Related articles and links |  1 of 5

If Billy Graham is the paragon of evangelical Christianity in America, then Howard Owen Jones is the "Jackie Robinson" of American evangelicalism. Jones has learned that there is a mixed blessing that comes with being the first African American to realize some key achievement in this nation. On the one hand, it is a high honor to overcome a barrier that has long kept blacks on an unequal footing with whites. But there is also the pain of living with the often unfriendly fallout of being a pioneer in the fragile chronicle of racial progress in America.

"It's an awareness that you're a living test, a human experiment," the evangelist explains. "It's knowing that your every word, your every action, has the potential to either make or break the hopes of your race."

Jackie Robinson knew this angst when he became the first African American to break the color barrier in major-league baseball in 1947. Martin Luther King, Jr., felt it when he led the American civil-rights movement in the sixties. And Howard Jones experienced it when, in 1957, he became the first black preacher to join evangelist Billy Graham's crusade team.

Last year marked the fortieth anniversary of Jones's important breakthrough. It did not receive the same media fanfare as the 50-year observance of Jackie Robinson's symbolic accomplishment, but in a day when racial reconciliation was not a buzzword in the Christian lexicon and when Martin Luther King had not yet reached the zenith of his national fame, Jones was going where no black man had gone before.

TO AFRICA AND HARLEM
If Howard Jones had had his way 60 years ago, he would not have been the first black preacher to hold rallies in Africa or the first African-American associate to join Graham's crusade team. "I played clarinet and alto saxophone in dance bands," he says, "and wanted to become the next big name in jazz music."

Fortunately for Africa, Graham, and the believing community, Jones's dreams of swinging with Ellington and Basie were cut short by the bigger plans of God—and the prayers of the young woman who would become his wife.

"Wanda challenged me to examine my life," says Jones. "She told me, 'I love you, but I love Christ more. You keep playing, and I'll keep praying.' That got my attention.

"She finally won me over," he says. "She helped me understand that when you give your dreams to the Lord, he'll multiply them in ways you could have never imagined."

At 22, newly graduated from Nyack College in New York (the Christian and Missionary Alliance's oldest school), Jones pastored his first congregation, Bethany Alliance Church on Harlem's Lower East Side. Not content with in-house services alone, Jones took his preaching "on location," forming Soldiers for Christ, an evangelistic outreach to teens and others in New York's inner-city neighborhoods. Along the way, Jones became acquainted with Jack Wyrtzen, a noted New York bandleader-turned-minister, whose Word of Life youth radio broadcast and evangelistic rallies regularly packed venues like Carnegie Hall. It was a friendship that would prove significant later in Jones's career.

After a fruitful eight-year stint in Harlem, Jones returned to his home turf of Cleveland where he assumed pastoral duties at Smoot Memorial Alliance Church in 1952. It was during this period that the preacher came upon a small advertisement by a radio station in Liberia, West Africa, in Christian Life magazine. "The station was interested in receiving recordings of Negro spirituals produced by black churches," Jones recalls. According to the ad, the Africans loved Negro spirituals. Jones rallied his church choir and recorded some tunes. He was surprised when, a few weeks later, the radio station responded enthusiastically about the tape.

next page... |  1 of 5

February 9 1998, Vol. 42, No. 2