Sunday night, October 27, 1918, was like any other evening service at Moody Church. Clarence was playing the trombone in the band with gusto while the congregation sang along. Finally Paul stood and strode to the pulpit to preach. Clarence laid his trombone aside and sat down to listen to the homily. As usual Paul was in fine form, and the words of his sermon were carefully chosen and hard-hitting—a little too hard-hitting for Clarence. As he listened, Clarence suddenly became aware that in his heart he was a sinner. It did not matter that he had been raised in the Salvation Army and played in the band at Moody Church. In truth, before God he was no better than any of the lowly people he had encountered while playing in the Salvation Army band at the open-air meetings on West Madison Street. Clarence knew that very night that he had to do something about the sinful state of his heart.
When Paul had finished speaking, he invited anyone who wanted to become a Christian to come to the front of the church. From his position on stage with the band, Clarence looked out across the faces of the crowd. People began to make their way to the front of the sanctuary. As they moved, Clarence wondered what people would think when a member of the band stood and walked to the front as well. After all, most people assumed that he was already a Christian. But in the end Clarence decided that it did not matter what people thought. What was more important was responding to what he was feeling in his heart. He rose to his feet, walked to the side of the stage and down the stairs, and joined the others standing at the front of the church with their heads bowed. Finally Paul said a prayer for those who had come forward, and then someone led them to a large room off to the side.
From his association with the Salvation Army, Clarence had seen many dozens of sinners kneel and accept Jesus Christ into their lives. Once he reached the room, Clarence automatically sank to his knees and prayed the sinner’s prayer and invited Jesus into his life. Thirty seconds later Clarence was back on his feet and headed out the door to resume his place in the band.
“And where are you going?” a burley man asked as he stepped in front of Clarence.
“I’m leaving. I’m saved now,” Clarence replied.
“And how do you know you’re saved?” the man asked.
“Because I feel better already,” Clarence said.
“What do you mean you feel better now? Suppose you wake up with a toothache tomorrow—what about your salvation then?” the man asked.
Clarence did not quite know what to say, and before he could think of anything, the man continued. “If you’re going to last as a Christian, young man, you’ll need more than feeling. You’ll need to put your feet on the solid rock of God’s Word. Let’s sit down here for a few minutes and talk.”
The man guided Clarence to where two chairs were arranged facing each other. Once they were comfortable, the man opened his worn, leather-bound Bible and began to show Clarence verse after verse about what it meant to be a Christian and how he should live his life to honor God. When they were done, Clarence stood up and headed for the door. “And now, how do you know you’re saved?” the man asked again as Clarence was leaving.
“I know I’m saved now because God’s Word says so,” Clarence replied with a smile on his face.
As he left Moody Church that night, for the first time in his life, Clarence Jones felt sure that his life was on the right track. He had accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior, and he was ready to go anywhere and do anything that God told him to do. The big question he now contemplated was, what exactly would that be?
Chapter 3
A Newfangled Fad
Clarence soon moved his membership from the Salvation Army to Moody Church. His parents and younger brother Howard noticed such a change in Clarence that they, too, soon joined him at Moody Church.
Two weeks after joining the church, Clarence attended a luncheon meeting there. After the meal, a missionary from Japan stood and spoke to the gathered crowd. Clarence was enraptured by the speaker’s challenge to missionary service. As soon as an opportunity to respond was presented, Clarence shot up his hand to signify his willingness to become a missionary. His heart thumped in his chest as he surveyed the other hundred or so young people seated around him. Not one of them raised his hand. Clarence could hardly believe it. God has done so much for each of us, he thought. Surely we should want to do what little we can for Him. The missionary waited for others to respond, but Clarence’s hand remained the only one raised. Finally Clarence could no longer hold in the excitement he was feeling, and he blurted out for all to hear, “I’ve got Christ as my Savior. I’ll be glad to do anything He wants, go anyplace He sends me.”
The missionary beamed at Clarence’s response and then said a prayer before dismissing the group.
As Clarence bicycled home that day, he thought about what he had said. He did want to serve God, and he did not care how difficult it was—he was sure of that. But he did not have many qualifications. He was a good musician and liked working with children, but he had dropped out of high school to work packing tires for Montgomery Ward. Clarence peddled on, thinking about his options, when all of a sudden a thought lit up his mind: Go to Moody Bible Institute!
By the time Clarence reached the family apartment, he was sure that this was the next step God had for him. What he was not sure about was whether he could complete that step. Now that he was nearly eighteen years old, could he really go back to school and study hard enough to pass the courses? Clarence was not at all sure he could, but he knew he had to try his best. So after work the following day, he took the bus to Moody Bible Institute, where he talked with a secretary.
“What course do you want to take?” the secretary asked him.
“Why, the missionary one, of course!” Clarence replied.
The secretary laughed. “You are eager, aren’t you! We don’t have a course specifically for missionaries, but we do have some good classes that would be very helpful for a missionary.”
That was close enough for Clarence. That night he enrolled at the Bible institute in a three-year study program that would start in six weeks, at the beginning of 1919. The next day he handed in his notice at work.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones were delighted when Clarence told them about his next step. In fact, his mother burst into tears. “I’ve been praying for a long time for you to do some more training for the Lord,” she told her older son.
Clarence was even more delighted when he learned that three of his friends had also enrolled at Moody Bible Institute. They were Richard Oliver Jr., Lance Latham, and Howard Ferrin, who had all played with him in the band at Moody Church.
As the first day of class rolled around, Clarence was filled with both excitement and dread—excitement at what lay ahead and dread as to whether or not he could pass his classes. He soon discovered that he did not have to be concerned about passing the courses. Now that he was studying things that interested him, Clarence was soon earning straight A’s. Not only that—he was also a natural leader, and by the time his third year at Moody Bible Institute rolled around, he was elected class president.
Before he knew it, Clarence’s three years at Moody were over, and he graduated in 1921, just after celebrating his twenty-first birthday. Now that he had some formal training, Clarence was ready to take on a new challenge. This came in the form of a tent crusade with a well-known evangelist named Charles Neighbour. Together they headed down through the coal-mining district of West Virginia, pitching a large tent and preaching to the curious crowds that would gather in it each night. Clarence found tremendous satisfaction in playing the trombone and leading the singing at the tent meetings while Charles preached.
When their time in West Virginia was up, the two men headed for home, preaching as they went. Along the way they stopped for the night at the home of the Reverend Adam Welty. Mr. Welty ran a rescue mission for down-and-outs in the small town of Lima, Ohio. Clarence was impressed with the man’s dedication to his mission, but he was even more impressed with his beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter, Katherine.
Clarence’s heart pounded the first time he saw Katherine coming down the stairs, and he could not wait to get to know her better. This proved difficult because Katherine’s mother had died when Katherine was three years old, and Katherine’s father was extremely protective of his daughter. Clarence soon discovered that there was no way he would be allowed to speak to Katherine unchaperoned, and so he resigned himself to talking to her in group situations.
Even so, Clarence managed to find out quite a lot about Katherine and the Welty family. Katherine’s uncle was a United States senator, and Katherine had a sister, Ruth, and two older brothers, Fred, a senior tenor in the Westminster choir, and Roy, a Princeton graduate and lawyer.
The day he and Charles left Lima, Clarence knew he wanted to come back and spend more time with Katherine. But when he told his friends back in Chicago that he was smitten with a sixteen-year-old girl, they teased him mercilessly. “With all the girls here in Chicago, why did you have to fall for a high school student in Lima?”
Clarence could not answer the question. He just knew that there was something special about Katherine. He began to send her letters and elaborately illustrated love poems. She in turn wrote to him about her life. She told Clarence that she had won a typing contest for the western half of Ohio and that she had been offered a scholarship in literature and creative writing at Harvard University, although she had her heart set on becoming a concert pianist. Clarence was concerned that Katherine might go to Harvard and lose interest in their friendship, and he wished he could visit her more often. But he was too busy traveling with Charles to make a trip to Lima.
All of that changed, however, in April 1922, when Clarence received a telegram from his old music master at Moody Church, Richard Oliver Sr. The telegram read, “Paul Rader starting new tabernacle. Will you come and play in brass quartet?”
The thought of working with a man of Paul Rader’s spiritual stature thrilled Clarence, who sent back a return telegram agreeing to take the position. Once he was back in Chicago, Clarence learned the details of why Paul had left Moody Church. The split revolved around Paul’s overarching interest in evangelism. Over the years Paul had clashed with the elders of Moody Church, who felt he was devoting too much of his time and energy to evangelism and not enough to running the church. In the time that Clarence had been out on the road with Charles Neighbour, things had come to a head, and Paul had stepped down from his position of pastor at Moody Church. Paul’s intention had been to start an evangelistic program in New York City, but those plans had fallen through. Instead Paul began running tent meetings on the North Side of Chicago. These meetings had proved to be so popular that Paul decided to stay in Chicago and turn the tent at the corner of Barry, Clark, and Halsted Streets into a permanent structure, which soon became known as the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle.
The Chicago Gospel Tabernacle looked more like a barn than a church. It was an enormous wooden structure that seated five thousand people on hard, straight-back wooden benches. The walls inside were not painted, and the structure had no floor, just sawdust spread on the ground. Several large potbelly stoves were used to heat the place. From the first time he set foot in the tabernacle, Clarence knew he belonged there.
Each night more and more people poured into the building for the evening service, and the atmosphere was electric with anticipation. Not only was Paul Rader a great preacher, but he was also adept at using music to prepare the audience for the message he was going to deliver. Each service started with rousing singing and musical numbers. Clarence’s two friends, Richard Oliver Jr. and Lance Latham, often played duets on twin grand pianos arranged onstage. It was not long before Clarence and the quartet were enthralling the crowd with their playing. Clarence’s brother, Howard, a gifted cornet player and still only a teenager, was also a member of the quartet. He and Clarence often played duets, blending their instruments as they offered up stirring renditions of popular gospel tunes. Their most popular duet was “Christ Alone,” which they first played together at an Easter sunrise service and which was soon being requested almost every night.
