Essentials of Evangelism: The Bob Jones University Lectures on Evangelism for 1958
(This is the eighth volume of the Lectures on Evangelism d...)
This is the eighth volume of the Lectures on Evangelism delivered annually at Bob Jones University. As President of Bob Jones University, I feel a tremendous responsibility each year to select carefully the man who shall be invited to deliver the Lectures. I try to select either a man whom God has singularly blessed in the conducting of Scriptural evangelistic campaigns, a man who is known as an authority on evangelism and is engaged in the promotion of such work, or a pastor who is noted for a strong, evangelistic and soul-winning ministry in his own church and in the conducting of special evangelistic meetings for other pastors. Dr. Malone has built in the last few years one of the largest and strongest churches on this Continent. It has been built around his own evangelistic ministry and personal soul-winning efforts. He is the founder and head of a Christian day school and Seminary. He is the editor of a paper which is both uncompromising in its orthodoxy and evangelistic in its emphasis. I am convinced that any man who loves the Lord and is interested in the salvation of souls and the reviving of the Church will approve my choice of Dr. Malone as the Lecturer for 1958. I am convinced, too, that the excellent quality of the setup and printing of this volume is an indication of an equally good choice in the publisher. In February, 1959, James A. Stewart, Scotch evangelist, internationally known for his powerful preaching, his Scriptural approach, and his uncompromising stand for the fundamentals of the Faith, will deliver to the students and faculty of Bob Jones University the next annual series of Lectures on Evangelism. These will be published in due course so that others outside the University family may share in the same sort of instruction and blessing which we are sure they will find in the present volume. Bob Jones, Jr. President Bob Jones University
Robert Reynolds "Bob" Jones Sr. was an American evangelist and the founder and first president of Bob Jones University.
Background
Robert was born on October 30, 1883 in Skipperville in Dale County, Alabama, United States, the son of William Alexander Jones, a farmer, and Georgia Creel. His father told of his experiences in the Confederate army, particularly his leg injury at the Battle of Chickamauga Creek, and his involvement in such agricultural-lobby causes as the Farmers' Alliance. He named Bob both for the man who aided him after his war injury, Robert Reynolds, and for Jefferson Davis, but the middle name Davis was later dropped. Jones's father required that he regularly memorize and recite to family supper guests long passages from the classics and other literature.
Education
Jones received a diploma from Kinsey High School in 1899 and, in 1901, he enrolled in Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama (now Birmingham Southern University), paying for three years of college from earnings as minister of small country churches and as a part-time revival preacher. He was a serious and hardworking student but ordinary in academic accomplishment.
Career
One of Jones's first public addresses was an 1895 speech in defense of the Populist party. Other early speeches included his talks at the local Methodist church at Brannon's Stand, where the parishioners elected him Sunday-school superintendent when he was only twelve. Soon Jones sought and received invitations to preach throughout his community in homes, schoolhouses, small country churches, and even "brush arbors. " The Mt. Olive church at Brannon's Stand was the site of his first revival, and the twelve-year-old witnessed sixty conversions during the one-week meeting. At thirteen, he led a brush-arbor meeting that resulted in the establishment of a church of fifty-four members where he served as minister for about a year. The rotund youth (he weighed 150 pounds at age thirteen) became known locally as "the boy preacher. " He received a license to preach from the Methodist Episcopal Church South when he was fifteen.
He accepted a call to the Headland Circuit of the Mariana District of the Alabama Conference, which included the church that he had founded and four others. Even as pastor, his emphasis was more that of an evangelist, and during his first year on that circuit, the churches gained more than 400 members by profession of faith. During Jones's middle teenage years, both his parents died.
Jones's career as a full-time evangelist spanned approximately the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gradually he received invitations from larger and moredistant cities. By 1914 he was known as "the Billy Sunday of the South. " In that period a typical campaign would be held in a 10, 000-to-15, 000-seat tabernacle with long pine-board seats, sawdust aisles, and a huge platform to accommodate a choir of up to 1, 000 voices. By 1924, he had preached over 12, 000 sermons in all the states and 30 foreign countries and counted over 15 million listeners and 300, 000 converts. His meetings attracted a broad range of Protestants, but primarily Methodists and Baptists.
Jones's early career coincided with the movement toward secularization in higher education. During his revival tours, he became increasingly disturbed by the reports of Christian parents who had sent their children to supposedly trustworthy colleges only to have them lose their faith and/or purity. A solution, he believed, was to found a Christian college with a highly controlled intellectual and social environment. Accordingly, he opened Bob Jones College in St. Andrews, Florida, in 1926.
For financial reasons, he moved the school to Cleveland, in 1933; and in 1947, to provide for further growth, he relocated the school (renamed Bob Jones University) to its present site in Greenville, South Carolina. Jones continued his evangelistic travels, promoting the college as well as the Gospel, and soon delegated much of the internal management of the school to his son, Bob Jones, Jr.
When on campus, he spoke regularly in daily chapel to the student body, which grew from 88 in 1927 to 2, 500 in 1947 and 4, 000 by the 1960's. Jones's institution identified itself as "the world's most unusual university, " a phrase that reflected its tendency toward promotional overstatement. In certain respects, however, the institution has been unique. Perhaps no modern American college has as strongly opposed racial integration on religious grounds. Jones believed he found support for that belief and practice in Acts 17:26, which says that God "hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the bounds of their habitation. " No school matched its combination of excellence in the fine arts and fervor in fundamentalism.
He died in Bob Jones University Hospital and is buried on the campus.
Jones preached not only the Christian Gospel but also against liquor, gambling, Catholicism, and Protestant liberalism. His preaching style was direct, dramatic, and self-assured and featured a folksy, down-home delivery.
Connections
While at Southern, he met Bernice Sheffield, a student at nearby Judson College of Marion, Alabama. They were married on October 24, 1905, but his wife died from tuberculosis ten months later. They had no children.
During a campaign in Uniontown, Alabama, he met his second wife, Mary Gaston Stollenwerck. They married on June 17, 1908, and shortly thereafter moved to Birmingham, which was to be their home for nearly two decades. They had one child.