There is no better expert on the late Adrian Rogers than his wife and lifelong sweetheart, Joyce.
There is no better expert on the late Adrian Rogers than his wife and lifelong sweetheart, Joyce.
Through grade school, high school, college and 54
years of marriage, she experienced the highs and lows of life alongside
him and was the sounding board for his deepest thoughts.
She has recorded her unique perspective in “Love
Worth Finding: The Life of Adrian Rogers and His Philosophy of
Preaching,” a biography released by Broadman & Holman Publishers
prior to Rogers’ death Nov. 15 after a battle with cancer.
Joyce Rogers lovingly recounts her husband’s
beginning in the ranks of the ordinary, where in junior high school he
was known as “unruly and belligerent.”
“He had an overdose of courage and the ability to
fight with his fists,” she wrote in the book. “He had gained a
reputation of being one of the toughest kids in school. He would
challenge others to a fight just for an expression of what must have
been an inner turmoil.”
The third child of working-class parents, Rogers
yielded his life to Jesus at age 14 after some neighbors invited his
family to a crusade at a local Baptist church in his hometown of Palm
Beach, Fla. Rogers followed his father down the aisle and made a
profession of faith, and his life was immediately changed.
“Adrian often has said that if it were not for Jesus
and His transforming grace that he would not be a nice person to live
with and may have even ended up in prison,” Joyce wrote.
Rogers was captain of his high school’s championship
football team and received several honors including a scholarship to
play at Stetson University in Florida. Yet during those years, he
sensed God was calling him to preach.
“When I was younger attending Sunday School, I was
asked by the teacher to lead in prayer,” he said in the book. “I felt
so inadequate that I declined to do so. This embarrassed my teacher and
me.
“I was not afraid of much that moved on the football
field, but the thought of public speaking or praying was another
matter,” he continued. “I did not think of myself as having any verbal
gifts at all.”
Joyce was standing by Rogers’ side the night he
stepped forward during a retreat at Ridgecrest, the LifeWay conference
center in North Carolina, to publicly declare that God had called him
to preach the gospel.
“He recalls I squeezed his hand as we walked out of
the meeting that night indicating that I was pleased with his
decision,” she wrote.
After Rogers dropped love notes on her desk in sixth
grade and courted her through high school, Joyce and Adrian were
married in 1951 following their freshman year of college. In the book,
Joyce recounts his first pastorate, at First Baptist Church of
Fellsmere, Fla., which he took at just 19 years of age.
“The Fellsmere church was rustic, to say the least,”
she wrote. “The building had an unpainted concrete floor, unpainted
cement block walls, and no ceiling.
“Rafters cut from rough lumber were overhead,” she
continued. “The building was lighted with bare bulbs dangling by their
cords from the ceiling. The pews were not pews at all, but two
two-by-eight boards connected by an iron bracket – one to sit on and
one to lean back on.
“There was no running water, no baptistery, and no
water fountain,” she noted. “Those who needed a restroom walked across
the street to a neighbor’s house.”
But Rogers pressed on, and at each church he
pastored there was record growth because of his insistence on preaching
the Word of God and lifting up Jesus.
After years of being faithful at smaller churches,
he was pursued by the pastor search committee of Bellevue Baptist
Church in Memphis, Tenn.
Having grown to love the people he was serving at
First Baptist Church in Merritt Island, Fla., Rogers told the
committee, “I’m honored that you would be interested, but I’ve
absolutely no inclination to leave my present pastorate.”
The committee persisted, and what some would call a
divinely appointed misunderstanding led to Rogers succeeding Ramsey
Pollard as pastor of Bellevue in 1972.
The mix-up involved Rogers thinking he was simply
filling the pulpit one Sunday at Bellevue while the search committee
thought he was preaching in view of a call. They had him leave the
auditorium, and the congregation unanimously voted him in as pastor, to
his surprise.
From then until his retirement in 2005, Rogers grew
the membership from 9,000 to more than 29,000 and led in a major
relocation and building project, which Joyce covers in the biography.
Perhaps one of Rogers’ most important moments came
in 1979, at the outset of what now is called the Conservative
Resurgence, when key conservative leaders urged him to be a candidate
for president of the Southern Baptist Convention to help take back the
reins of the SBC from their liberal counterparts. Again, Rogers was
uninterested, believing his obligations at Bellevue needed his utmost
attention.
As Joyce recounted it, Paige Patterson and Jerry
Vines met Rogers at his hotel door in Houston the night before the
election and asked to join him in his room for prayer. Previously in
the book, she had mentioned a decision-making method she and her
husband had developed in which each would ask the other,
“Where are you on a scale of one to ten?”
“By now it was approaching midnight on Monday night
and the election was to be on Tuesday afternoon,” Joyce wrote. “I
joined in as the three men kneeled on the floor and fervently prayed.
“After an extended time of prayer, Dr. Patterson
began to weep,” she continued. “Adrian looked up at me propped up in
bed, and there was a defining moment. I held up ten fingers. With that
Adrian said, ‘I will do it.’”
The next day, Rogers remarkably was elected on the
first ballot and became president of the largest evangelical body in
the world. Apart from the seriousness, Joyce remembered the hilarity of
it all, particularly as they arrived at the airport in Memphis to be
greeted by a lobby filled with cheering Bellevue members.
“Adrian, our two daughters, and I made our way to
the curb where a limousine was waiting to take us home,” she wrote.
“Then we realized there was a police escort to lead us
through the city. This was exciting but made us feel a little
self-conscious.”
“It was almost bewildering to us, but it was not
without humor,” she continued. “When we arrived at home and the
entourage pulled away, we sat with Gayle and Janice in the empty house
and looked at one another. The whirlwind of activity had suddenly
ceased. The four of us had a big laugh.”
Rogers’ first presidency marked the beginning of the
Conservative Resurgence within the SBC, and he would be elected
convention president twice more to become the only man in recent SBC
history to serve three terms. Through it all, Joyce was by his side, in
meetings with United States presidents, in various ministry situations
and on trips throughout the world, which she describes in the book.
She wrote, “I was always proud to be married to this courageous man.”(BP)
(“Love Worth Finding: The Life of Adrian Rogers and
His Philosophy of Preaching” is available at LifeWay Christian Stores
or other Christian bookstores and online at www.lifewaystores.com.)