The entire family were able to get together in June 1965, and Clarence was proud of them all. But one year and one month later, tragedy struck the family. Richard crashed his van while driving in a blinding rainstorm in Panama. He was thrown from the vehicle in the accident and died a day later. Clarence and Katherine rushed to Panama to be with him in his last hours and to help with the funeral. It was a sad moment for both of them. Now three of their children were dead, and three were alive. Still, Clarence did not let the grief overtake him. He had more work to do, and he vowed to plug away as long as he had the strength to do so.
Chapter 17
Continuing on the Uphill Journey
Clarence had been on hand in April 1965 when HCJB completed a huge hydroelectric power plant. The plant was situated at Papallacta, where it took water from the headwaters of the Amazon River and produced 1.8 million watts of power for the radio station. Abe Van Der Puy had told Clarence that the cost of the power plant would be covered in five years by the money saved in diesel fuel to run the generators at Pifo. Soon, however, the engineers at the radio station realized that during drought times not enough water was flowing in the river to enter the penstock and turn the turbine to produce power.
Clarence carefully studied the options to correct the problem and agreed with the board of directors when they recommended that a hydro dam be built to create a reservoir from which the water to drive the turbines could be drawn. This was a mammoth task, involving 250 workers and 110 tons of supplies, mostly bags of cement, which had to be loaded onto mules and carried over a dangerous six-mile trail to the dam site. The building of the dam was finally completed in March 1971, and in the time the dam was being built, over half of the workers involved in the project became Christians. Clarence stood proudly with these workers as the new dam was dedicated.
At that time other changes were taking place. Radio was evolving, and more and more people were tuning in to the latest technology—FM stereo radio. HCJB applied to the government for FM frequencies in Quito and Guayaquil, and these were granted. As a result, HCJB-2 was born. This was an easy-listening station that mixed short gospel segments with classical music and popular songs. The station was an instant hit, and Abe sent Clarence an early review of the station by a newspaper reporter in Guayaquil. The review read in part,
Suddenly, by chance, we found enchanting music and cultured, pleasant voices of a calm and measured kind, with pleasant modulation and proven experience. I am speaking of the new radio station HCJB-2, which begins its broadcast at 12:00 noon and signs off, unfortunately, at 10:00 AM.…
These broadcasts are never interrupted by any kind of commercial advertising. Only once every half-hour there is a short, pithy, as well as agreeable, commentary on peace, human dignity and the virtues which men are forgetting. These never in any way are in the form of a dull sermon. Sometimes they are short, pleasing stories in the form of parables. And thus they introduce Christ to your spirit and “oblige” you to meditate.
They do not proselytize. They mention no specific religion. They only quote short, instructive passages from the Bible in a brief interval between each half-hour of moving, beautiful music. HCJB-2 FM stereo is a great factor in lifting the cultural level of our citizens in general. It has come to fill a real need.
As Clarence read the review, he was very pleased. His mind went back to 1930, when he, Reuben Larson, and John Clark had set out the guidelines for the proposed radio station. The men had declared that the station would always present a positive, hopeful gospel message and that it would stay away from political and denominational issues. It was gratifying to Clarence to know that a new generation of missionary broadcasters had embraced and continued to follow these founding principles.
Radio HCJB continued to face new challenges. One that particularly troubled Clarence was the continual jamming of foreign radio transmissions by the Communist government of the Soviet Union, with its own huge 500,000-watt shortwave transmitter. At a time when the people of the Soviet Union most needed the gospel beamed to them, the message was being stopped.
Clarence thought and prayed about what to do about the situation, and when he felt he had an answer, he spoke up at the World Christian Radio Fellowship board meeting. “Men, are we going to let the Communists drown out the gospel of Jesus Christ?” he chided. “We’ll never win the war with one gun. If they have a 500,000-watt transmitter, what’s to stop us from having one as well? We’ll send over a barrage they can’t ignore.”
No one spoke.
“I’ll head up the fundraising!” Clarence offered. “If God is in this idea, we will prevail.”
And prevail they did. Even though Clarence was seventy-three years old, he attacked the project with as much enthusiasm and vigor as a thirty-three-year-old. He aimed his appeal for the $750,000 needed for the transmitter at supporters in Great Britain. The people rose to the occasion, and the money poured in. In 1975 a team of twelve HCJB engineers was assigned to design, build, and install a 500,000-watt shortwave transmitter. It was an enormous task, and Clarence visited and encouraged the engineers whenever he could.
That same year Clarence went to Washington, D.C., to accept a very special award. The National Religious Broadcasters organization made Clarence Jones the first inductee into the Religious Broadcasting Hall of Fame and gave him the title of Pioneer Missionary Radio Statesman. Also in that same year, the Clarence Jones Lectureship in Christian Communications was established at Wheaton College in Illinois. The awards and accolades provided a time for Clarence to look back with satisfaction and humility: satisfaction at what had been achieved and humility that God had chosen him to lead such a talented team of workers for so many years.
After Clarence was inducted into the Religious Broadcasting Hall of Fame, many people expected him to retire from active Christian service, especially since he and Katherine had bought a small house in Largo, Florida. But Clarence had other plans.
Four weeks after his induction into the hall of fame, Clarence was in Canada, meeting with the leaders of five other missions: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Latin American Mission, Africa Inland Mission, the Oriental Missionary Society, and the Sudan Interior Mission. Clarence saw a great opportunity and suggested that the leaders of the six organizations travel together through Canada, promoting missions and jointly presenting the needs of each of their organizations.
The tour was very successful and was immensely rewarding for Clarence. The idea of different men and women from various mission organizations standing together to promote the needs of their organizations in presenting the gospel reflected his highest hopes for Christian work.
After the tour of Canada, Clarence and Katherine traveled to Nome, Alaska, where they met with Peter Deyneka of the Slavic Gospel Mission. For many years Peter had been broadcasting gospel shows in Russian over HCJB, and now he and Clarence were guest speakers at a mission conference in Nome.
Clarence listened with rapt interest as Peter spoke of some of the Christians he had encountered on his covert trips into the Soviet Union. Peter told of meeting three Soviet army officers who were posted to a base in Siberia. The officers played with their shortwave radio set on the long, frozen nights and eventually came across HCJB’s Russian program. At first they listened skeptically, but soon they were singing and praying along. Three months later they sought out an underground church many miles away and walked to it. When they arrived at the church, they told the congregation, “We have come to know the Lord through the shortwave radio, and now we wish to fellowship with you.”
Peter reported that many Soviet Christians had told him, “We feel God invented radio just for us!”
When Clarence stood up to speak, he started with that thought. “There is a genius of broadcasting that fits Scripture perfectly. When Psalm 19 talks about the heavens declaring the glory of God, ‘Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.’ This is radio that the psalmist is talking about. I believe radio was in the mind of God from the very beginning.”
In 1981 Clarence and Katherine journeyed south to Quito to celebrate the Fiftieth Jubilee of HCJB. It was a glorious moment for them, to be looking back over fifty years of service and catching a glimpse of the bright future. The 500,000-watt transmitter had been installed at Pifo, doubling the station’s transmitting power to one million watts! HCJB now had offices in twenty countries, and in Quito alone there were 250 full-time foreign missionaries and 300 nationals working for the ministry. In Heralding Christ Jesus’ Blessings throughout the world, HCJB broadcast six programs simultaneously, twenty-four hours a day, in fifteen languages.
Everyone at the jubilee wanted to meet Clarence and shake his hand, and sometimes it was difficult for Clarence to get through the crowd to see what he wanted to see. He was particularly interested in touring the well-stocked HCJB bookstore and the Rimmer Hospital, which had just been expanded yet again. He visited the Quinta Corston, and as he did so, the years rolled away, and it seemed like yesterday that they had inaugurated the first broadcast from there.
On the trip to the Fiftieth Jubilee, Clarence had to admit that his eighty-one-year-old body had slowed down a little, but he vowed to continue doing what he could. “I have always been looking up,” he told the assembled crowd. “Even in my darkest days, I have made it my goal, my personal challenge, to climb upward. And I am not through yet. I pray that God will never set me aside on the shelf, that I will never know what it is to be a dry Christian, like a river with nothing but rocks. Old age is about challenges and climbing upward, not going downhill but uphill.”
For the next five years Clarence continued his journey uphill, preaching where he could, writing countless letters to encourage missionaries and friends, praying often for his daughters and sixteen grandchildren, and conducting a local Bible study. But all journeys must end, and Clarence Jones’s extraordinary journey ended on April 29, 1986, when he died quietly in his sleep at home in Largo, Florida.
Fittingly, news of Clarence’s passing was beamed around the world on the radio waves of HCJB. Soon messages of Christian love and sympathy were pouring in to Katherine from such faraway places as the Soviet Union, the Philippines, and Egypt.
In 1927 Clarence Jones had felt God challenge him to set out to reach the ends of the world with Christian radio. Fifty-nine years later, the messages of condolence that flowed in upon news of his death were proof enough that he had stuck unswervingly to that task.
