APPRECIATING E. STANLEY JONES: The Methodist Thich Nhat Hahn [Sa, 3-12-22]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

“The Current,” publication of my Methodist conference, The Illinois Great Rivers Conference, recently printed a retrospective appreciation of E. Stanley Jones [1884-1973], as we approach the 50-year anniversary of his death.

Jones went to India as a traditional missionary, but he became a Christian Thich Nhat Hahn. The spirituality that he found in India brought forth his Christian spirituality and created a new path toward God. He led ashrams [Indian name for a spiritual retreat] all over the world, especially India and his native America. His books of daily devotionals became best-sellers. He was the iconic Indian missionary spiritual evangelist of the twentieth century

I had two significant encounters with him.

The first was at an Ashram Jones led, at the church camp-ground at Santa Claus, Indiana, only 35 miles from my home.

I was 19. I was pretty sure I was going to have to be a preacher, against my will, because of a deal I made with God when I was 14, to save my sister’s life. I thought that maybe if God saw that I was so religious that I even went to an Ashram on a hot and sweaty southern Indiana night, maybe that would be enough.

It wasn’t. Unfortunately for me, Jones included an altar call for those considering ministry. I had taken my friend, Dave, along, because he was thinking about the ministry, too. Also, I was scared to go alone. I nudged him and said, “I guess we’ve got to go up there.” I was all the way to the front before I realized Dave was still back on that hard wooden bench. [1]

When Jones put his hand on my head and prayed, I felt like I was where I was supposed to be, and very much alone.

My second encounter was in Dallas, TX. I was a student at Perkins School of Theology, at Southern Methodist U, before I got thrown out of Dallas for integrating the community center where I was Director. Helen and I visited a different church each Sunday morning. One Sunday we went to First Baptist Church, where the infamous W.A. Criswell was the preacher. [2]

This was during the time when the young white Methodist preacher, Lloyd Foreman, was taking his first-grade daughter, Pam, to Wm. Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, even though all the other white parents were boycotting the school to protest integration. There were so many threats against little Pam and her family that they had to move out of their house. The little black girls, like Ruby Bridges, were rightly lauded for braving the hostile mobs that tried to keep them away from that school, but Pam Foreman was a symbol of an even greater wrong in the eyes of New Orleans segregationists, white people who “betrayed their race.”

At First Baptist in Dallas that Sunday morning, they received new members. The last couple was transferring from a church in New Orleans. Their name, maybe not surprisingly, was Saint. Criswell put his hands on their heads and prayed for courage “for all the saints of New Orleans who are resisting the Communist inspired unamerican race-mongrelizing integration in New Orleans.” With his hands still on the heads of the Saints from New Orleans, he pronounced the benediction: “The South will rise again. We ain’t licked yet. Amen.”

We were deeply disturbed all day. We had read in the newspaper that E. Stanley Jones was doing a service in a neighborhood Methodist church that night. We had not planned to go. We were always tired by 7:30 on any night. E. Stanley Jones and his spirituality seemed to be over the hill by that time. But we needed to hear that simple E. Stanley Jones message of salvation by grace through faith.

It was a quiet service. Not many people there. Jones wasn’t as prominent as he had been. But he was real. His message was simple, and fit well the song we sang to end the service: “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] My friend Dave heard a different voice. He answered a call to a different sort of evangelism. He became the premiere madman of the 1970s, evangelizing for Coors Beer and RC Cola.

2] Strangely, segregationist Wally Amos Criswell and integrationist Clarence Jordan, the founder of Koinonia Farms and translator of The Cotton Patch Version of the Bible, were classmates at Louisville Baptist Seminary.