The Rev. Charles Stanley, an influential Baptist pastor who for greater than 50 years preached a conservative message from his Atlanta megachurch, by way of an intensive community of tv and radio stations, and in lots of books, died on Tuesday at his dwelling in Atlanta. He was 90.
In Touch Ministries, Dr. Stanley’s nonprofit group, introduced his dying however didn’t state a trigger.
As the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. Stanley was generally known as one of many main American preachers of his time, alongside figures just like the Rev. Billy Graham. He was additionally a board member of the Moral Majority, the right-wing spiritual group, and a detailed buddy of its founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
“Evangelicals just loved him,” Barry Hankins, a professor of historical past at Baylor University who, with Thomas Kidd, wrote “Baptists in America” (2015), stated in a cellphone interview. “He was a very winsome preacher. He didn’t exude the hard fighting edge that conservatives sometimes did.”
Dr. Stanley constructed a major nationwide profile by way of his church and his tv ministry, and in 1984 he was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
He introduced staunch beliefs — amongst them that the Bible was infallible and that ladies shouldn’t be ordained — to a unbroken battle over management of the conference between conservatives, who have been in ascent, and moderates.
In his first 12 months as president, Dr. Stanley backed measures throughout the conference to cease church buildings from ordaining girls. By 1984, Christian Today journal reported, the conference had ordained greater than 200 girls.
“The Bible does not forbid women from preaching,” Dr. Stanley stated on the time. “The issue is authority, not service. Role, not work.”
Dr. Stanley was re-elected in 1985 with a document turnout of the conference’s delegates, extending the denomination’s conservative resurgence.
After the vote, Dr. Stanley was requested about his positions towards abortion and in favor of prayer in public faculties. He informed The Associated Press that he took these stands as a “strong Christian citizen and not a right-winger.”
Charles Frazier Stanley Jr. was born on Sept. 25, 1932, within the farming group of Dry Fork, Va. When he was 9 months outdated, his father died of nephritis, an irritation of the kidneys. His mom, Rebecca (Hardy) Stanley, an unskilled laborer, labored for $9 per week at a textile manufacturing facility in Danville, Va.
She additionally launched Charles to the Bible.
“I remember how we would turn to the index in her well-worn, thick black Bible — which was the only book she owned — and looked up subjects together,” Mr. Stanley wrote in his autobiography, “Courageous Faith: My Story From a Life of Obedience” (2016). “Those are times children just don’t forget.”
Dr. Stanley, whose paternal grandfather was a preacher, felt a calling to the ministry at age 14. He graduated from the University of Richmond with a bachelor’s diploma in historical past in 1954 and, two years later, was ordained at a Baptist church in Danville. He later turned a pastor at church buildings in Hendersonville, N.C., Fairborn, Ohio, and Miami and Bartow, Fla., earlier than becoming a member of First Baptist Church of Atlanta in 1969 as affiliate pastor.
He earned a grasp’s diploma in 1968 and a doctorate in theology in 1971 from Luther Rice College & Seminary.
Dr. Stanley’s path to changing into the church’s senior pastor, after the earlier senior pastor stepped down, was rocky. The search committee initially rejected him. One of its members informed The Atlanta Constitution that he was energy hungry. And throughout a heated church assembly, Dr. Stanley was punched within the face by a member of the church board after cautioning him about utilizing a curse phrase.
“I was preaching a lot of things that made some of the church leaders uncomfortable — the Holy Spirit, the coming of the Lord, evangelism,” Dr. Stanley informed The Constitution in 1982, explaining why his acceptance had come slowly. “Secondly, there were a small group of men who’d always made the decisions, and when I would say we’ve got to obey God, that’d disturb them a bit.”
“So,” he added, “I became a thorn in their plans. But I was willing to stay or leave, whatever God wanted.”
He took over as senior pastor in 1971 and started broadcasting a taped 30-minute weekly sermon, “The Chapel Hour,” on two Atlanta TV stations in 1972. Six years later it was picked up on cable by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, tremendously increasing its viewers.
It was renamed “In Touch With Dr. Charles Stanley” in 1982, and it continued after he stepped down as senior pastor of First Baptist in 2020. At his dying, it was carried by 743 stations nationwide and a separate every day radio program was broadcast by 637 stations. His applications additionally had digital and worldwide media distribution.
“He was a solid Bible teacher whose straightforward preaching style appealed to a broad middle class,” Troy Miller, president of National Religious Broadcasters, a Christian media affiliation, stated in a cellphone interview. “He was an early adapter in television, like Dr. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.”
Dr. Stanley wrote quite a few books, together with three New York Times finest sellers, “Surviving in an Angry World: Finding Your Way to Personal Peace” (2010), “Turning the Tide: Real Hope, Real Change” (2011) and “Emotions: Confront the Lies. Conquer With Truth” (2013).
Dr. Stanley confronted a serious problem to his maintain on First Baptist within the Nineties with the deterioration of his marriage to Anna Johnson. The church had not allowed divorced males to function deacons or ministers, and Dr. Stanley had agreed with that coverage.
Tension throughout the church grew when Mrs. Stanley filed for divorce in 1993; she dropped the swimsuit, however refiled it in 1995. Dr. Stanley insisted to his congregation that he wished to reconcile. But Mrs. Stanley stated that their marriage was damaged.
“I am dismayed by my husband’s refusal to accept the critical state of our marriage,” she wrote in a press release printed by The Constitution in 1995. “Instead, he has made repeated announcements from the pulpit that progress was being made toward our reconciliation, when in fact the very opposite was true.”
Some church members requested him to resign. His son and inheritor obvious, Andy Stanley, advised that he learn a letter of resignation to his congregation and allow them to resolve in the event that they wished him to remain.
“Andy says his father didn’t hear anything after the word ‘resign,’” Act Daily News reported in 2012. “All the rumors seemed to be true. His son had joined the church faction trying to get rid of him. His son had betrayed him.”
Andy Stanley quickly left First Baptist, and that 12 months he based North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, which he has constructed into one of many nation’s largest megachurches.
But Dr. Stanley survived. In 2000, after his divorce was finalized, the church agreed to retain him as senior pastor. (His former spouse died in 2014.) When the news was introduced on the church, the congregation rose and applauded, The Constitution reported in a front-page article.
“He is our pastor,” stated Jerry Beal, chairman of the church’s board of administrators, “and he will remain our pastor.”
In addition to his son, Dr. Stanley is survived by his daughter, Becky Stanley Brodersen; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a half sister, Susie Cox.
Dr. Stanley and his son ultimately ended their rift. The youthful pastor informed an Atlanta TV station after his father’s dying that he was a job mannequin not simply as a preacher or a church builder, but additionally as a result of he confirmed “how to get to a finish line with integrity, and to be able to look back and be proud of everything that came before, and unfortunately that’s increasingly rare.”
Source: www.nytimes.com