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Called to Preach
Bob Jones College 1936, Florida Bible Institute 1937–1940

GRIPING NOT TOLERATED!

That was the sign on the wall of the dormitory room welcoming me to Bob Jones College. My father had driven the Wilson boys and me across the Appalachians to Cleveland in east Tennessee in September 1936. Every one of the three hundred students there faced the same stark warning on the wall of his or her room. Grady and I did not know whether to believe it or not.

Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., the school’s founder, who had won our hearts when he spoke at Sharon High School back home, believed in Authority (his) and Discipline (ours), with capital letters. A military academy could not have been more strict.

My father and mother had never been exactly lax in enforcing their rules on us children, as I could vouch for personally. But now I found myself in an environment so rigidly regimented that it shocked me. Our social life was restricted. Dating had to be scheduled and was governed by the dean’s code book. When you did date, you could not sit on the same sofa or chair as the girl. You were chaperoned and watched like a hawk. Outside of approved dating times, you could not stop to talk to your girlfriend. On certain evenings, though, you were allowed to sit in the lobby and talk (but only for fifteen minutes), and you could always write notes.

Even our intellectual life was subject to regulation. Teaching in every subject was dogmatic, and there was little chance to raise questions. Dr. Bob’s interpretation of doctrine, ethics, and academics was the only one allowed. Very few students ever questioned his authority to his face. But sometimes, stretched out on the double-decker bunks in our tiny four-bedded rooms with the grim motto confronting us, we did discuss it—though always with fear in our voices.

To make matters worse, we also loved Dr. Bob (as we often called him). Sometimes as intimidating as a bull, he could also be as tender as a child. We could not help but sense that he had our best interests at heart in all the policies he imposed. His religious convictions and genuine devotion to the Lord kindled a deep respect in my heart.

“I’ve made all the mistakes in evangelism,” he often said. “There are no more to be made.” That was memorable, but he never elaborated on what they were. Almost every day he spoke to us in the compulsory chapel service, and we enjoyed his homespun philosophy tartly expressed.

“If the Devil is going your way, ride the Devil,” he would say.

“If a hound dog is barking for Jesus Christ, I’m for the hound dog.”

As I looked forward to a few days of Christmas vacation, I tried to sort things out in my mind. I am not sure I could have defined in detail just what was bothering me about Bob Jones College. After all, I had nothing to compare it with. But I disliked the overwhelming discipline, which often seemed to have little rationale behind it. And I disliked being told what to think without being given the opportunity to reason issues through on my own or to look at other viewpoints. Coming down with the flu did not help.

One of my roommates, Wendell Phillips, had become a good friend in those early months. Frustrated with the rules and faced with the possibility of being “shipped” (expelled) by the college, Wendell quit and drove to Florida where he had been reading about a school that was reported to have excellent Bible teachers—although he had also considered Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where he had gone to school the previous year. Knowing how unhappy I was at Bob Jones, he now urged me, by letters and at least one phone call, to join him.

I surely knew I was not fitting in where I was. I asked for an interview with Dr. Bob in his office and told him about my discontent and my thoughts of leaving. His voice booming, he pronounced me a failure and predicted only more failure ahead. I left his office disillusioned and dejected.

Naturally, I assumed the problem was more with me than with the college. “I know I’ve been converted,” I wrote to Mother. “I know that I know Jesus Christ, but I’ve lost my feeling. I can’t seem to get anywhere in prayer. I don’t feel anything.”

“Son, God is testing you,” she wrote back. “He tells us to walk not by feeling but by faith, and when you don’t feel anything, God may be closer to you than ever before. Through the darkness and through the fog, put your hand up by faith. You’ll sense the touch of God.”

And I did. But the deep struggle was to continue for weeks.

The family’s Christmas plans all along had been to take Catherine, Melvin, little Jean, and me on a trip to Florida, where Mother’s older sister Sissy, along with Uncle Bo and my cousin Mildred, had bought a large rooming house in the heart of Orlando. They hoped I would get enough time off from school to make the trip.

Still sick from the flu and confused in my thinking, I headed south with them. By then my parents had heard about Florida Bible Institute from a small ad in Moody Monthly. I also talked with a Plymouth Brethren Bible teacher named Chambers who was staying at our house just then, and he counseled me to consider transferring there.

Once in Florida, I immediately acquired a taste for the warmer climate and the palm trees. Raising oranges and cattle appealed to a lifelong farmboy like myself. And Orlando’s many lakes attracted me too. I made up my mind to leave Bob Jones College when I returned there in January.

While we were in Orlando, Daddy did something unusual: he encouraged little Jean (who was four) to get up on the table in front of the guests and “preach” to them. She was so cute, with her beautiful blond hair, that they stopped to pay attention. I don’t know why Daddy put her up to it, but Jean was serious about her message and told the guests that they needed to come to Jesus. I guess you could say she was the first preacher in our family.

Back in Charlotte, Mother wrote to the president of Florida Bible Institute, asking him for information about the start of the second semester, courses offered, costs, and so on. She added a postscript asking him to send a copy to me at Bob Jones College. Dr. Watson, the president, replied by return mail: “In view of the fact that he is already in school at the Bob Jones College, we do not feel like writing him to explain our school to him as we do not wish to be misunderstood and have it appear in any way whatsoever that we are even suggesting that he make another change from another school to ours.”

Mother wrote back to him that our interest in the Florida school was prompted by friends of ours in Charlotte and by its advertisement in Moody Monthly magazine, along with the favorable impression Florida made on the family when we visited at Christmas.

She also sent a letter from our family physician, which had been copied to Dr. Jones, explaining my need for a less strenuous environment. In a veiled allusion to Wendell Phillips and myself, she told Dr. Watson that she would “leave it entirely with you as well as other faculty members, sincerely believing they will not be permitted to ‘run around’ except in the Lord’s work.”

Every day after lunch, I found out later, both Mother and Daddy went upstairs to their bedroom, got down on their knees, and prayed for me in line with Paul’s concern for his young associate Timothy, using the beloved cadences of the King James Version of the Bible: “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). When I received the news from Florida that I had been admitted, I was overjoyed.

Riding in my father’s 1937 green Plymouth, we arrived at the campus of Florida Bible Institute one morning late in January. It was located in Temple Terrace, fifteen miles east of Tampa. After the damp and dismal autumn in the mountains of east Tennessee, western Florida seemed like Paradise to me. The Institute itself was housed in a Spanish-style country-club hotel with several outbuildings. All had creamy pink stucco and tiled roofs, with wrought-iron railings along red-brick steps. Surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped eighteen-hole golf course on the banks of the Hillsborough River, the buildings were part of an exclusive residential subdivision that went broke in 1929. The family stayed for lunch before driving back to Charlotte.

The next day the lady who supervised the dining room (“Gibby,” the students called her) hailed me from across the room.

“Say, can you drive a car?” she asked hopefully.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I have a station wagon full of tourists who are supposed to be taken on a tour of Tampa, and I’ve nobody to drive them. Will you do it?”

“But I’ve never been to Tampa,” I protested. “How can I take them on a tour of the city?”

It was the height of the annual Gasparilla celebration—Gaspar was a pirate who had once captured Tampa—and there would be extra traffic and lots of crowds.

“Well, tell them something,” she said in desperation.

When I brought them back to the campus late in the afternoon, they all seemed happy. I did not know whether they had seen the main attractions, but I had done my best to explain the virtues of Tampa (as I was seeing them myself for the first time). After all, anybody could point out a post office when there was a big sign on the building. And I did remember a few things from a Chamber of Commerce brochure I had read before arriving in Tampa.

Only a few houses had been built in Temple Terrace by the time of the stock market crash, and some of them had been left deserted ever since. One of the men who lived there was J. W. Van DeVenter, who wrote “I Surrender All” and a number of other familiar Gospel songs. In another house lived a doctor who came to see the students when they were sick. Mainly, though, the broad, paved streets ran mile after mile through barren blocks.

A former Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) minister from North Carolina, Dr. W. T. Watson, had taken over the bankrupt property and started Florida Bible Institute as a nondenominational institution. It had forty women and thirty men students when I arrived. We all lived and ate and had our classes in the hotel complex. There was still plenty of room left over for “paying customers”—ministers and Christian laypeople (well-to-do Yankees, as I saw them) who took advantage of the Institute’s comfortable quarters and reasonable rates in winter months. It cost a lot less than hotels and was far superior to tourist camps and trailer parks. Perhaps as many as fifty people from the North would spend the entire winter there; others came and went. Every room had twin beds and a private bath, and some included sitting areas—suites, really.

We students were the workforce that ran the place, waiting on tables, cooking, washing dishes in the kitchen, doing the housekeeping, and handling grounds maintenance—all for 20¢ an hour. But those were good wages, because Dr. Watson, who had come from a poor home, managed to keep school fees down to $1 a day, all-inclusive. My father was paying my expenses and providing my pocket money, so I was affluent compared to some of the other students. I worked like everybody else, though, mainly to be part of the action and to expend some of my surplus nervous energy. I became the school’s first “automatic dishwasher,” or so they told me. My pace in the soapsuds races kept four girls busy with their dish towels.

My achievements were not all glorious, however. One day I was serving the head table. The Christian Church denomination, having rented all the facilities at the Institute for a time, was in the process of holding its summer conference. As I was about to pour steaming hot coffee into a cup, a man in a white suit raised his arm to make a point. When that arm hit the coffee pot, he screamed! He knocked it right out of my hand and into the lap of the lady in a white dress sitting next to him—and she screamed! I snatched a napkin and desperately tried to dry both people off.

“Get away!” he yelled. “Get away!”

I preferred the outdoor chores anyway—tasks like hedgetrimming and lawn maintenance. A real bonus job for many of us fellows was caddying on the golf course. Legendary preachers whom I had only heard about materialized right on the fairways and greens of our campus, and I could walk beside them as they made their rounds on the course, carrying their golf bags and spotting where their balls landed.

Preachers got reduced rates in exchange for speaking in our chapel and classes or at Dr. Watson’s independent church in St. Petersburg, the Gospel Tabernacle. That church had started in a ragged tent in the early twenties, but it now occupied a building seating 4,000 people. Many of those visiting preachers made a lasting impression on me in their own individual ways.

World-renowned evangelist Gipsy Smith, probably in his seventies by then, came and stayed for weeks at a time. I asked him for his autograph, but he turned me down. I felt hurt by the rebuff. Later, when we became good friends, I did get his autograph, and I promised myself that if anyone was ever kind enough to ask me for my autograph, I would gladly give it if I possibly could.

William Evans, former director of the Bible department at Moody Bible Institute, particularly impressed my schoolmate Roy Gustafson, who would years later become a member of our evangelistic Team. Roy copied many things Evans said and did—his hand movements, his tone of voice. One day in class, or so the story goes, Roy’s roommate, Charles Massey, fell asleep beside Roy while Evans was lecturing.

“Wake that boy up there!” shouted Evans.

“Dr. Evans,” responded Roy, “you put him to sleep; you wake him up.”

For carrying his golf clubs around the course, Dr. Evans tipped me $1 and told me to apply myself to my studies so that someday I would be in a position to give a tip too.

E. A. Marshall spent every winter there, fascinating all of us with his maps and flannelgraphs of the Holy Land that explained where everything in the Bible had happened.

W. B. Riley and his wife from First Baptist Church in Minneapolis came down every year too; he was also founder and president of Northwestern Schools. His wife took time to help us students put together our yearbook, since she supervised the excellent one put out at Northwestern Schools. My previous Fuller Brush salesmanship won me a place on the yearbook staff, drumming up advertising from local businesses.

Another speaker was the highly intellectual A. B. Winchester from Canada. He had a memorable phrase he repeated frequently throughout his lectures and sermons: “My Bible says. . . .”

This visiting faculty also included such men as W. R. Newell, E. R. Neighbor, Theodore Elsner, A. C. Gaebelein, Donald G. Barnhouse, Oswald J. Smith, E. J. Pace, Homer Rodeheaver, and Harry Rimmer. They were not names in the headlines, but in conservative Christian circles they were the Who’s Who of evangelicals; they exerted a lot of good influence. And they were colorful personalities with a highly individual flair in their public speaking.

It was wonderful to be in the company of these men and women, and with such others as the general superintendents of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Methodist preachers, and a whole host of people from other denominations. That exposure broadened my view of the Church.

Wendell, my former roommate, and Woodrow Flynn, my pres-ent roommate (who had also attended Bob Jones College for a time), quickly introduced me all around to my new classmates, and I soon had a sense of belonging to a wonderful new family. I knew I was where I ought to be. This was confirmed in an early letter home: “Mother, words can’t express Florida Bible Institute. . . . I love it here. I’m working a little every day so as to help a little on my way. I’m stronger and feel so much better.”

The curriculum was largely Bible courses, or subjects related to the Bible (for example, church history). It also offered me the saturation I wanted in the study of God’s Word. I came to believe with all my heart in the full inspiration of the Bible.

One thing that thrilled me was the diversity of viewpoints we were exposed to in the classroom, a wondrous blend of ecumenical and evangelical thought that was really ahead of its time. Our teachers came from different backgrounds and denominations, exhibiting to us what harmony could be present where Christ and His Word were loved and served. In their teaching, they were not afraid to let us know about other philosophies and even about views critical of Christianity. Dr. Watson had actually dropped the word Fundamentalist from the name of the school after its first two years because it had come to connote such a negative image in the public mind.

We were encouraged to think things through for ourselves, but always with the unique authority of Scripture as our guide. So many of the questions that I had to keep bottled up previously could now be freely aired and wisely answered. I could stretch my mind without feeling that I was doing violence to my soul.

The faculty’s openness, and the diversity of visiting lecturers, instilled in me a fresh enthusiasm for the Lord and a burst of energy to get involved in His work. I still had no clear plan of action for my life, however. I was as carefree and happy-go-lucky as ever—maybe more so—in this subtropical playground of the Lord’s.

The Institute was committed to equipping all of us for Chris-tian witness in the world, even if not as preachers. So students were sent out regularly, both as individuals and in teams, to churches, missions, trailer parks, jails, street corners, and just about any other place that would have them. What we lacked in finesse we made up in youthful exuberance. In the course of student assignments that came my way, I spoke almost regularly at the well-populated trailer parks in the winter months and at The Stockade, Tampa’s jail.

The dean of men was the Reverend John Minder, a red-haired giant. His mother, who was from Switzerland, lived with him and inspired me a great deal. The fact that Minder was a bachelor freed him to give a lot of time to each student, as well as to his pastoral duties at the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle (CMA), which he had founded—as Dr. Watson had his St. Petersburg church—while in his early twenties. He saw me for what I was—a spindly farmboy with lots of nail-biting energy, a mediocre academic record, and a zeal to serve the Lord that exceeded my knowledge and skills.

I enthusiastically took his courses in pastoral theology and hermeneutics (or Bible interpretation), and I responded instinctively and positively to his gentle counseling approach, so different from the authoritarian ways I had just experienced in Tennessee. Instead of resenting his advice, I wanted to hear everything he could tell me about life and service. He did not dictate how to think and what to do; rather, he opened my thinking to consider the perfect trustworthiness of God, and to rest in that.

One day not long after I arrived, Dr. Watson called a meeting of the whole school to tell us there was a financial crisis and that he had nowhere to turn for funds. Under his leadership, we spent almost the entire day in prayer. At the end of the day, Dr. Watson stepped back into the prayer meeting to make a special announcement. He had just received a telegram from a man in the North named Kellogg, who said he had been strangely burdened that day to send a check to the school. That check was for $10,000! We were convinced our prayers had been answered, as the Scriptures promised, even above what we had dared to expect.

In early spring of 1937, at Easter, Dr. Minder invited me to accompany him on the 150-mile ride to his summer conference grounds at Lake Swan in northern Florida, a 150-acre property owned by his family. While there on a cold, blustery Saturday, we got together in nearby Palatka with his friend Cecil Underwood, a lay preacher who was pastoring Peniel Baptist Church five miles to the west.

Out of the blue, Mr. Underwood asked Dean Minder if he would mind preaching for him the following evening at a small Baptist church in Bostwick, for which Mr. Underwood had taken responsibility.

“No,” he answered, “Billy is going to preach.”

I was stunned. My repertoire at the time consisted of about four borrowed sermons, which I had adapted and practiced but never preached. This would be different from the old Fellowship Club meetings in Charlotte. There I just got up and “let them have it.” But in a strange church—a Baptist one at that—what would I do?

When I told Mr. Underwood that I had never preached a formal sermon in front of a church audience, he and Dean Minder both laughed.

“We’ll pray for you,” said Mr. Underwood, “and God will help you.”

“All right,” I agreed rather hesitantly.

What else could I say to the dean of my school? But I was so frightened that I spent the night studying and praying instead of sleeping. I did the same most of the next day, practicing aloud. By evening I felt confident that any one of my sermons should be good for at least twenty or thirty minutes.

The meeting room was small, with a potbellied iron stove near the front to take the chill off that cold, windy night. The song leader, who chewed tobacco, had to go to the door every so often to spit outside; he could have used the stove just as conveniently. The congregation of about 40 included ranchers and cowboys in overalls and their women in cotton wash dresses.

When the moment came to walk to the pulpit in the tiny Bostwick Baptist Church, my knees shook and perspiration glistened on my hands. I launched into sermon number one. It seemed to be over almost as soon as I got started, so I added number two. And number three. And eventually number four. Then I sat down.

Eight minutes—that was all it took to preach all four of my sermons! Was this the stuff of which those marvelous preachers at Florida Bible Institute were made?

Believe it or not, though, when I got back to campus I felt that I had grown spiritually through the experience. But at the same time I was concerned: I could not get away from a nagging feeling in my heart that I was being called by God to preach the Gospel. I did not welcome that call. Whatever glimmer of talent Dr. Minder might have thought he saw in me was certainly Raw, with a capital R.

I practiced for when the time would again come to preach in public. My roommate, Woodrow Flynn, was a great sermonizer and would preach his outlines to me in our cold room in front of the little stove. I used outlines of sermons borrowed from great published preachers like Dr. Lee Scarborough of Texas. I would paddle a canoe across the Hillsborough to a little island where I could address all creatures great and small, from alligators to birds. If they would not stop to listen, there was always a congregation of cypress stumps that could neither slither nor fly away. The loudness of my preaching was in direct proportion to their unresponsiveness, so the trees got my voice at full blast.

Once some fishermen, wandering within earshot, paused in amazement at this bellowing beanpole of a boy who seemed to rise from the river. Too often a few of my fellow students would line the opposite bank at my return to cheer me on with comments like, “How many converts did you get today, Billy?”

One day Dr. Watson was walking down a corridor of the men’s residence building when he overheard a similar practice session. Drawn toward the open door of my room, he looked in to see me shouting a sermon at his four-year-old son, Bobby, whom I had perched on top of the high antique dresser, perhaps to prevent his escape.

Things were bound to get better, though. Woodrow recalled one of my earliest speaking experiences in a rural Methodist church where I was teamed with him as organist and Wendell as song leader.

In full swing, physically and vocally, I was telling my audience about the ancient world’s wait for Christ, as the great Dwight L. Moody had presented it in a sermon.

“A thousand years went by, and no Christ!”

Dramatic pause.

“Two thousand years rolled by, and no Christ!”

Dramatic pause.

It was during just such a dramatic pause, after I had gotten to “seven thousand years,” that Wendell, from his seat on the platform behind me, hissed, “Shut up!”

Indignant, I asked him on the way home, “What did you mean saying, ‘Shut up,’ when I was preaching?”

“Well,” he said, “according to Archbishop Ussher’s chronology of Genesis, there have been but six thousand years since Adam was created.”

“I was going to at least ten thousand years,” I replied, “because that was good preaching!”

Despite my awkward debut in Bostwick at Easter, Dr. Minder invited me to speak to his Sunday night youth group at the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle. Then came the moment when he asked me to preach at a regular service. I was downright frightened. Woodrow was lying on his bunk in our room when I told him about it. “And I haven’t even got a sermon!” I concluded in despair.

He sat up and, then and there, commenced to preach me one of his own on Belshazzar, the ancient pagan monarch in Daniel 5. I liked it and told him I would use it. But I was not counting on having to repeat to the congregation the handwriting on the wall that made the king turn pale in verse 25: “Mene, Mene, tekel, upharsin” was not the kind of phraseology that came easily to a Carolina farmboy. “Meany, meany, tickle, upjohn” was the way it came out of my mouth. It sure tickled my buddies, but I didn’t think it was all that funny.

When I returned to the Institute after summer vacation that first year, I little guessed that I would face my severest test before the school year was over, when a beautiful girl complicated my life. Emily Cavanaugh—I had been smitten with love at the first sight of her soon after arriving at Florida Bible Institute, spending as much time with her as I could that first year. And I was not the only fellow on campus so afflicted. Wendell had been the first to alert me to the jewel that was Emily. It was something about her dark hair and sparkling eyes.

A chance to be near Emily happened every Sunday night. The several of us who went to Dr. Minder’s youth group at the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle converged on the Cavanaughs’ nearby house for supper before the meeting. I got in the habit of suggesting that we go back there afterward for our dessert, my favorite being Jell-O with fruit in it.

Sometimes Emily and others would go along on my preaching assignments or to young people’s events, riding in the used 1929 Chevrolet coupe I had picked up for $75 (or later in the 1931 Oldsmobile for which I went into debt for $225, payable at $10 a month). But there was so much to do on campus—canoeing, volleyball, Ping-Pong, tennis—that we really never had to leave it for our social contacts. Emily and I used to double on the tennis court with my good friend Charles Massey and a girl from Michigan he went with occasionally.

What I did not notice was the growing friendship between Emily and Charles, who was a sophisticated senior with plans to go on to Harvard. In my own infatuation, I was sure she was the woman God meant for me to marry. So I proposed to her . . . in writing . . . during the first summer vacation! She told me she would have to think about it. I could not imagine why.

During the fall semester of that second year, it seemed she was growing more favorable to the idea, and my hopes soared along with my assumptions. One night after we attended a service together at a black church, she indicated that she would say yes to my letter. From then on, I guess I considered us engaged, even though I had not given her a ring. After the turn of the year, though, she seemed to be having second thoughts, and they apparently lingered through the spring.

At the close of school each spring, we celebrated Class Night, the social event of the year. On that May day in 1938, Dr. Minder took several of us fellows to Larson’s Florist in Tampa to get flowers for our dates. This was a real splurge for most of us, with our limited finances. The going rate was 25¢ for a corsage, but I insisted on a 50¢ corsage for Emily!

When she did not wear my flowers to the party, I was perplexed. During a break in the festivities, we walked down to the river and sat in a swing hanging from a tree branch. I asked her to explain. She did not hesitate to tell me, quite gently but firmly, that she was in love with Charlie and would not marry me.

Charles Massey was one of the best preachers I ever heard as a student. In fact, on my very first weekend in Florida, I listened to his superb preaching at a student street meeting in Sulphur Springs—a meeting at which Roy Gustafson played his trumpet. I used to look forward to any chance of hearing Charles when I was not on an assignment myself.

But Emily and Charles? Incredible!

That woeful night in the spring of 1938 when she called it quits between us was Paradise Lost for me. In my despondency, I looked up Dr. Minder after my fellow students had gone back to their dorm rooms. I wept out my misery to his understanding ears.

But my problem was deeper than losing a girlfriend, and in my heart I admitted it. The issue was not trying to do something to please her and win her back. Her new boyfriend had wooed and won her fair and square. The issue was doing what pleased the Lord. If I refused that, could I expect the future to hold any happiness?

For some weeks, triggered by a profoundly searching sermon in chapel, I paced those deserted, echoing streets of Temple Terrace. In the moonlight, a soft southern breeze stirred the wispy Spanish moss that draped the trees on the golf course. I never felt so alone in my life—or so close to God. I walked through the late-night hours, struggling with the Holy Spirit over the call of God to be a minister. That was the last thing I wanted to be, and I had used all kinds of rationalizations to convince God to let me do something else.

I had the same sense of uncertainty in Charlotte nearly four years before, standing in the sawdust shavings of Mordecai Ham’s tabernacle. There I did what I felt I should do: commit my eternal destiny to the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. But was I now being asked to commit the rest of my life on earth to serving Him in a way that I did not particularly relish?

In the eighteen months since arriving at Florida Bible Insti-tute, I exercised some gifts and began to develop some skills that I did not know I had. I knew that I loved to tell people the good news of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ. On Sundays I often preached on the streets of Tampa, sometimes as many as five or six times a day.

But in those days, the greatest ministry that God opened up to me was the trailer parks. One of them, the largest (or close to it) in the country, was known as Tin Can Trailer Park. Two ladies there had gotten the concession to hold religious services on Sunday nights, but they had no preacher; they asked me if I would come. The crowds ran anywhere from 200 to 1,000. They would take up a collection, which I think the ladies kept and used for some worthy project, and they would give me $5—a tremendous help to my meager budget.

Many people responded to my preaching by confessing faith in Christ and being converted. My teachers and classmates seemed to affirm that this ministry was good and right for me. But did I want to preach for a lifetime? I asked myself that question for the umpteenth time on one of my nighttime walks around the golf course. The inner, irresistible urge would not subside. Finally, one night, I got down on my knees at the edge of one of the greens. Then I prostrated myself on the dewy turf. “O God,” I sobbed, “if you want me to serve you, I will.”

The moonlight, the moss, the breeze, the green, the golf course—all the surroundings stayed the same. No sign in the heavens. No voice from above. But in my spirit I knew I had been called to the ministry. And I knew my answer was yes.

From that night in 1938 on, my purpose and objectives in life were set. I knew that I would be a preacher of the Gospel. I did not yet know how or when, however.

My next preaching assignment seemed a long time in coming. I so badly wanted to preach, but nobody asked me to. The schoolyear was over. Students had left for the summer. I decided to stay on in Tampa, hoping to help Dr. Minder with the conferences at Lake Swan or to be kept busy with pulpit engagements while I worked at odd jobs on the campus. I applied to one church after another, but they either did not have openings or did not want an inexperienced student. A week went by, and I began to wonder nervously whether I had been truly called to preach or not.

Then, on one Saturday afternoon when I was down by the river cutting grass, I saw Mr. Corwin wandering about the campus. He operated the West Tampa Gospel Mission in the Hispanic section and always used Institute people to assist him. I had begun to think he would never ask me.

I dropped to my knees behind a bush and prayed, “Dear Lord, please let me preach at his mission tomorrow.”

When I looked up, the kindly old man was coming right toward me. “Mr. Graham, a student had to cancel his appointment at the last minute,” he said. “Would you mind coming to my mission to preach for me tomorrow?”

Having accepted Mr. Corwin’s invitation gladly, the next day I spoke to a couple dozen Hispanic teenagers in Tampa, talking as loudly as I could for them. Whether it was my volume or my message I wasn’t sure, but Mr. Corwin was impressed enough to ask me back the next Saturday, and many times after that.

Talking to those young men had given me a full head of steam. I asked Mr. Corwin after the mission service if I could go out and preach on the street. That day I preached seven sermons outdoors, and I continued to do that every weekend for the next two schoolyears, usually in front of saloons.

On Saturday nights, I would speak in the Tampa Gospel Mis-sion off Franklin Street to whoever wandered in; Brunette Brock, Dr. Watson’s secretary, and some other musicians from school helped me out from time to time.

I was also invited to preach on a Sunday morning at a small Methodist church some forty miles from Tampa, where Roy Gustafson and a musical trio from school were conducting a week of meetings. Then came the big break I had been longing for.

Dr. Minder’s old friend Cecil Underwood arranged for me to preach for a week of evenings at East Palatka Baptist Church. And not only in the church but also over radio station WFOY in nearby St. Augustine, live every morning. By now I had prepared and practiced about fifteen sermons—full-length ones—and I was ready to go!

During my stay in Palatka I lived in his home. I walked the streets practicing my sermons. I found a nearby church that was empty during the day and fine-tuned my sermons in there. By the time evenings came around, I was worn out from preaching to those empty pews.

Every night a congregation of 150 filled the church building. I became irritated at some of the young people who always sat in the back pews and cut up during the services. I scolded them from the pulpit and even threatened to go back there and throw them out bodily.

At that, the son of a leading member of the church jumped up, shook his fist at me, and stalked out, slamming the screen door behind him. I let the people know I could do other things besides preach, threatening that if there was a repeat performance of that behavior, I would give the boy a whipping. I think he came back two nights later. Fortunately, I wasn’t challenged to make good on my threat.

Despite my immaturity, the Lord graciously moved 80 people to profess conversion that week, and many of them joined the church. I could not doubt that His hand was on me, which made me practice my sermons all the harder every day. I was so keyed up that I could hardly sleep at night, and yet I had to drive on a rural road the twenty-eight miles from Palatka to St. Augustine and back in the morning in order to preach on the radio.

A by-product of my Palatka experience was my third baptism! In accordance with their Presbyterian covenant theology, my parents had presented their infant son for baptism by sprinkling in 1919 at Chalmers Memorial Church back home. I had never questioned the validity of that solemn act of commitment on their part, born of a heart desire to have their child identified with the household of faith. Years later as a youngster, after studying the catechism, I was “confirmed” in the faith by declaring my personal allegiance to the Lord. That background contributed to my checking “Recommitment” when I went forward in the Mordecai Ham meetings; that, I feel, was the moment when I truly put my trust in Christ as my Savior and was born again.

In Florida I had become convinced that I should be baptized by immersion and had arranged quietly for Dr. Minder to do that. It was an adult act, following my conscious conversion, and signified my dying to sin and rising again to a new life in Christ, as Paul described it in Romans 6.

But preaching in Southern Baptist churches raised a problem for me. Cecil Underwood pointed out that for Southern Baptists to invite preachers from other denominations—especially Presbyte-rians—into their pulpits was like defying a sacred tradition. Al-though he did not care one way or the other, not being a strict denominationalist himself, he thought that if I did not want to have a row with the deacons, I would be wise to be immersed under Southern Baptist auspices.

I pondered the question and prayed. It certainly seemed redundant, if not superfluous, to be baptized a third time. I did not believe there was anything magical or automatic about another baptism, as far as changing my heart. Baptism was only, to use the standard terminology, an outward sign of an inward grace. I knew that God had already made me a member of the Body of Christ, visibly expressed on earth in the Church, and that human labels could not affect my standing with Him one way or the other. On the other hand, I did not want anything to be a stumbling block or barrier in the minds of those I was seeking to reach.

In late 1938, therefore, Cecil Underwood immersed me in Silver Lake, with people from the church on the shore to wit-ness the ordinance. I waded down into the water, where he lowered me under and lifted me out in less than three seconds. I waded ashore again and went into a little shanty bathhouse to change into dry clothes.

Early in 1939, Woodrow came to me and said, “I think you ought to be ordained. That would give you a standing in the Baptist Association and be of great benefit to you in many ways.”

Woodrow and I talked it over and prayed about it. We agreed to get in touch with Cecil Underwood, who was still pastor at Peniel Baptist Church near Palatka. Cecil was glad to call together four or five neighboring pastors to form an ordination council. On a Sunday in February after I preached at one of the churches, we went to Peniel for the two o’clock session.

The little white frame church, about four windows long, was hot, and I was nervous. The handful of rural Southern Baptist pastors took their responsibility seriously, and under Cecil’s considerate direction commenced to question me in a kindly way about my background and beliefs.

One brother took it on himself to probe a bit into my theological views. After all, he must have reasoned, they were dealing here with a youngster who only recently had seen the light and converted from Presbyterian to Baptist. I am afraid my patience ran short. “Brother,” I said, “you’ve heard me preach around these parts, and you’ve seen how the Lord has seen fit to bless. I’m not an expert on theology, but you know what I believe and how I preach, and that should be enough to satisfy you.”

He chuckled, along with the others, and reckoned it was so. They approved me for ordination, and the service was held that night in the Peniel church. Cecil presided, and Woodrow preached the ordination sermon on the text, “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:3, KJV).

I knelt on the little platform in front of a small congregation and was encircled by a half-dozen country preachers. I felt the light touch of their outstretched fingers and calloused hands on my blond head and bony shoulders as they prayed me into their distinguished fellowship. When I stood up again, I was an ordained Southern Baptist minister in the St. John’s River Association.

Being ordained meant lots of things. Now I had sanction to perform weddings, conduct funerals, and officiate in church activities not open to me before. Far more important, though, by that simple act of ordination I was henceforth “set apart” for the preaching of the Gospel. Ordination did not elevate me to superiority over my fellow Christians who sat in the pews and listened, even if I stood in a high pulpit. On the contrary, it specially designated me to be their servant, their shepherd, for Christ’s sake. It was meant to nurture in me humility, not pride.

After another profitable schoolyear, the summer of 1939 brought me new and larger opportunities. I was promoted to a two-week evangelistic series in Welaka Baptist Church, surely the longest I would ever have been at one place. Welaka was a fishing village on the St. John’s River, with a reputation as a rough and tough place. Again the Lord was generous in drawing nightly crowds, and several people responded to the appeal to receive Christ. In the process, I was developing the basics of my own preaching style and my approach to giving the Invitation to come to Christ. For all of these meetings in north Florida, I stayed in the home of Cecil Underwood. While he was out working, painting houses, I would walk the streets around his house practicing my sermons and praying.

Then John Minder gave me an incredible opportunity. He needed to spend some time away that summer and asked me to be his summer replacement at the large Tampa Gospel Tabernacle. For six weeks, I would have my own church, preaching at all the regular services and carrying out pastoral responsibilities.

The embarrassments of Bostwick and Belshazzar faded into memory as I moved into the Tampa parsonage next door to the church. The neighbors were largely Cuban immigrants, most of them Roman Catholics in name if not in practice. I visited faithfully in home after home, inviting people to church. Surprisingly, many came, and listened, and responded.

I went to the Tampa hospitals and prayed for the sick. I held the hands of the dying and learned how much love and compassion a pastor must have toward his people.

And I preached. And practiced. Every Saturday I went into the empty sanctuary and rehearsed aloud the sermon I would preach the next day. Sometimes I had an audience of one, the janitor, who seemed to feel quite free to make suggestions.

One night in the parsonage, I woke up suddenly. Someone was breaking into the house. I was all alone, of course, and tensely aware that someone was in the next room. In the closet, I kept my old .22 rifle, left over from my hunting days on the farm. I eased out of bed, got the gun, put a cartridge in it, and shot it through the door into the ceiling of the next room. That loud bang was followed almost instantly by the bang of the back door as the intruder fled.

Apart from that, Dr. Minder found things pretty much in one piece when he got back. To my amazement, he appointed me to become his assistant pastor for the next year, while I was completing my education.

I was vice president of the young people’s ministry for the Christian and Missionary Alliance churches in the state of Florida, and all the CMA churches had invited me, in that role, to visit and speak to their young people. This had given me many contacts all over Florida and southern Georgia. For the balance of the summer, I did more preaching through these contacts, including Dr. Watson’s huge church in St. Petersburg. I went back to school for my final year, rejoicing in the evidence that God’s call was valid.

Then came a blow, the kind that was most damaging to the spirit of a young Christian. Dr. Watson was accused of moral indiscretions—falsely accused, I was certain. He was a man of God and one of my spiritual fathers. I did not believe for one minute that the evidence supported the charges against him. It was all circumstantial. Even the testimony of the accusers was not unanimous. The chief accuser was an employee of the school who himself had come under suspicion on a separate matter and might have been motivated by revenge. Dr. Minder and I were among the majority who stood by Dr. Watson.

The whole affair seared my soul with sorrow, both for his own pain and for the damage to the school. A few faculty and maybe a fourth of the students left. The campus was under a pall. As president of the senior class, I did what I could—which was negligible—to improve morale. Dreadful as the experience was, I was grateful that the dark cloud passed over Florida Bible Institute while I was there. It was a big learning experience for me in many ways, and it taught me to be very careful myself.

In May 1940, I graduated from Florida Bible Institute. At Class Night just before commencement that spring, one of the girls, Vera Resue, read the traditional “prophecy”—a passage that she had composed for the occasion: “Each time God had a chosen human instrument to shine forth His light in the darkness. Men like Luther, John and Charles Wesley, Moody, and others were ordinary men, but men who heard the voice of God. Their surrounding conditions were as black as night, but they had God. ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ (Romans 8:31). It has been said that Luther revolutionized the world. It was not he, but Christ working through him. The time is ripe for another Luther, Wesley, Moody, ______. There is room for another name in this list. There is a challenge facing us.”

I did not think my name was the one to be added to that list, but I did know that I was a human instrument and that God had chosen me to preach.

During that summer after graduation, classmate Ponzi Pennington and I went north to York, Pennsylvania, where pastor Ralph Boyer had invited me to preach in his church for a week in July.

We did not dare drive that far in my decrepit 1931 Oldsmobile, whose tire blowouts, broken piston rods, and exhausted spark plugs were enough to try the patience of Job. So we left it in Charlotte and borrowed my father’s 1937 Plymouth.

The meetings in York went well. We were invited for one week, and the series was extended for a second week. In our room at the YMCA, I had to think up and pray through more messages, since I had already preached all my evangelistic sermons. There was a good response to the Gospel, even though my heavy accent made it difficult for some people to understand me. I tried speaking louder than usual, but a few still did not get what I was saying. I wanted to blame the poor communication on their spiritual deafness, but it had to have been my dialect.

While in York, we drove up to New York and spent a day at the World’s Fair. It was the first time I ever saw television. They had a camera there, and as you walked by, you could see yourself on a screen. We never thought it would amount to anything, though. It seemed too incredible!

On our way back from York, on the Skyline Drive in Virginia, a farmer in a pickup truck pulled out in front of us without warning, forcing me off the road and into a ditch. He towed us into Galax, where we waited six hours for the car to be repaired. It took all my money, and as I was fishing the bills out of my wallet, I heard faint echoes of my father talking, telling me how many automobile mishaps I’d had and how he’d had to come rescue me with the mules. When I told him in person, however, he understood and mercifully traded my old blue Oldsmobile in for a new car for himself; the green Plymouth he gave to me.

As for me, the certainty about a call to preach motivated me to desire further education. An accredited college of liberal arts seemed to be the next step. I had a particular one in mind because of two visitors to Temple Terrace in the winter of my senior year.