Bob Jones Sr.

==Evangelistic career==
[[Image:Joneses.jpg|thumb|left| Bob Jones and his bride, Mary Gaston Stollenwerck Jones, June 1908]]Jones's family was devoutly Christian—his mother a [[Primitive Baptist]] and his father an "immersed" [[Methodism|Methodist]]. The family attended a nearby Methodist church where Bob Jones was converted at age 11. But as a portent of Jones's later [[Non-denominational Christianity|non-denominationalism]], he too was baptized by immersion before joining the Methodists.
   
At age 12, Jones was made Sunday School superintendent, and he held his first revival meeting at his home church—seeing sixty conversions in a single week. At thirteen, he built a "brush arbor" shelter and organized his own congregation of 54 members. By age 15, Jones was a licensed circuit preacher for the Alabama [[Methodist]] [[Annual conferences within Methodism|Conference]]. A year later, he was called to the Headland Circuit of five churches, including the one he had started, and he was earning $25 a month (worth ${{formatnum:{{Inflation|US|25|1898}}}} today) for his labors. Jones later wondered that "the devil did not trap me....I was pulled here and there and from house to house. People flocked to hear me preach. The buildings could not hold the crowds; people even stood outside and stuck their heads in the windows to listen. It's a wonder it did not spoil me."<ref>Turner, 5-6</ref>

American evangelistic meetings received more newspaper publicity at the turn of the twentieth century than before or since and were often boosted by the town fathers out of civic pride. Bob Jones meetings were frequently front-page news for weeks in the cities where he held meetings. By the 1920s, Jones was probably the best-known evangelist in the United States except for [[Billy Sunday]]. His campaign results were remarkable even for the era. For instance, in a seven-week campaign in [[Zanesville, Ohio]] (1917), a town of 22,000, there were 3,384 converts, of whom 2,200 joined churches on Easter Sunday. In 1921, [[Muskingum College]], a Presbyterian school, became the first of several institutions to confer honorary doctorates on Jones.<ref>Johnson, 128</ref>

By the time he was 40, Jones had preached to more than fifteen million people face-to-face and without amplification, and he was credited with tens of thousands of conversions.  (Unlike [[Billy Sunday]], Jones was reluctant to keep tabulated records of his results.) Crowds might be as large as 15,000 at a time, virtually necessitating the sustained volume, hyperbolic language, and extravagant gestures that became stereotypical characteristics of period evangelists. (In Zanesville, a reporter noted that Jones "pounded the altar so hard he broke it.")<ref>Quoted in Johnson, 95. "The custodian replaced the broken top with a thicker board and a pad."</ref>