When I started this Celebration Rock blog, I meant to simply mark the 40th anniversary of the debut of that program. I started writing these reflections in 2008 and never imagined I would find something to write about for a few months, much less for a couple of years. Yet, ideas kept occurring, and never having had an un-noted thought, I kept adding biographical reflections about the media ministry that began in earnest in February, 1968, but which probably had its genesis in college radio six years earlier.
My own radio ministry was certainly fed by pioneers in the medium of radio itself, as I’ve noted previously by telling some of the story of Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church and its 1924 entrance into radio broadcasting. With a license granted by what was called the Federal Radio commission, the church put WBBL on the air, in order to broadcast a well-known evangelist who was to speak at the church. While not the first religious broadcast, it was without a doubt an early effort, and the church has been on the air since, with current services broadcast over a commercial Richmond station.
So I began my first attempts at religious broadcasting at WBBL. I confined my first efforts to a youth-oriented rock show with Christian commentary and interviews. The whole effort was considered creative, progressive, even (dare I say it?) avant-garde.
But nationally, there were bigger fish to fry, er, fish to reel in. By the early 1970s and well into the 1980s something called “The Electronic Church” emerged. Instead of broadcasting services from churches, evangelists created their own TV programs especially for the medium. While Billy Graham persisted in holding his crusades in large venues with TV audiences looking in, the new breed built studios, their own stations, then their own networks, thanks to cable and satellite delivery systems.
One fascinating example of this electronic evangelism effort was Oral Roberts. As a child growing up with the first television set in the neighborhood in the early 1950s, I remember seeing Oral Roberts on the black and white sawdust trail. He was a young Pentecostal preacher and faith healer who let movie cameras into his revival tent services so his message could find its way to flickering TV screens across the nation. It was perhaps 25 years later that Roberts had built (using his viewers’ money) the university in Tulsa that bears his name. On campus he had designed a full television production center so that, instead of pitching a primitive tent in cities and villages throughout the world, he needed only to head across the world’s fair style campus and into his own studio.
And instead of holding a revival service, he emceed a music-filled variety show, complete with choreography (Pentecostals have always “danced in the Spirit”) and contemporary music. Though always, I suppose, a “showman,” his spoken messages, healing “miracles,” and appeals for money took center stage like a glossy form of vaudeville.
It occurs to me that my own radio show was, in a far more modest way, a precursor to some of the trappings of the “electronic church.” Eschewing (always wanted to use that word) hymns, sermons, and heady discussions of theological and social issues, I offered my listeners a Top 40 radio experience musically, while I played deejay. Now I must hasten to note the differences between my modest entertainment format and the more widespread and well-financed glitz of the electronic evangelists. First, I never asked listeners for money. Second, my program was produced under the auspices of a major Protestant denomination (and therefore I didn’t need to pass the plate among listeners). Third, my presentation came from a liberal heart/mind/soul.
As a footnote to this entry, I recall my own modest participation in the ground floor of the electronic church locally, in Richmond, Virginia. During the summer of 1967, I was employed as an intern at Richmond’s NBC affiliate. My job description included running camera on local news and other Channel 12 productions. On Saturday afternoons, that included carrying very heavy TV cameras and pedestals, and lugging huge cables and sundry TV production supplies, to a car dealership just down the road from the station. There we would set up for a live broadcast of car commercials during the breaks of an old movie being run back at the station. When that two-hour slot was over, we packed all the equipment back in a truck and drove several miles to a large Baptist church near downtown Richmond.
We carried those massive cameras up the stairs of the church into balcony and upper transept areas to prepare for the church’s broadcast of its Sunday morning service the next day. I would be there the next morning to run camera on Pastor Vander Warner, Jr., capturing his sermon, the congregation’s hymns, and what little liturgy the Baptists had in their worship. Warner didn’t treat the television audience as mere onlookers or bystanders. He knew how to play to his viewing audience, frequently looking directly up into my camera’s zoom lens to make eye contact with worshipers at home. At one point, during the offering, he’d be sitting in his chair, hidden from the church’s congregation by the good-sized pulpit, and he would quietly speak directly to the home viewers.
His was not the first local worship service to be telecast, of course. Ministers had caught that vision many years before. And for many years after, when sanctuary, camera, and satellite converged in an electronic trinity of evangelistic entertainment, there was big money to be made in the business of saving souls. From Elmer Gantry to Pat Robertson… have they got a deal for YOU!
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