Life of Jack Evans Sr., influential preacher, crusade speaker and Christian college president, celebrated.
By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle
TERRELL, Texas — Jack Evans Jr. rose from his seat on the front row of the Graham-Kennedy-Farmer Auditorium at Southwestern Christian College.
Dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and tie, the oldest son of Jack Evans Sr. — one of the most influential African American preachers in the history of modern-day Churches of Christ — approached his father’s coffin.
Evans Jr. picked up the open Bible that rested atop the closed casket.
His dad’s Bible.
Then the brokenhearted progeny stepped on stage to eulogize his 81-year-old father, who served for nearly 50 years as president of the only historically black higher education institution associated with Churches of Christ.
“Y’all knew him as the president and the preacher and the crusade speaker,” Evans Jr. told a capacity crowd of 1,500 Christians who filled the auditorium 30 miles east of Dallas. “But to us, he was just Daddy, and we’re going to miss him tremendously.”
Evans Sr. was a Houston native who moved to Nashville, Tenn., in the 1950s and became one of the famous black traveling evangelist Marshall Keeble’s “boy preachers.”
He died Nov. 1 after battling dementia.
This story appears in the December print edition of The Christian Chronicle.
The Ross News 