By Rick Cherok
Bob Vernon could not have blazed trails by uncharted wilderness areas within the model of well-known explorers like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, however there’s little question he was a real pioneer within the rising frontier of Christian tv broadcasting.
Improvements and infrastructures that made tv broadcasting potential had been developed within the late Twenties and Thirties, and the Nationwide Broadcasting Firm (NBC) grew to become the primary firm to make common telecasts in 1939. As early as 1940, the primary spiritual tv broadcasts had been made on native stations when the Roman Catholic Easter Mass of Fulton J. Sheen and the Easter sermon of Dr. Henry McCrea Cavert of the Federal Council of Church buildings of Christ in America had been broadcast in New York.
Not till 1949, nevertheless, did Fundamentalist preacher Percy Crawford create the primary spiritual tv program. Inside the subsequent few years, the so-called “televangelism” idea developed as Christian tv applications had been fashioned by Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen (1951) and Pentecostal preachers Rex Humbard (1952) and Oral Roberts (1954).
And it was in 1954, at station KOAM close to Pittsburg, Kan., that Bob Vernon and his brothers—B.J., Invoice, and Don—started their first tv broadcasts because the Vernon Brothers.
Bob Vernon, who’s now 96 and dwelling in Los Angeles, remembers driving to the station and discussing the opportunity of a non secular broadcast with the station proprietor and program director, who invited him to sing that night on a dwell program. For the subsequent two years, the Vernon Brothers broadcast their half-hour tv program over the KOAM airwaves every Friday night.
The Vernon brothers grew up in Lebanon, Mo., the place they had been raised in a Christian household and graduated from Lebanon Excessive Faculty. But, it was whereas he was serving on a naval submarine in World Battle II, Bob remembers, that he grew to become extra severe than ever about his relationship with Jesus Christ. Consequently, Bob and his brothers, B.J. and Invoice, enrolled at Ozark Bible School in 1947 to organize themselves for lives of Christian ministry.
After graduating, because the brothers married, began households, and commenced ministries, Bob was enamored with the probabilities of how the rising expertise of tv could be used to profit the church. Bob’s son, Gregg Vernon explains that his father appeared “pushed to make use of this new medium” to speak the gospel.
Finally, Bob went to Hollywood, watched the filming of I Love Lucy, and commenced exploring the probabilities of ministry by tv.
In 1955, Bob participated within the Radio and Tv Convention on the campus of Cincinnati Bible Seminary; the convention was sponsored by the Nationwide Affiliation of Christian Broadcasters and the Christian Radio Mission. In his handle to the convention, Bob described tv as a “mission discipline” through which the evangelist is invited into an individual’s residence as an honored visitor. He defined,
[Television] is revolutionizing political campaigns and is affecting the whole social and financial construction of America and the world. Can we not see that in faith, as nicely, a brand new period of unparalleled success may very well be ushered in, because the restoration of New Testomony Christianity is worried!
The next 12 months, Bob and his brothers fashioned the Christian Tv Mission, which “was known as into existence for the particular goal of telecasting the plea of the Restoration Motion.”
Whereas most Christian tv programming on the time consisted of little greater than the printed of a Sunday service or the filming of a preacher behind a pulpit, Bob and his brothers conceived of a unique strategy to spiritual telecasting. Utilizing the idea of their Missouri residence because the setting, they developed a program known as Homestead USA. Filmed at Common Studios in Hollywood with skilled producers, administrators, editors, and music, they mixed drama with their Christian message.
“These applications,” Gregg Vernon noticed, “had been gentle years past the rest being achieved” in spiritual broadcasting they usually had been being broadcast weekly by over 200 stations in america and internationally.
Maybe the capstone challenge of Bob’s tv profession was a nationally televised documentary entitled Again to Jerusalem.
In his memoir, As I Go, Bob wrote that he had lengthy “held a really deep need for a documentary film made in coloration to be produced on the historical past of the Church, main as much as the Restoration Motion.”
By 1963, he and a powerful array of students had been collaborating on a script and Bob started the method of filming in 1964.
“There was a burning ardour in my coronary heart,” Bob explains, “for this film to be filmed within the Holy Land” so individuals might truly “see the place Jesus walked.” And so, Bob put collectively an expert filming crew and made his journey to the Holy Land to set his long-cherished dream in movement.
What emerged from Bob’s efforts was a one-and-a-half-hour movie—in coloration—that consisted of an exposé on the church’s historical past and a proof of biblical Christianity. With dramatic Holy Land imagery and Bob’s narration, Again to Jerusalem provided an outline of the start and early progress of the church, adopted by a drift from its early practices and rules throughout the Center Ages.
As well as, the struggles of Martin Luther and others to reform the church had been described, resulting in the Restoration Motion’s plea for a return to the rules of New Testomony Christianity. The latter half of the movie consists of an interview through which Bob discusses the rules of biblical Christianity and what it means to be a nondenominational Christian.
On Sunday night, Aug. 15, 1965, Again to Jerusalem was given a prime-time airing throughout america on CBS tv. Bob and his associates acquired rave opinions from many individuals who watched this program.
Pamela Ilott, director of all CBS spiritual telecasting at the moment, wrote,
This movie is the best of its nature that I’ve ever screened. It presents in such good style what the world wants, and is the reply, ecumenically talking, to what fashionable religionists are looking out. Many who rejected creedal authoritarianism would welcome any such message, if solely they knew about it. You owe it to yourselves and to the world to get the widest potential publicity of this manufacturing.
At this time, greater than 50 years because the authentic telecast of Again to Jerusalem, Bob Vernon, with the help of his son Gregg, is trying to get this movie professionally restored and digitized in order that it could be a ministry software for a complete new technology that’s nonetheless trying to find what it means to be merely a New Testomony Christian.
Richard J. Cherok, PhD, serves as professor of historical past at Ozark Christian School, Joplin, Mo., and as govt director of Celtic Christian Mission.
THE VERNON FAMILY: (BACK ROW) BOB, BILL, DALLAS JR., AND BJ. (SEATED) J.P., DALLAS SR., BEULAH, WARD, AND DON (CENTER FRONT).
Adblock check (Why?)