09/12/2025
Harold Bell Wright (HBW) on how the job of being a preacher for ten years found him, as told in Chapter XI of “To My Sons:”
Those poor spiritually hungry backwoods people had come to that meeting to be fed. The man who had invited them held in his hand the Book which contained the greatest spiritual food the world has ever known. Those people were dependent upon him. They were waiting, with breathless interest, for his message. And the preacher himself was incapable even of so much as READING the words of Jesus. If this one who proposed to present to them the teaching of Jesus could not distinguish between “savor” and “Saviour,” what chance had they of receiving from his lips the truths carried in the Master’s own words?
The preacher began his sermon. “Now, brethren and sisters, yo-all air the salt of this hyer yearth and yo-all has done crucified yo’ Saviour.”
For two hours that representative of the Lord spoke with authority which I alone of all of hearers could question. He thundered at them the most horrible conglomeration imaginable of misquotations, with confused, involved, and impossible interpretations of the simple utterances of Jesus. His weird and terrible doctrines of hellfire and damnation, starry crowns and golden streets, blood and sacrifice, were revolting. To me, it was profane. I burned with shame that in a Christian country such things could be; and that, too, in the name of Jesus whose simple eternal truths meant so much to me.
As I walked home that night through the moonlit woods I pondered over what I had seen and heard. I said to myself: “You have practically no school training; you know very little of anything, and nothing at all of theology, but you can at least READ what Jesus said. Might it not be possible for you to do something for these people?”
Thanksgiving was to be observed in the White Oak district with an all-day meeting at a schoolhouse not far from my uncle’s [Uncle Bill’s] home. The neighbors would bring baskets of food and there would be a community Thanksgiving dinner. A preacher was coming to hold services.
At the last minute we learned that, for some reason, the preacher could not come.
A long, lean hill-billy approached me. “You got edication, mister. Why cain’t you preach for we-uns?”
I answered impulsively, “I reckon I can.”
And that, my sons, although I did not at the time know it, was the exact moment when I entered the ministry. The job had found me….
