Core Values and Lee's Heritage
by J. Matthew Melton, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication Dean, College of Arts & Sciences
“A Few Months Training Would be of Great Value”
When the sun rose on New Year’s Day 1918, it dawned on a bitterly cold, snow-covered landscape in southeast Tennessee. Local papers urged residents to shovel the snow off their sidewalks to prevent ice hazards. A serious national coal shortage forced people to scramble for fuel to heat their homes during the worst winter in over a century. The Great War in Europe, where 600 men from Bradley County were serving, had become the deadliest war in human history and lay anxiously on everyone’s minds. The Chattanooga News front-page featured a photo of German submariners surrendering to an American destroyer on the high seas. The attitude of the whole nation was one of anxious hope and prayer that the devastating conflict would end soon.
Despite the fact that all the schools in the area announced closures for the rest of week due to the bone-chilling weather, one school in Cleveland, Tennessee decided the icy first of the year was the ideal day to open its doors. Accordingly, that morning, seven fresh, college-age students bundled up against the frosty air and climbed the stairs to a rustic second-floor meeting room in the Church of God Publishing House. At 9:30 a.m., Nora Chambers, a proofreader in the Publishing House, officially opened the very first class of a brand-new Bible Training School. The superintendent, A.J. Tomlinson, Editor-in Chief of the Publishing House and General Overseer of the Church of God, greeted the students, said a few words, then retreated to the offices below, leaving Chambers in charge. Before the end of the week, five more students would trickle in, swelling the number of that first class to twelve.
The desperate need for a school “for the training of young men and young women for efficient service on the field” had been stressed for several years in the General Assembly meetings of the young Pentecostal denomination, the “Church of God.” Unfortunately, while the spirit was willing, the essential elements—funding, building space, students, teachers, but most of all, funding—had been missing. These finally came together late in 1917 after repeated and passionate urging from several denominational leaders, most notably Overseer A.J. Tomlinson and Elder F.J. Lee. For the members of the rapidly growing spiritual movement, education was at a premium. Many were from poor or working-class families in and around the Appalachian hills of Tennessee, North Carolina and north Georgia. And though the church had spread into the towns northwards and southwards across state lines, the times were such that hard- working people focused most of their time and energy on feeding their families. A whopping third of household income when to feeding the family in 1917 (twice the current ratio), and only 6% of the general population had completed high school. But workaday people in the church were emerging as leaders, evangelists, missionaries, pastors, and Sunday school teachers. They felt an acute need for more education to acquaint them with the skills necessary to share the truth effectively. “A few months training would be of great value,” Tomlinson declared in the 1917 General Assembly.
“I finally consented when all my suggestions met opposition.”
In 1918, Nora Chambers had attained a higher level of education than the vast majority of her peers. She had taken and taught classes at Holmes Bible School in Altamont, SC, so she not only had college-level training, she possessed modest teaching credentials. Those credentials were only a small part of the story that brought her to Cleveland, TN.
Originally from Illinois, she relocated to South Carolina in 1910, in her mid-twenties, with her husband Fred, at Holmes Bible School. The young couple, while studying and teaching, met a new evangelist, Ed Boehmer, overflowing with enthusiasm from the Azusa Street revivals in California. He had just married a local girl named Millie, and the two of them wanted to preach the holiness gospel to the people in the beautiful Smoky Mountains nearby. The Chambers agreed to help during their spring break vacation in 1911. Little did they know that this “vacation” would last for two incredibly difficult years.
Today, Southern Appalachia is full of gorgeous state and national parks, camp grounds, popular hiking trails, charming resorts, vacation homes and big utility companies. Lee University faculty, staff and students spend a lot of spare time out in nature there. It was a very different world in the early twentieth century. There were few navigable roads, and hardly anyone owned a motor vehicle or even a telephone. Travel over unpaved tracks was either by mule and wagon or simply on foot. The scattered families tended to be large and lived mostly on farms carved out of the hills with back-breaking effort. Many cooked up their own “spirits” at improvised stills with little fear of arrest. Small towns were sprinkled here and there and these became hubs of communication and trade for the surrounding countryside. Much of the populace went to church, and their little weathered chapels—Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian—dotted the landscape. They were sparsely educated, less from choice than from the scarce availability of accessible schools. As a result, some were literate enough to handle home economics numbers, but most considered the work of survival to be more important than education. As a group, they were fiercely independent, set in their ways, deeply loyal to family, and generally suspicious of outsiders.
When the Boehmers and the Chambers ventured into these highlands, the region was undergoing massive change. Big mining and logging enterprises were laying railroads up into the hills to dig for copper, coal and iron and to build massive sawmills. Many men left their farms to sign on as wage laborers. The young evangelists arrived in the midst of serious upheaval, with thousands of new people moving into the region, many of them immigrants. The couples preached wherever they could, sometimes in churches, sometimes in the open air, sometimes in lonely spots with only oak and hickory trees for cover. Somehow, without the aid of advertising or marketing, crowds gathered to hear them, bringing their families, some traveling great distances. Many were converted, but others didn’t like what they were hearing, especially the calls for life-style change and “holy living.” These came to hate these “outsiders” with their radical notions. One local newspaper editor even called for the evangelists to be tarred and feathered and driven out before they caused too much trouble.
It’s hard for us today to imagine the hardships these dedicated young people suddenly faced. We like to think we are civilized enough to be tolerant of other points of view. But in the mountains of Southern Appalachia in the early 1900s, tolerance wasn’t in fashion. For the next two years, 1911-12, while the four attempted to make a positive impact on the mountain folk, they were hounded day after day, week after week, by angry detractors who demanded they stop all this preaching, singing, and loud praying and leave well enough alone. Time after time, a church or barn or other meeting place was burned to the ground the night after a service. In one town, the evangelists thought they would outsmart the vandals, so they put up a sheet- metal structure, thinking that it would survive, but a rambunctious group came late at night, stacked up all the wooden benches, burned them, and then tore the sheet metal down! Another mob torched a cabin where the evangelists were staying, physically restraining the preachers while all their meager belongings burned in the fire. At another cabin, rocks were hurled, shattering all the windows.
One terrible night, an unruly mob came hunting for them. Fred Chambers: “Six masked men came on to the log cabin where we were living. They fired three shots when they arrived at the front door, broke in and called for Brother Boehmer. I told them he was not at home. They searched the house for him and were too much enraged to go away without doing something. Two men grabbed hold of my arms, one on either side, and led me out to a mule. They placed me on the animal and took me about a hundred yards from the house. They told me they had fully decided to stamp out holiness in that area. They had two or three large hickory sticks with which they gave me a severe lashing. They would hold me, one by each arm, and the third fellow would do the beating, while the rest stood and looked on.”
While Fred was being savagely beaten, his wife Nora ran through the darkness to warn the Boehmers, who were staying at another cabin that night. She urged them to run and hide as the mob had said they planned to kill Ed. Ed did run, but he ran toward danger to try to stop the beating of his friend. By the time he arrived, the mob had gone, leaving Fred on the ground, thankfully still alive. After tending to Fred’s wounds, the preachers moved forward with a revival meeting the next night, bruises and all.
An indication of how they felt about their difficulties comes from Nora Chambers, who declared that “God was dearest to me when I spent two years of persecution in the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia.” Convinced they were doing the right thing, they persisted in trudging along remote forest paths, sometimes 25 miles in a single day, singing as they went. Many days they had no money or supplies. Sometimes they ate nothing but the walnuts they picked up off the ground. Other times they went hungry. When they could, the men found work chopping wood for seven and a half cents an hour, “which,” Fred said with remarkable economy of expression, “supplied our needs.” It was about one tenth of a living wage.
The church eventually brought the two couples off the mountain, down into the valley, to Cleveland, Tennessee, a growing railway town of 5,500 or so people. Nora’s skills were in great demand right away. One of the most urgent endeavors of the denomination was to spread the good news through the printed page. At considerable expense for the time, the church had established a printing operation on the edge of town in a two-story building with an incongruous storefront façade, the Publishing House. The building served as printing press, publication offices, denominational headquarters and meeting space for the elders of the Church of God. The proximity to the railway across the nearby creek was no accident. It provided easy access to communities to the north and south.
Here Nora became a proofreader for the growing list of journals, leaflets and Sunday School materials for which A.J. Tomlinson served as editor. In those days, material that was hand written or typewritten had to be laboriously “typeset” – each letter of each word, each space between words, and each punctuation mark on tiny lead blocks had to be arranged by hand in a metal tray, tightened firmly into place with screws, sponged with ink and then pressed to paper to create a “proof” copy. Someone had to go over these “proofs” very carefully to make sure the typesetting was accurate. The “proofreader” marked the copy and made notations in the margins for corrections. Once reviewed and adjusted, the metal page went to the “press” for the actual print run. Reading and correcting countless pages was Nora Chambers’ task in the very active print shop. She did this demanding, painstaking work for many years. But her role shifted suddenly one day.
In late 1917, after the General Assembly of the Church of God had finally declared its intention to move forward with the launch of a Bible Training School, A.J. Tomlinson approached Nora in the offices of the Publishing House. He wanted to inform her about a decision regarding the faculty for the new school.
“Sister Chambers, you have been selected to teach the Bible Training School, and we want you to begin January 1,” he said.
Nora was dumbfounded, not about the start-date, but about the selection of teacher. “Shouldn’t a man be chosen for that position?” she asked.
Tomlinson asked her to suggest one. Nora offered up several options, but one by one, Tomlinson shook his head and said that, for various reasons, none of them would work.
Nora Chambers later recalled, “I finally consented when all my suggestions met opposition.”
The assembly had declared that the Bible should be the primary textbook, as it was the Bible these students were intended to teach and preach, but any subject matter that might shed light on the scriptures and make ministry more effective should also be included. Chambers added Hurlbut’s Teacher-Training Lessons for the Sunday School, a compact volume that had been around since the late 1800s and would remain a staple for decades to come. Finely printed, tautly organized and impressively packed, Jesse Hurlbut’s elegant text supplied outlines for teaching the Old and New Testaments, complete with historical, linguistic, and geographical background material. The book also provided practical instruction on teaching different age groups, as well as a list of qualifications for a good teacher, including the following thought: “The teacher’s work has relation to living souls, and therefore he must be a friend. No mere intellectual machine can teach living hearts. To influence souls there must be a soul. For not by knowledge, nor by gifts of expression, but by the personal contact of heart with heart are scholars led upward to the best in thought and life.” By all accounts, Nora Chambers took this particular advice to heart, and former students remembered her as a person who cared about them deeply, comforting them when they cried, encouraging them when they were down and cheering them on toward successful completion of their schooling.
Supplementing the Bible and Hurlbut’s was coursework in grammar, spelling, music and geography. Tuition was a dollar a week, compared to five dollars at many other institutions of the day. Of the original 12 students, several, like Nora Chambers, worked in the Publishing House, but only six were able to complete that first term. Of those, only two would end up finishing the full course of study.
From such small beginnings, an institution was born.
Shortly after the school itself was opened, BTS learning opportunities were expanded to include a series of correspondence courses. Understanding how difficult it might be for people to leave their homes and workplaces, teaching and learning by distance, through the mail, turned out to be a huge success, with 788 students enrolling in the first year. Much of the work of writing the curricular materials, mailing them out, receiving and sorting student work, grading these materials, and mailing them out again fell to Nora Chambers, who later said there was no work she enjoyed quite so much. She was a one-woman educational enterprise!
Chambers worked for four years as the Bible Training School’s primary teacher and program developer. In time, both she and A.J. Tomlinson gave up their positions with the school to focus on church publications once again. But that wasn’t it for Nora. She went on to run an orphanage. She became one of the primary recorders and reporters of General Assembly proceedings; she composed Sunday School curriculum for the denomination; and, when she wasn’t working on these demanding projects, she was volunteering for ministry at her local church in Cleveland, TN. E. L. Simmons, president of BTS in 1948, noted, “Nora L. Chambers, a very remarkable woman evangelist of Illinois ... was a very pious, holiness woman, with aptitude and initiative, coupled with a vision of greater things, which, though she possibly knew it not, was to be fulfilled within her generation.”
Feeling ill in 1953, by then almost 70 years of age, Nora traveled to Phoenix, Arizona in the hopes of avoiding another cold winter in Cleveland. She died there, having left an unforgettable mark on the hearts, minds and lives of a great many people who would carry her courageous and industrious spirit forward to later generations. In her lifetime, the institution would name a women’s dormitory in her honor.
“As strange as it may seem, this institution never had a name.”
The history of the institution after Nora Chambers and those small beginnings in a borrowed room has been full of ups and downs. The Bible Training School evolved and grew for the next thirty years, adding and adjusting programs, including a high school and a two-year junior college with several degrees offered. The double-commitment to high-school completion and a jumpstart on college placed the BTS in rare educational company at the time. For a decade, 1938-1947, the school relocated to Sevierville, TN, growing to as many as 700 residential students. At the graduation ceremonies in the spring of 1947, school officials made a historic announcement: “One of the most successful terms of Bible Training School and College at Sevierville Tennessee, has just closed, and the management of the School is now preparing to move to our newly purchased property, which was formerly the Bob Jones College, in Cleveland, Tennessee.” This news, coupled with accreditation by the University of Tennessee, was greeted with delighted applause.
In addition to the big move back to Cleveland, the school was to get a new name. The recently appointed Academic Dean and Vice President, Earl M. Tapley, who was himself a graduate of BTS, suggested a name to several key figures in the Church, thinking that the move back to Cleveland was a good time to make such a change. On the encouragement of others, he brought his suggestion to the Board of Directors, who unanimously approved of his idea, and President E.L Simmons declared shortly thereafter: “As strange as it may seem, this institution never had a name. It seemed almost a shame, with all of its other acquirements, to go farther on such a march of progress and to keep traveling without a name. The Board of Directors decided that the Bible Training School and College must have a name. And, without a change of purpose or without deviating from its divine prerogative, the School was named LEE COLLEGE.” The General Overseer and other denominational leaders also gave their approval.
That June, the Cleveland Daily Banner added this report, “The board of directors ... gave the following reason for having named the institution Lee College: ‘The late Rev. F. J. Lee, a former Clevelander, served the Church as General Overseer for many years, having died in office. He was one of the most respected men our movement has ever produced; there was never a mark against his record and for many years there has been somewhat of a reverence among our people for his name and meekness. Furthermore, he was once head of the institution.’” E. L. Simmons added, “Reverend F. J. Lee was a very pious and holy man. He was very strong in matters pertaining to government and discipline, and yet was loved by all who knew him.”
“Telegraphing to Heaven”
Flavius Josephus Lee was 33 years old when he joined the Church of God in 1908. He had been the choir director at First Baptist Church in Cleveland, TN, but he was drawn to the Pentecostal tent meetings that were taking place near downtown on Central Avenue. At one such meeting, he was so overcome by a feeling of ecstasy that he nearly passed out in the aisle on his way to the altar. He lingered in a state of euphoria until the wee hours of the morning. Alarmed family members couldn’t get him to move, so they summoned a doctor, who examined him, only to pronounce that it was “about the best case of religion I ever saw.”
Like many other members of the growing church movement, Flavius Lee was a working-class individual. He had grown up on a farm, worked with his father making furniture, then got a job as an artisan who crafted decorative patterns for the products of Hardwick Stove Company, manufacturers of cast-iron stoves, kettles, skillets and other iron wares in Cleveland.
After joining the denomination, Lee quickly became an important figure in the operations of the church. He left his job and stepped abruptly into the role of pastor. Eye-witnesses agree that Lee was articulate and well-spoken, with a gift for detail and organization. By 1910, “Flavius J. Lee” was listed on the masthead as associate editor of the very first issue of the denomination’s weekly newsletter, The Evening Light and Church of God Evangel (he would refer to this in his diary as “the paper.”) The following year, he was named to the “board of education” whose task was to lay the groundwork for a Bible training school. Over the next seven years, while he labored in ministry, Lee persistently urged the formation of such a school.
In 1917, Flavius was appointed as one of the first official “elders” of the denomination. For the next four years, he served in state administrative posts for the Church of God. According to his wife Eva, Flavius was a peacemaker who helped resolve conflicts in many churches. When the denomination decided in 1921 that it needed an organizing constitution to govern its affairs and assemblies, Lee was selected to help draft the documents. The following year, he was named superintendent of the new Bible Training School, replacing A.J. Tomlinson. By 1923, the denomination had fallen into serious financial difficulties, sparking accusations that threatened to tear it apart. Lee was asked to be General Overseer in the hopes that he could do for the denomination what he had done in other difficult cases by brokering peace. Though the organization did rupture, Lee succeeded in holding things together, repairing relational bridges, soothing angry voices, upholding the integrity of the ministry, and establishing high levels of accountability to guard against potential missteps.
Charles W. Conn, Lee College president (1970-82) and author of the definitive history of the Church of God, mentioned the high regard in which Flavius J. Lee was held: “Lee was popularly regarded as ‘the best man in town,’ a Christian whose character was impeccable, a musician of better-than-average ability, possessed of a logical mind, and a model of meekness and integrity.” Lee’s daily ledgers, correspondence, and sermons paint a picture of a visionary who was also supremely practical, fair-minded, and humane. Flavius treasured mundane aspects of life, listing the following activities in his ledgers with equal enthusiasm: Preaching on healing or on “the chart” (a long illustrated scroll he created on the Apocalypse); visiting churches by car or train; working on “the paper;” visiting the sick and shut-ins to pray for them (something very important to him personally); hitching up the mule to plow the garden; planting string beans and squash; practicing the saxophone; helping his wife with the laundry (a major undertaking in those days); enjoying a good bean supper; repairing his 1916 Model T Ford.
The Ford was anything but a luxury judging by how much sweat he expended to keep it running, but he noted proudly toward the end of 1919 that he had saved $50 in train fare (about $750 today). His sermons, in a time when powerful, high-energy pulpit delivery was highly prized, were typically calm expositions with a lot of Scripture reading, literary quotations and practical, every-day illustrations. One example, penciled into his ledger in his relaxed handwriting: “There is no use telegraphing to heaven for God to send a cargo of blessing unless you are at the wharf to unload.”
His letters as General Overseer were direct and brief, focusing on facts and never using the grandiose wordiness so common among his contemporaries. Much of his official correspondence dealt frankly with ongoing controversies in the Church, but he relied on documented evidence to support his points and never stooped to personal attacks. He preferred the accountability of open meetings and condemned decisions made in secret. He demonstrated an ongoing and acute interest in the charitable undertakings of the Church, especially its orphanages.
Flavius J. Lee worked tirelessly, often through illness, traveling by train, car or boat to visit regional meetings and remote churches across the country and overseas, ever the calm peacemaker. In August of 1928, shortly after having preached in the stifling summer heat of Texas, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. He continued to work until he was physically unable. Those who visited him during his illness reported his quiet lack of complaint. The General Assembly met that October. Well aware that he was on his deathbed, they re-elected him to the office of General Overseer. Three days after this remarkable vote of confidence, and just before the Assembly adjourned, F.J. Lee died at the age of 53.
“But in everything, we show that we are God’s servants.”
The others-centered lives of Nora Chambers and F.J. Lee provided the values foundation for Lee University. F.J. Lee’s commitment to ethical thinking and behavior possibly saved the denomination and its new Bible Training School from disintegration. His understanding that organizations, to survive, need integrity and accountability guaranteed that the school would have a safe place in which to thrive and flourish.
Both F.J. Lee and Nora Chambers had a strong sense of citizenship that extended far beyond the borders of their city, state or nation. They understood and participated fully in the affairs of their communities. F.J. Lee preached strongly that people should be law-abiding citizens. “If you’re a law-breaker, how can you call yourself a follower of Jesus in his precepts and examples?” he asked in one sermon. His examples of “law-breaking” probably surprised some people and included things like violating traffic signs, hunting or fishing without a license, not paying rent or taxes, letting chickens wander into the neighbor’s garden, or building an outhouse “where it will be a nuisance to some family.” In other words, follow the law and be kind to your neighbors.
But there was a dimension to citizenship that crossed earthly boundaries and drove them into mountain hollows and remote parts of the world, following, like the Apostle Paul, the call to bring light to those in darkness. Nora Chamber’s devotion to the people around her, to doing everything in her power to improve the lives of people in need, to meeting their great need where they lived, whether in remote hills, at an orphanage, church, home or school, displayed a life of service. One of the things F.J. Lee most enjoyed doing was going to the homes of the sick to comfort and pray for them. Both of these role models worked hard to establish, fund and operate orphanages and to clothe and feed the poor. And both believed firmly that the best way for people to serve others was for them to be educated and trained to serve effectively.
They took seriously the words of the Apostle Paul in II Corinthians 6: 4-10: “But in everything ... we show that we truly are God’s servants. We have been patient, though we have had a lot of trouble, suffering, and hard times. We have been beaten, put in jail, and hurt in riots. We have worked hard and have gone without sleep or food. But we have kept ourselves pure and have been understanding, patient, and kind. The Holy Spirit has been with us, and our love has been real. We have spoken the truth, and God’s power has worked in us. In all our struggles we have said and done only what is right. Whether we were honored or dishonored or praised or cursed, we always told the truth about ourselves ... and we are always happy, even in times of suffering. Although we are poor, we have made many people rich. And though we own nothing, everything is ours.” (CEV)
Ethical action. Responsible Citizenship. Redemptive Service: The Bible Training School, Lee College and Lee University were created with these values in mind. The legacy of Nora Chambers and F.J. Lee continues between these walls today.
Sources
Chambers, Fred. “A Brief Sketch of Our Work in the Mountains of North Carolina and Georgia.” Unpublished, 1934.
Chambers, Nora. “When God was Dearest to Me,” A Symposium. The Lighted Pathway, 22:10 (October, 1951) 14-15.
The Chattanooga News, Tuesday, January 1, 1918. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038531/1918-01-01/ed-1/seq-1/
Church of God Evangel, June 1947.
Conn, Charles W. Like a Mighty Army: A History of the Church of God. Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1996. 149-150; 185-186
_______. “Youth Interviews Experience” The Lighted Pathway Yearbook 1949, 14.
D. Bruce Conn. “Lee University.” The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture. Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville, TN 2009. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=777
Gorbacheva, Tatiana. “Nora Chambers—Education Pioneer.” Church of God History and Heritage, Fall 1997, pp. 3-5.
Hurlbut, Jesse Lyman. Hurlbut’s Teacher Training Lessons for the Sunday School, New York: Eaton & Mains, 1908: p. 113.
Jernigan, John. Church of God General Overseer Correspondence, 1947.
Lee, F.J. Church of God General Overseer Correspondence, 1924-1927.
_______, Life Sketch and Sermons. Cleveland, TN: Church of God Publishing House, 1930.
_______, Personal Ledgers, 1914-1919.
Morgan, Louis F. “Laying the Foundation: The First Students at Bible Training School.” The Church of God Evangel. http://www.evangelmagazine.com/2018/01/laying-the-foundation/
Roebuck, David G. “Nora Chambers and the Unseen Guest.” The Church of God Evangel. http://www.evangelmagazine.com/2017/09/nora-chambers-unseen-guest/
_______, “Restorationism and a Vision for World Harvest: A Brief History of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)” Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research.
Ruelas, Abraham. “Going Where She Thought a Man Should Go: Nora Chambers.” Women and the Landscape of American Higher Education: Wesleyan Holiness and Pentecostal Founders. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010. Chapter 18. https://books.google.com/books?id=YVqUCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT2&dq=Women+and+the+Landscap e+of+American+Higher+Education:+Wesleyan+Holiness+and+...&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjp opaCtYrZAhVNja0KHQ5zBq8Q6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Tapley, Earl M. The Way It Was. St. Petersburg, FL: Southern Heritage Press, 2000.
Yarnell, Susan L. “Southern Appalachia: History of a Landscape” United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Ashville, NC, 1998. https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_srs018.pdf
Professor of Communication Dean, College of Arts & Sciences
“A Few Months Training Would be of Great Value”
When the sun rose on New Year’s Day 1918, it dawned on a bitterly cold, snow-covered landscape in southeast Tennessee. Local papers urged residents to shovel the snow off their sidewalks to prevent ice hazards. A serious national coal shortage forced people to scramble for fuel to heat their homes during the worst winter in over a century. The Great War in Europe, where 600 men from Bradley County were serving, had become the deadliest war in human history and lay anxiously on everyone’s minds. The Chattanooga News front-page featured a photo of German submariners surrendering to an American destroyer on the high seas. The attitude of the whole nation was one of anxious hope and prayer that the devastating conflict would end soon.
Despite the fact that all the schools in the area announced closures for the rest of week due to the bone-chilling weather, one school in Cleveland, Tennessee decided the icy first of the year was the ideal day to open its doors. Accordingly, that morning, seven fresh, college-age students bundled up against the frosty air and climbed the stairs to a rustic second-floor meeting room in the Church of God Publishing House. At 9:30 a.m., Nora Chambers, a proofreader in the Publishing House, officially opened the very first class of a brand-new Bible Training School. The superintendent, A.J. Tomlinson, Editor-in Chief of the Publishing House and General Overseer of the Church of God, greeted the students, said a few words, then retreated to the offices below, leaving Chambers in charge. Before the end of the week, five more students would trickle in, swelling the number of that first class to twelve.
The desperate need for a school “for the training of young men and young women for efficient service on the field” had been stressed for several years in the General Assembly meetings of the young Pentecostal denomination, the “Church of God.” Unfortunately, while the spirit was willing, the essential elements—funding, building space, students, teachers, but most of all, funding—had been missing. These finally came together late in 1917 after repeated and passionate urging from several denominational leaders, most notably Overseer A.J. Tomlinson and Elder F.J. Lee. For the members of the rapidly growing spiritual movement, education was at a premium. Many were from poor or working-class families in and around the Appalachian hills of Tennessee, North Carolina and north Georgia. And though the church had spread into the towns northwards and southwards across state lines, the times were such that hard- working people focused most of their time and energy on feeding their families. A whopping third of household income when to feeding the family in 1917 (twice the current ratio), and only 6% of the general population had completed high school. But workaday people in the church were emerging as leaders, evangelists, missionaries, pastors, and Sunday school teachers. They felt an acute need for more education to acquaint them with the skills necessary to share the truth effectively. “A few months training would be of great value,” Tomlinson declared in the 1917 General Assembly.
“I finally consented when all my suggestions met opposition.”
In 1918, Nora Chambers had attained a higher level of education than the vast majority of her peers. She had taken and taught classes at Holmes Bible School in Altamont, SC, so she not only had college-level training, she possessed modest teaching credentials. Those credentials were only a small part of the story that brought her to Cleveland, TN.
Originally from Illinois, she relocated to South Carolina in 1910, in her mid-twenties, with her husband Fred, at Holmes Bible School. The young couple, while studying and teaching, met a new evangelist, Ed Boehmer, overflowing with enthusiasm from the Azusa Street revivals in California. He had just married a local girl named Millie, and the two of them wanted to preach the holiness gospel to the people in the beautiful Smoky Mountains nearby. The Chambers agreed to help during their spring break vacation in 1911. Little did they know that this “vacation” would last for two incredibly difficult years.
Today, Southern Appalachia is full of gorgeous state and national parks, camp grounds, popular hiking trails, charming resorts, vacation homes and big utility companies. Lee University faculty, staff and students spend a lot of spare time out in nature there. It was a very different world in the early twentieth century. There were few navigable roads, and hardly anyone owned a motor vehicle or even a telephone. Travel over unpaved tracks was either by mule and wagon or simply on foot. The scattered families tended to be large and lived mostly on farms carved out of the hills with back-breaking effort. Many cooked up their own “spirits” at improvised stills with little fear of arrest. Small towns were sprinkled here and there and these became hubs of communication and trade for the surrounding countryside. Much of the populace went to church, and their little weathered chapels—Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian—dotted the landscape. They were sparsely educated, less from choice than from the scarce availability of accessible schools. As a result, some were literate enough to handle home economics numbers, but most considered the work of survival to be more important than education. As a group, they were fiercely independent, set in their ways, deeply loyal to family, and generally suspicious of outsiders.
When the Boehmers and the Chambers ventured into these highlands, the region was undergoing massive change. Big mining and logging enterprises were laying railroads up into the hills to dig for copper, coal and iron and to build massive sawmills. Many men left their farms to sign on as wage laborers. The young evangelists arrived in the midst of serious upheaval, with thousands of new people moving into the region, many of them immigrants. The couples preached wherever they could, sometimes in churches, sometimes in the open air, sometimes in lonely spots with only oak and hickory trees for cover. Somehow, without the aid of advertising or marketing, crowds gathered to hear them, bringing their families, some traveling great distances. Many were converted, but others didn’t like what they were hearing, especially the calls for life-style change and “holy living.” These came to hate these “outsiders” with their radical notions. One local newspaper editor even called for the evangelists to be tarred and feathered and driven out before they caused too much trouble.
It’s hard for us today to imagine the hardships these dedicated young people suddenly faced. We like to think we are civilized enough to be tolerant of other points of view. But in the mountains of Southern Appalachia in the early 1900s, tolerance wasn’t in fashion. For the next two years, 1911-12, while the four attempted to make a positive impact on the mountain folk, they were hounded day after day, week after week, by angry detractors who demanded they stop all this preaching, singing, and loud praying and leave well enough alone. Time after time, a church or barn or other meeting place was burned to the ground the night after a service. In one town, the evangelists thought they would outsmart the vandals, so they put up a sheet- metal structure, thinking that it would survive, but a rambunctious group came late at night, stacked up all the wooden benches, burned them, and then tore the sheet metal down! Another mob torched a cabin where the evangelists were staying, physically restraining the preachers while all their meager belongings burned in the fire. At another cabin, rocks were hurled, shattering all the windows.
One terrible night, an unruly mob came hunting for them. Fred Chambers: “Six masked men came on to the log cabin where we were living. They fired three shots when they arrived at the front door, broke in and called for Brother Boehmer. I told them he was not at home. They searched the house for him and were too much enraged to go away without doing something. Two men grabbed hold of my arms, one on either side, and led me out to a mule. They placed me on the animal and took me about a hundred yards from the house. They told me they had fully decided to stamp out holiness in that area. They had two or three large hickory sticks with which they gave me a severe lashing. They would hold me, one by each arm, and the third fellow would do the beating, while the rest stood and looked on.”
While Fred was being savagely beaten, his wife Nora ran through the darkness to warn the Boehmers, who were staying at another cabin that night. She urged them to run and hide as the mob had said they planned to kill Ed. Ed did run, but he ran toward danger to try to stop the beating of his friend. By the time he arrived, the mob had gone, leaving Fred on the ground, thankfully still alive. After tending to Fred’s wounds, the preachers moved forward with a revival meeting the next night, bruises and all.
An indication of how they felt about their difficulties comes from Nora Chambers, who declared that “God was dearest to me when I spent two years of persecution in the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia.” Convinced they were doing the right thing, they persisted in trudging along remote forest paths, sometimes 25 miles in a single day, singing as they went. Many days they had no money or supplies. Sometimes they ate nothing but the walnuts they picked up off the ground. Other times they went hungry. When they could, the men found work chopping wood for seven and a half cents an hour, “which,” Fred said with remarkable economy of expression, “supplied our needs.” It was about one tenth of a living wage.
The church eventually brought the two couples off the mountain, down into the valley, to Cleveland, Tennessee, a growing railway town of 5,500 or so people. Nora’s skills were in great demand right away. One of the most urgent endeavors of the denomination was to spread the good news through the printed page. At considerable expense for the time, the church had established a printing operation on the edge of town in a two-story building with an incongruous storefront façade, the Publishing House. The building served as printing press, publication offices, denominational headquarters and meeting space for the elders of the Church of God. The proximity to the railway across the nearby creek was no accident. It provided easy access to communities to the north and south.
Here Nora became a proofreader for the growing list of journals, leaflets and Sunday School materials for which A.J. Tomlinson served as editor. In those days, material that was hand written or typewritten had to be laboriously “typeset” – each letter of each word, each space between words, and each punctuation mark on tiny lead blocks had to be arranged by hand in a metal tray, tightened firmly into place with screws, sponged with ink and then pressed to paper to create a “proof” copy. Someone had to go over these “proofs” very carefully to make sure the typesetting was accurate. The “proofreader” marked the copy and made notations in the margins for corrections. Once reviewed and adjusted, the metal page went to the “press” for the actual print run. Reading and correcting countless pages was Nora Chambers’ task in the very active print shop. She did this demanding, painstaking work for many years. But her role shifted suddenly one day.
In late 1917, after the General Assembly of the Church of God had finally declared its intention to move forward with the launch of a Bible Training School, A.J. Tomlinson approached Nora in the offices of the Publishing House. He wanted to inform her about a decision regarding the faculty for the new school.
“Sister Chambers, you have been selected to teach the Bible Training School, and we want you to begin January 1,” he said.
Nora was dumbfounded, not about the start-date, but about the selection of teacher. “Shouldn’t a man be chosen for that position?” she asked.
Tomlinson asked her to suggest one. Nora offered up several options, but one by one, Tomlinson shook his head and said that, for various reasons, none of them would work.
Nora Chambers later recalled, “I finally consented when all my suggestions met opposition.”
The assembly had declared that the Bible should be the primary textbook, as it was the Bible these students were intended to teach and preach, but any subject matter that might shed light on the scriptures and make ministry more effective should also be included. Chambers added Hurlbut’s Teacher-Training Lessons for the Sunday School, a compact volume that had been around since the late 1800s and would remain a staple for decades to come. Finely printed, tautly organized and impressively packed, Jesse Hurlbut’s elegant text supplied outlines for teaching the Old and New Testaments, complete with historical, linguistic, and geographical background material. The book also provided practical instruction on teaching different age groups, as well as a list of qualifications for a good teacher, including the following thought: “The teacher’s work has relation to living souls, and therefore he must be a friend. No mere intellectual machine can teach living hearts. To influence souls there must be a soul. For not by knowledge, nor by gifts of expression, but by the personal contact of heart with heart are scholars led upward to the best in thought and life.” By all accounts, Nora Chambers took this particular advice to heart, and former students remembered her as a person who cared about them deeply, comforting them when they cried, encouraging them when they were down and cheering them on toward successful completion of their schooling.
Supplementing the Bible and Hurlbut’s was coursework in grammar, spelling, music and geography. Tuition was a dollar a week, compared to five dollars at many other institutions of the day. Of the original 12 students, several, like Nora Chambers, worked in the Publishing House, but only six were able to complete that first term. Of those, only two would end up finishing the full course of study.
From such small beginnings, an institution was born.
Shortly after the school itself was opened, BTS learning opportunities were expanded to include a series of correspondence courses. Understanding how difficult it might be for people to leave their homes and workplaces, teaching and learning by distance, through the mail, turned out to be a huge success, with 788 students enrolling in the first year. Much of the work of writing the curricular materials, mailing them out, receiving and sorting student work, grading these materials, and mailing them out again fell to Nora Chambers, who later said there was no work she enjoyed quite so much. She was a one-woman educational enterprise!
Chambers worked for four years as the Bible Training School’s primary teacher and program developer. In time, both she and A.J. Tomlinson gave up their positions with the school to focus on church publications once again. But that wasn’t it for Nora. She went on to run an orphanage. She became one of the primary recorders and reporters of General Assembly proceedings; she composed Sunday School curriculum for the denomination; and, when she wasn’t working on these demanding projects, she was volunteering for ministry at her local church in Cleveland, TN. E. L. Simmons, president of BTS in 1948, noted, “Nora L. Chambers, a very remarkable woman evangelist of Illinois ... was a very pious, holiness woman, with aptitude and initiative, coupled with a vision of greater things, which, though she possibly knew it not, was to be fulfilled within her generation.”
Feeling ill in 1953, by then almost 70 years of age, Nora traveled to Phoenix, Arizona in the hopes of avoiding another cold winter in Cleveland. She died there, having left an unforgettable mark on the hearts, minds and lives of a great many people who would carry her courageous and industrious spirit forward to later generations. In her lifetime, the institution would name a women’s dormitory in her honor.
“As strange as it may seem, this institution never had a name.”
The history of the institution after Nora Chambers and those small beginnings in a borrowed room has been full of ups and downs. The Bible Training School evolved and grew for the next thirty years, adding and adjusting programs, including a high school and a two-year junior college with several degrees offered. The double-commitment to high-school completion and a jumpstart on college placed the BTS in rare educational company at the time. For a decade, 1938-1947, the school relocated to Sevierville, TN, growing to as many as 700 residential students. At the graduation ceremonies in the spring of 1947, school officials made a historic announcement: “One of the most successful terms of Bible Training School and College at Sevierville Tennessee, has just closed, and the management of the School is now preparing to move to our newly purchased property, which was formerly the Bob Jones College, in Cleveland, Tennessee.” This news, coupled with accreditation by the University of Tennessee, was greeted with delighted applause.
In addition to the big move back to Cleveland, the school was to get a new name. The recently appointed Academic Dean and Vice President, Earl M. Tapley, who was himself a graduate of BTS, suggested a name to several key figures in the Church, thinking that the move back to Cleveland was a good time to make such a change. On the encouragement of others, he brought his suggestion to the Board of Directors, who unanimously approved of his idea, and President E.L Simmons declared shortly thereafter: “As strange as it may seem, this institution never had a name. It seemed almost a shame, with all of its other acquirements, to go farther on such a march of progress and to keep traveling without a name. The Board of Directors decided that the Bible Training School and College must have a name. And, without a change of purpose or without deviating from its divine prerogative, the School was named LEE COLLEGE.” The General Overseer and other denominational leaders also gave their approval.
That June, the Cleveland Daily Banner added this report, “The board of directors ... gave the following reason for having named the institution Lee College: ‘The late Rev. F. J. Lee, a former Clevelander, served the Church as General Overseer for many years, having died in office. He was one of the most respected men our movement has ever produced; there was never a mark against his record and for many years there has been somewhat of a reverence among our people for his name and meekness. Furthermore, he was once head of the institution.’” E. L. Simmons added, “Reverend F. J. Lee was a very pious and holy man. He was very strong in matters pertaining to government and discipline, and yet was loved by all who knew him.”
“Telegraphing to Heaven”
Flavius Josephus Lee was 33 years old when he joined the Church of God in 1908. He had been the choir director at First Baptist Church in Cleveland, TN, but he was drawn to the Pentecostal tent meetings that were taking place near downtown on Central Avenue. At one such meeting, he was so overcome by a feeling of ecstasy that he nearly passed out in the aisle on his way to the altar. He lingered in a state of euphoria until the wee hours of the morning. Alarmed family members couldn’t get him to move, so they summoned a doctor, who examined him, only to pronounce that it was “about the best case of religion I ever saw.”
Like many other members of the growing church movement, Flavius Lee was a working-class individual. He had grown up on a farm, worked with his father making furniture, then got a job as an artisan who crafted decorative patterns for the products of Hardwick Stove Company, manufacturers of cast-iron stoves, kettles, skillets and other iron wares in Cleveland.
After joining the denomination, Lee quickly became an important figure in the operations of the church. He left his job and stepped abruptly into the role of pastor. Eye-witnesses agree that Lee was articulate and well-spoken, with a gift for detail and organization. By 1910, “Flavius J. Lee” was listed on the masthead as associate editor of the very first issue of the denomination’s weekly newsletter, The Evening Light and Church of God Evangel (he would refer to this in his diary as “the paper.”) The following year, he was named to the “board of education” whose task was to lay the groundwork for a Bible training school. Over the next seven years, while he labored in ministry, Lee persistently urged the formation of such a school.
In 1917, Flavius was appointed as one of the first official “elders” of the denomination. For the next four years, he served in state administrative posts for the Church of God. According to his wife Eva, Flavius was a peacemaker who helped resolve conflicts in many churches. When the denomination decided in 1921 that it needed an organizing constitution to govern its affairs and assemblies, Lee was selected to help draft the documents. The following year, he was named superintendent of the new Bible Training School, replacing A.J. Tomlinson. By 1923, the denomination had fallen into serious financial difficulties, sparking accusations that threatened to tear it apart. Lee was asked to be General Overseer in the hopes that he could do for the denomination what he had done in other difficult cases by brokering peace. Though the organization did rupture, Lee succeeded in holding things together, repairing relational bridges, soothing angry voices, upholding the integrity of the ministry, and establishing high levels of accountability to guard against potential missteps.
Charles W. Conn, Lee College president (1970-82) and author of the definitive history of the Church of God, mentioned the high regard in which Flavius J. Lee was held: “Lee was popularly regarded as ‘the best man in town,’ a Christian whose character was impeccable, a musician of better-than-average ability, possessed of a logical mind, and a model of meekness and integrity.” Lee’s daily ledgers, correspondence, and sermons paint a picture of a visionary who was also supremely practical, fair-minded, and humane. Flavius treasured mundane aspects of life, listing the following activities in his ledgers with equal enthusiasm: Preaching on healing or on “the chart” (a long illustrated scroll he created on the Apocalypse); visiting churches by car or train; working on “the paper;” visiting the sick and shut-ins to pray for them (something very important to him personally); hitching up the mule to plow the garden; planting string beans and squash; practicing the saxophone; helping his wife with the laundry (a major undertaking in those days); enjoying a good bean supper; repairing his 1916 Model T Ford.
The Ford was anything but a luxury judging by how much sweat he expended to keep it running, but he noted proudly toward the end of 1919 that he had saved $50 in train fare (about $750 today). His sermons, in a time when powerful, high-energy pulpit delivery was highly prized, were typically calm expositions with a lot of Scripture reading, literary quotations and practical, every-day illustrations. One example, penciled into his ledger in his relaxed handwriting: “There is no use telegraphing to heaven for God to send a cargo of blessing unless you are at the wharf to unload.”
His letters as General Overseer were direct and brief, focusing on facts and never using the grandiose wordiness so common among his contemporaries. Much of his official correspondence dealt frankly with ongoing controversies in the Church, but he relied on documented evidence to support his points and never stooped to personal attacks. He preferred the accountability of open meetings and condemned decisions made in secret. He demonstrated an ongoing and acute interest in the charitable undertakings of the Church, especially its orphanages.
Flavius J. Lee worked tirelessly, often through illness, traveling by train, car or boat to visit regional meetings and remote churches across the country and overseas, ever the calm peacemaker. In August of 1928, shortly after having preached in the stifling summer heat of Texas, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. He continued to work until he was physically unable. Those who visited him during his illness reported his quiet lack of complaint. The General Assembly met that October. Well aware that he was on his deathbed, they re-elected him to the office of General Overseer. Three days after this remarkable vote of confidence, and just before the Assembly adjourned, F.J. Lee died at the age of 53.
“But in everything, we show that we are God’s servants.”
The others-centered lives of Nora Chambers and F.J. Lee provided the values foundation for Lee University. F.J. Lee’s commitment to ethical thinking and behavior possibly saved the denomination and its new Bible Training School from disintegration. His understanding that organizations, to survive, need integrity and accountability guaranteed that the school would have a safe place in which to thrive and flourish.
Both F.J. Lee and Nora Chambers had a strong sense of citizenship that extended far beyond the borders of their city, state or nation. They understood and participated fully in the affairs of their communities. F.J. Lee preached strongly that people should be law-abiding citizens. “If you’re a law-breaker, how can you call yourself a follower of Jesus in his precepts and examples?” he asked in one sermon. His examples of “law-breaking” probably surprised some people and included things like violating traffic signs, hunting or fishing without a license, not paying rent or taxes, letting chickens wander into the neighbor’s garden, or building an outhouse “where it will be a nuisance to some family.” In other words, follow the law and be kind to your neighbors.
But there was a dimension to citizenship that crossed earthly boundaries and drove them into mountain hollows and remote parts of the world, following, like the Apostle Paul, the call to bring light to those in darkness. Nora Chamber’s devotion to the people around her, to doing everything in her power to improve the lives of people in need, to meeting their great need where they lived, whether in remote hills, at an orphanage, church, home or school, displayed a life of service. One of the things F.J. Lee most enjoyed doing was going to the homes of the sick to comfort and pray for them. Both of these role models worked hard to establish, fund and operate orphanages and to clothe and feed the poor. And both believed firmly that the best way for people to serve others was for them to be educated and trained to serve effectively.
They took seriously the words of the Apostle Paul in II Corinthians 6: 4-10: “But in everything ... we show that we truly are God’s servants. We have been patient, though we have had a lot of trouble, suffering, and hard times. We have been beaten, put in jail, and hurt in riots. We have worked hard and have gone without sleep or food. But we have kept ourselves pure and have been understanding, patient, and kind. The Holy Spirit has been with us, and our love has been real. We have spoken the truth, and God’s power has worked in us. In all our struggles we have said and done only what is right. Whether we were honored or dishonored or praised or cursed, we always told the truth about ourselves ... and we are always happy, even in times of suffering. Although we are poor, we have made many people rich. And though we own nothing, everything is ours.” (CEV)
Ethical action. Responsible Citizenship. Redemptive Service: The Bible Training School, Lee College and Lee University were created with these values in mind. The legacy of Nora Chambers and F.J. Lee continues between these walls today.
Sources
Chambers, Fred. “A Brief Sketch of Our Work in the Mountains of North Carolina and Georgia.” Unpublished, 1934.
Chambers, Nora. “When God was Dearest to Me,” A Symposium. The Lighted Pathway, 22:10 (October, 1951) 14-15.
The Chattanooga News, Tuesday, January 1, 1918. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038531/1918-01-01/ed-1/seq-1/
Church of God Evangel, June 1947.
Conn, Charles W. Like a Mighty Army: A History of the Church of God. Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1996. 149-150; 185-186
_______. “Youth Interviews Experience” The Lighted Pathway Yearbook 1949, 14.
D. Bruce Conn. “Lee University.” The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture. Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville, TN 2009. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=777
Gorbacheva, Tatiana. “Nora Chambers—Education Pioneer.” Church of God History and Heritage, Fall 1997, pp. 3-5.
Hurlbut, Jesse Lyman. Hurlbut’s Teacher Training Lessons for the Sunday School, New York: Eaton & Mains, 1908: p. 113.
Jernigan, John. Church of God General Overseer Correspondence, 1947.
Lee, F.J. Church of God General Overseer Correspondence, 1924-1927.
_______, Life Sketch and Sermons. Cleveland, TN: Church of God Publishing House, 1930.
_______, Personal Ledgers, 1914-1919.
Morgan, Louis F. “Laying the Foundation: The First Students at Bible Training School.” The Church of God Evangel. http://www.evangelmagazine.com/2018/01/laying-the-foundation/
Roebuck, David G. “Nora Chambers and the Unseen Guest.” The Church of God Evangel. http://www.evangelmagazine.com/2017/09/nora-chambers-unseen-guest/
_______, “Restorationism and a Vision for World Harvest: A Brief History of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)” Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research.
Ruelas, Abraham. “Going Where She Thought a Man Should Go: Nora Chambers.” Women and the Landscape of American Higher Education: Wesleyan Holiness and Pentecostal Founders. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010. Chapter 18. https://books.google.com/books?id=YVqUCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT2&dq=Women+and+the+Landscap e+of+American+Higher+Education:+Wesleyan+Holiness+and+...&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjp opaCtYrZAhVNja0KHQ5zBq8Q6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Tapley, Earl M. The Way It Was. St. Petersburg, FL: Southern Heritage Press, 2000.
Yarnell, Susan L. “Southern Appalachia: History of a Landscape” United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Ashville, NC, 1998. https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_srs018.pdf