As pastor of Audubon Forest Methodist Church in southwest Atlanta, Bevel Jones III helped fashion a statement calling for racial reconciliation as resistance to school desegregation escalated throughout the South in 1957.
The statement was signed by 80 ministers, including Jones, and dubbed the Ministers’ Manifesto. It was viewed as an early sign Atlanta might live up to Mayor William B. Hartsfield’s famous boast of being “the city too busy to hate.”
“We just felt like we had to say something and say it quickly because of the prevailing hysteria of the time,” Jones told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2007, the 50th anniversary of the manifesto’s signing. “Our leaders were threatening to close public schools rather than integrate.”
Bishop L. Bevel “Bev” Jones of Atlanta, 91, longtime pastor, Emory University graduate, teacher and devotee, and one of the last surviving signers of the highly lauded Ministers’ Manifesto, died March 6 of complications from dementia.
A service celebrating Jones’s life will be at 2 p.m. March 24 at Decatur First United Methodist Church, 300 East Ponce de Leon Avenue in Decatur with a reception to follow.
Gary Hauk, Emory University’s historian and senior advisor to the university’s president, said Jones “should be remembered most for what he prized the most, which was his work for racial justice, exemplified, in part, by the Ministers’ Manifesto.”
Jones also will be remembered for “his affability and gregariousness.”
Both traits were not part of “merely superficial congeniality but the vehicles for [Jones’] deeply felt compassion for others,” Hauk said.
Dr. James T. Laney, president emeritus of Emory University said Jones had “an infectious twinkle in his eye that gave him unparalleled access to people’s hearts.
“His humor, his velvet voice, and his passion for the church made him one of the best-loved preachers of generation,” Laney said. “He was truly a beloved leader.”
Born in a Methodist parsonage in the small town of Gracewood, near Augusta, on July 22, 1926, Jones was called early to the ministry. At 16, he entered Emory College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1946. He continued his education at Emory’s Candler School of Theology, where he earned his divinity degree and played on the “Theologs,” an intramural baseball team.
He left Emory in 1949, having begun his career the previous year as an associate pastor of First Methodist Church in Decatur. He would go on to pastor six churches in the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church, the same conference in which his late father, the Reverend Lewis Bevel Jones, Jr., served for 50 years, and his son, the Reverend Dr. David Bevel Jones, now serves.
After graduating from seminary, Jones took over at Audubon Forest Methodist, where he was pastor for a decade and worked on the manifesto.
He was elected bishop of the Western North Carolina Conference in 1984 and retired in 1996, returning to his alma mater, Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, as bishop in-residence.
Jones taught for 10 years as Candler’s Loida E. Willett Churchman in Residence and was a special assistant the school’s development office, as well as a trustee and trustee emeritus of the university. A chair in the practice of ministry at Candler bears his name.
In addition, Jones had honorary doctorate degrees from Emory, LaGrange College, High Point University, and Pfeiffer University.
Mathew Pinson, associate dean of development and alumni relations at the Candler School of Theology, said Jones was “both a leader within the church and in society.
“He was pastor to the city in many ways in that he helped Atlanta live that notion we were a city to busy to hate,” Pinson said.
Jones wanted people to feel included at all levels of society, regardless of race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation, he said.
“In many ways, in our modern era, we see how people get it wrong when we try to put certain people to the margins,” Pinson said. “Bishop Jones knew we would be better as a people and as a society if we were inclusive and we did it in an authentic expression of who we are all as individuals.
Jones saw a meal as an important chance to make new friends, and he loved to stop for ice cream on any road trip, especially if a Dairy Queen was nearby, said Jan Love, professor Christianity and world politics at Candler.
Jones and his wife, the former Mildred Hawkins, were married 66 years and had three children and six grandchildren. Mildred Jones died in 2015, a few weeks after their anniversary.
Jones is survived by his three children, David Bevel Jones, Mark Edward Jones and Sharon Brewer.
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