Research on Robert Clarence Lawson's life has grown, picking up considerably some 50 years after his demise. The gift of God in him was such that a study of his life and deeds still yields inspiration and opportunities for fruitful reflection about ministry and culture. Appreciation for the contributions he made to his generation has inspired present-day action among white and black, spiritual and secular, and Christians of various denomination, to preserve his memory and add to his work.
Lawson's spiritual roots were in the post-Reconstruction black Baptist church. Born a generation after the first post-slavery generation, Lawson would have been raised among people who had been chattel slaves, people who likely had prayed for deliverance from that horror and were singularly blessed to see deliverance in their lifetime. His father, a preacher and perhaps a former slave, would have been one of the most literate and publicly visible men in his community, a product of the prodigious social, educational, and financial gains made by people of African descent during Reconstruction.
In his testimony as recorded in Spellman and Thomas's The Life, Legend, and Legacy of Bishop R.C. Lawson, the bishop describes a childhood and adolescence surrounded by born-again Christians. His father, a Baptist preacher, left with his mother for a revival in Texas, where he died. Before leaving, the elder Lawson laid his hand on and blessed what we can assume was his last child (there was at least one older brother), foretelling that the younger Lawson would be a preacher.
Years later in reflection, Bishop Lawson refers to the revival as "holy," a reflection perhaps of the Holiness movement that had found a serious following among Baptists in the late 1800s. (C.P. Jones and Charles Mason are prominent examples of Baptist preachers who were also Holiness adherents, later going on to establish Holiness and Pentecostal organizations, respectively.) The father Lawson, by blessing his son by word and by touch, may have been acting out a recapturing of the biblical practice of the laying on of hands.
Overshadowed from infancy by the memory of his father and his prophetic blessing, Lawson was impressed as well by the spirituality of the elders in his community. He lost his faith in in God at a young age, but nevertheless tolerated seniors' emotional pleas to him to get religion (i.e., to receive salvation). Sometimes when they spoke about God, their tears and joyful ecstasy, despite their poor health and old-age poverty, half convinced him that the religion they had was real. Also, Lawson, like many in his community, held the belief that disrespecting seniors could be fatal. He paints the picture by recalling a warning heard in his youth: "Don't mess with old lady Mamby, she'll put bad mouth on you" -- that is to say, if you wrong an old person, they may speak something bad about you and it come to pass. "And some did die," Lawson explains, which tempered him, otherwise an utter skeptic, into a thoroughly irreligious, but mildly curious, agnostic: he wasn't sure there was anything to religion, but if there was, he would rather be on good terms with those who had it.
Though death took both his parents in his childhood, Lawson mentions that he attended the Howe Institute, a nearby boarding school. Benjamin Mays and Joseph William Nicholson relate in The Negro's Church that black preachers would often refer to the schooling they received at local grammar schools or high schools when asked where they had been trained or whence they graduated; Howe Institute seemed to have served a similar purpose for Lawson before he pursued formal education in the Northeast. That he was able to attend Howe speaks both to the financial well-being of his family and to their value for education. True to his rearing, Lawson would make education one of his major goals. He acquired a small boarding school in Southern Pines, North Carolina, that became known as the R.C. Lawson Institute, as well as found the Church of Christ Bible Institute, one of the earliest Pentecostal educational organizations in the Northeast.
In many ways, R.C. Lawson was swimming against the current in Pentecost as he endeavored to realize the vision he had of congregational life. Financial prosperity and educational attainment were often assumed and taught to be mutually exclusive of biblical prosperity and spiritual attainment. We see, though, that a melange of natural and spiritual blessings early in life had exposed Lawson to the possibility of social elevation and financial affluence coinciding with profound Christian piety and belief in the supernatural.
No comments:
Post a Comment