JUNE VIEWS

“I’VE GOT A SECRET” PART II:

REMEMBERING RAY BELL

by Bill Bray © 2004

          In May, I dedicated this space to honor our Mothers – and even beyond Motherhood – to all the women in my life and ministry on whom this mission so much depends.  I called them my secret source of strength.  We wouldn’t survive a day without them.

Mothers are not just the nurturers of our families, but they are more often than not the very glue that holds us together.  Thank God that we have Mother’s Day to honor them – and we’re becoming increasingly sensitive to the growing contribution women are making in our ministries today – not just on Mother’s Day but year-round.

            Sadly, there is a much smaller appreciation of the critical role men play.  Not that “Fathers” are any less essential than in the past, but we’ve discounted their role to everyone’s loss.  We urgently need a revival of Father’s Day and Fatherhood.

            So it’s very refreshing this month to pause on Father’s Day to honor the men in our lives – especially “real fathers” like Ray Bell.  Last April, Mr. Bell went home to be with the Lord he loved and served.  He defines the essential meaning of fatherhood to me.

            Ray Bell was especially important to the Bray Family Missionaries.  When we moved to Charlottesville from Dallas in 1991 – Ray was one of the first local VIP’s to recognize us and contribute financially to our ministry.  Not that we knew he was a VIP back then – few outside the black community understood what a giant he was.

            Today the city is naming a local bridge after him.  Hundreds attended his funeral.  Celebrities, coaches, leaders, teachers, politicians gathered – each one touched by his remarkable life.  For Ivy and I – it was only then that we realized what an amazing gift Ray Bell had bestowed on us and our struggling little ministry for Christ.

But suddenly it dawned on me.  Through Ray’s life, I began to really understand the power of Fatherhood – courageously risking and selflessly daring to give loving service when there was no hope for return. That is essentially what “fatherhood” is all about – what the Bible calls agape love.

Readers not from Charlottesville need to know a bit more for this to make any sense.  In fact, lots of locals hardly knew Ray Bell or what he did because he never made a show of this lifelong servant leadership.  He just went about all the time humbly searching for people and projects to encourage, support, and lend a helping hand.

He was a father indeed – first, foremost and always – and often he was a father to the fatherless.  He habitually paused to aid the needy, weaker and defenseless.  This he did in such a subtle way that they never felt disfranchised, humiliated, shamed or weakened.

Besides his family, he dedicated his life to church and community.  He was the first African American member of the Charlottesville School Board and was instrumental in the peaceful desegregation of the city schools’ faculty and student body.  He believed in education, entrepreneurship, job placement, thrift, training, reverence, and sobriety – in short, he talked and walked out the missionary formula of “piety, study and action!”

He served on over 25 local and national boards.  He was regularly called upon as an advisor, facilitator, historian, mediator, news source, and a networked – but always in confidence, and always behind the scenes.

I could say much more.  But you get the picture.

For us personally, I still can’t believe that Ray Bell and his son Mark would pause from their busy and important lives to support us – aliens to their community and the larger community as a whole.

Looking back, I know that proves that Ray wasn’t looking on outward appearances. As missionaries with no visible means of support, we appeared at best, to be spare tires that didn’t fit anybody’s wheel!

But Ray Bell was listening to the Holy Spirit all along.  God touched his heart, and Ray opened his heart and wallet to us.  Not once, but many times.  Every time we took a missionary trip, there would always be a check from Ray Bell in mail.  We never had to beg or appeal.

Ray was the spirit of fatherhood incarnate.  He was “a prime mover” on the local scene who reflected that ultimate prime mover, the Lord himself.

Since the sexual revolution took hold in the1970’s, men like Ray don’t have a role in our popular culture.  A day like Father’s Day to celebrate them seems like a joke. We don’t understand the male contribution anymore. Instead of “Father Knows Best” we now mock the new image of men as bungling, irrelevant, deadbeat dads.  Playboys are the media “norm”.

Fatherhood is lost in this age when MTV pop culture has created an entire industry dedicated to celebrating the joys of child rebels – and women’s “service” magazines are reduced to instruction manuals for willful wives.

In fact, other institutions of media and education have surrendered themselves to become schools for perversion.  Even universities have joined the frantic effort to “gender-bend” males in each curriculum.  “Modern” fathers are urged to abandon biblical family duties and surrender authority and responsibility in one venue after another.

And in fact, some men have indeed sadly surrendered their posts in church, family and missions.  In March, for example, I attended a statewide missions convention here in Virginia where all but one of the six speakers were women!  

Thank God for mothers, but no missionary enterprise can succeed with that kind of leadership alone.  Nor can a family, a wife or a child.  In fact even businesses, charities and institutions need full-gendered leadership for strength and balance.

So this month, let’s thank God for Godly fathers – real Bible-believing presbyters who will lend their courage and strength to start and sustain us in the work of God.  The Lord has not called these fathers to lead because they are smarter or better or harder working than mothers.  (That’s the perverted lie behind the gender confusion of our age!)

Instead, God created and equipped fathers to be the fountainheads of life and missions because they are the gender that best represents God’s love in husbanding, initiating, protecting, providing and preserving life and family.

If women are the secret of nurturing missions like ours, then men are the secret sources of lighting the fire.  Father’s Day is our once a year chance to recognize and celebrate our need for this balance.