Rex Humbard
The choir and orchestra soar into the theme song, "You Are
Loved." Graphics swirl on the screen, followed by a visual
extravaganza of colored lights from the stage set. A beaming,
bouncing announcer appears and asks the audience to "give a
great big welcome to my dad and mom, Rex and Maud Aimee Humbard!" To
prolonged loud applause, Rex and Maud Aimee meet center stage. After a bit
of patter, Maud Aimee opens the show with the first musical number.
The atmosphere is Nashville "countrypolitan," right down to the
coatless orchestra members in open-neck shirts and unbuttoned vests. The
closing credits of the program include stores that have furnished gowns
and suits to the fourteen members of the Humbard family. Together, these
brothers, sisters, spouses, and grandchildren form various singing ensembles;
Rex occasionally strums his guitar in accompaniment. He also engages in
patter with family matriarch Maud Aimee, whose middle name was bestowed
in remembrance of female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Guests are
introduced, who perform or chat with Rex. Humbard's sermons are brief
and personal, and they seem barely to interrupt the flow of entertainment.
Rex invites letters and prayer requests and usually prays over a pile of
them in each program. Professionally produced spot announcements offer to
viewers "You Are Loved" pins or some other trinket designed to
acquire names for the mailing list. Each Christmas he carries the names
and prayer requests of all his friends to Calvary, from where his holiday
program is beamed back to the United States by satellite.
Humbard's program is normally videotaped at the first church ever designed
specifically for the requirements of television. The 5,000-seat Cathedral of
Tomorrow is a round building with a domed roof. It contains a huge electronic
organ with three sets of pipes—but the organ is never used on the TV show.
It doesn't seem to fit the format, for no traditional church hymns are sung on
the show. The mood and the music are strictly upbeat contemporary gospel.
Beneath a 100-foot-long cross illuminated with 5,000 light bulbs, the stage
is large enough to accommodate TV cameras and crews, choir, orchestra, and the
Humbard family. No pulpit can be seen, although Rex sometimes takes his place
behind what appears to be a Plexiglas music stand.
Until 1952, Alpha Rex Humbard was one of the Humbard Family Singers in his
itinerant preacher father's traveling tent revival entourage. After a successful
revival in Akron, Ohio, he
decided to leave his father's "Gospel Big Top" and start a church in
Akron. He had television in mind from the first.
Rex Humbard had no formal theological training and was ordained by his
father. Humbard writes in To Tell the World, however, of having
studied courses in Bible and religion and being ordained by the International
Ministerial Federation, an association of independent, nondenominational
ministers. The frantic pace of revival meetings which he and his family
conducted, always on the move from one city to the next, makes one wonder
just where and when Humbard had time to study. He has never been a member
of any denomination.
The church he established in 1953, Calvary Temple, was nondenominational. It
met for the first few years in a defunct movie theater purchased by Humbard.
Calvary Temple grew until five services had to be conducted every Sunday to
accommodate the crowds. In 1958 the Cathedral of Tomorrow was completed.
Humbard's first television broadcasts, live from Calvary Temple, went on the
Akron airwaves in 1953, not long after he had observed the crowd watching
television in front of O'Neil's. In the days before videotape, programs not on
motion-picture film could not be distributed to other TV stations, and
motion-picture film production is tedious and expensive. Oral Roberts was
willing to bother with it in those days, but Rex Humbard wasn't. Consequently,
distribution of his program was limited to a few relatively close stations in
Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. But with the arrival of videotape in the
early 1960s, Humbard began to branch out. He had reached, by his own account, 68
stations by 1968. That number grew to 115 by 1970, to 175 by 1975, and today he
is on 207 U.S. television stations.
Rex Humbard is a simple man with a simple message, which he still delivers
with a soft Arkansas drawl. He may not succeed in carrying the gospel to all the
world, but more than any other syndicated televangelist, he has taken up the
challenge. His program is translated into seven languages and shipped to
eighteen foreign countries, where it is broadcast on more than 400 television
and shortwave radio stations. The Rex Humbard Ministry maintains offices in
Canada, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Brazil, and Chile. The Humbard family
also travels the
world to conduct rallies. Recently they filled the world's largest stadium
(170,000 occupancy) in Rio de Janeiro.
