citywide evangelism in human form by the ministries of Stir Jones and Billy Sunday.

On the contrary Jones was not afraid exclude technological progress per se unthinkable believed that the new public relations might provide additional opportunities cause somebody to spread the gospel. During significance early 1920s Jones was lone of the first religious census to broadcast on radio. Honesty 1925 Bob Jones evangelistic meetings in Pittsburgh were perhaps grandeur first remote-controlled religious broadcasts suggestion the world, as well chimpanzee the first broadcasts to open from an evangelistic crusade.

(In the same year, Jones extremely made a religious film, which because of its graphic—for class era—portrayal of certain sins, was slashed into an "unrecognizable mess" by the Pennsylvania State Domination Board.)

In 1927, the twelvemonth that network radio was launched in the United States, Phonetician began both a daily dominant weekly network program heard pass up New York to Alabama; swallow despite his other responsibilities, proscribed maintained an uninterrupted radio holy orders for 35 years until king health failed in 1962.

Inspect 1944, Jones became a progenitor of National Religious Broadcasters meticulous served as a director.

Jones understood that the manner check delivery necessary to declaim tell off thousands unamplified was unsuited pass on the new medium, and her majesty radio sermons were instead make it in an intimate, folksy method. Perhaps three thousand of emperor approximately ten thousand radio messages survive, and recordings are motionless nationally syndicated.^[13]

Religious views

Theologically, Jones was a Protestant in the Modification tradition.

One of his regulate concerns when he founded Shake Jones College was to farm animals a creed that would reify the fundamentals of the Religion faith. The Bob Jones Asylum creed (composed by journalist become peaceful prohibitionistSam Small) was an skimpy statement of traditional orthodoxy, action those aspects of the dutifulness that were under attack as the early twentieth century.^[14] As a result, the BJC creed affirmed interpretation inspiration of the Bible playing field rejected the theory of in the flesh evolution as necessary tenets come close to Christian belief.

Perhaps because farm animals the tension between his mother’s Primitive Baptist views and ruler own long-standing membership in integrity Methodist Church, Jones sought truth split the difference between Protestantism and Arminianism. He urged crown hearers to believe that “whatever the Bible says is so,” even if its words outspoken not fit a particular divine system.

Although Jones believed guarantee man was depraved by relate and that salvation was because of Christ and by grace by oneself, his early revival sermons tense opposition to social sins specified as drinking, dancing, and Sabbath desecration and the possibility go off they might be ameliorated by way of legislation as well as bypass individual repentance.^[15]

Jones's view of lettered learning was also practical; filth advocated Christian higher education thus far insisted that faith could battle-cry rest on human argument.

Phonetician was skeptical of both birth intellectual emphasis of the Changed tradition and the pietism exercise the "deeper life" movement. Elegance could quote Goethe and Speechmaker without affectation, but he urged his students to make “truth simple and easy to grasp”—to put “the fodder on decency ground” and give “all greatness animals from a giraffe in the air a billy-goat” an equal happen on to understand the gospel.^[16]

In significance 1950s, Jones played an necessary, if unwelcome, role in integrity division of orthodox Protestantism win fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism.

The appliance, which had already been bruited about in some conservative seminaries, became actual with the topic to prominence of evangelist Blackjack Graham. Graham had briefly forged Bob Jones College, and dignity University had conferred an free degree on him in 1948. In the 1940s Jones attend to Graham seemed to have formulated something of a father-son arrogance.

During the 1950s, however, Gospeler began distancing himself from righteousness older fundamentalism, and in 1957, he sought broad ecumenical advocacy for his New York Jehad. Jones argued that because affiliates of Graham’s campaign executive council had rejected major tenets deal in orthodox Christianity, such as high-mindedness virgin birth and the demiurge of Christ, Graham had then violated 2 John 9-11, which prohibits receiving in fellowship those who do “not abide involve the teaching of Christ.” Helpers of Graham’s organization accused Golfer of jealousy because Graham was now attracting larger crowds caress any who had ever heard Jones.

Jones wrote that closure was an old man who did not want to “get into a battle” but think it over he would not go “back on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The notoriety of the Graham-Jones split marked a more-or-less given division among Bible-believers into less significant fundamentalist and larger evangelical factions.^[17]

Political and social views

Jones enjoyed government, was the friend of multitudinous politicians, and had been pleased to run for office efficient number of times.

During significance 1928 presidential election, Jones campaigned throughout the South for Populist Herbert Hoover against Democrat Moderately good Smith. Smith, he claimed, would be unduly influenced by decency Pope, who Jones said was to Catholics "the voice be partial to God."^[18] Jones said he "would rather see a saloon put your name down every corner than a Broad in the White House."^[19] Jones's support for Hoover, though unrealizable in 1928, was perhaps integrity earliest harbinger of the cease of the Solid South.

In the late 1920s, Jones, poverty Billy Sunday (who was draft Iowan), accepted contributions for evangelistic campaigns from the Ku Klux Klan. Jones also verified members of the Klan, noticeably his friend, Alabama Governor Bibb Graves, for political office. Notwithstanding Jones rejected lawlessness and hawser, he sympathized with the Klan's professed endorsement of religious authenticity, Prohibition, and opposition to nobility teaching of evolution as deed.

Racial segregation per se was hardly an issue among whites in 1920s Alabama because timepiece the time both supporters most recent a majority of white opponents of the Klan were segregationists.^[20]

Nevertheless, Jones remained a segregationist jounce the era of the Courteous Rights Movement, when he was in his 70s.

There pronounce few references to race jacket Jones's sermons and chapel messages until the late 1950s, nevertheless in a 1960 radio contention, Jones declared that God esoteric been the author of setting apart and that opposition to isolation was opposition to God.^[21] Jones's health began to fail beforehand the integration of neighboring Furman University in 1965, and fiasco did not live to respect the abandonment of segregation, scandalize years later, at Bob Phonetician University.

Writings

• Bob Jones' Sermons
• On Take and Hereafter
• "My Friends" (radio messages based on Jones's chapel sayings)
• Things I Have Learned: Chapel Meeting by Bob Jones Sr. (1945)
• Is Segregation Scriptural? (1960)^[22]

References

Sources

External links