Spreading the word the old fashioned way, preachers make the sidewalk their pulpit
by Joe Tarr
It's a warm, sunny Friday afternoon in the Old City, and several people are enjoying the weather on the patio of BW-3 (now called the Old City Grill), drinking beer and talking with friends. Couples walk into Manhattan's across the street, or stroll down toward Barley's. The atmosphere is more lazy summer subdued than boozy decadence.
But then Howie Johnson and John Vespie arrive on the scene, wearing dress slacks, clean white shirts, and ties. They come from Wartburg, carrying Bibles.
Their mission is to put the fear of God into the Old City.
"Jesus said, 'I am the way, I am the truth, I am the light.' It ain't Buddha, it ain't Confucius," Vespie shouts from the corner of Jackson and Central avenues, in front of the Christian New City Cafe but facing BW-3. "I want you to know that if you're a Baptist, you can die and go to hell just as fast as anyone else."
"Do you have any joy? Why aren't there any smiling faces around here? It's because of sin."
The commotion stirs the sleepy happy hour crowd. They heckle back. "And the Lord said, 'drink and be merry,'" one yells. Others confront the preachers directly. A tattooed young man angrily asks Johnson, "Do you think you're any better than me?" "No, I'm a sinner, just like you friend," Johnson replies. After a while, the man gives up the conversation, tells him to go to hell. "I'm not going there," Johnson replies.
Knoxville has always had its share of street preachers warning about hellfire and offering Jesus Christ as hope. It is a local tradition that Evangelical Christians have continued in modern times—their efforts perhaps even intensifying as the end of the millennium approaches.
Typically they're ignored, sporadically they're yelled at, and once in a while someone takes their words to heart. But who are these street corner prophets and what drives them to profess their faith on the streets?
If you want to hear some old fashioned Gospel preaching in Knoxville, probably the easiest place to find it is at the corner of Market Street and Union Avenue between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on any given weekday. Preachers can also be found in projects or on the University of Tennessee campus or any number of places. But the corner across from Market Square has become a traditional pulpit for preachers, so regular their shouts have almost come to signify the beginning of the lunch time in downtown Knoxville.
One of the most recognizable of these is Lee Bridges, who has an emotional, emphatic singsong style. His black curly hair has a touch of gray and he wears T-shirts that say things like "Lord's Gym"—a religious parody on the body-building gymnasium. Bridges speaks with a slight stutter, but when he preaches his voice booms and echoes through the Market Square area as he paces the sidewalk, stopping now and then to read a passage from his worn Bible.
Bridges says he wasn't raised in a religious family, but one of "drunks and whoremongers." At 18, he gave his life to Christ, but soon drifted away. In 1981 in Washington, D.C., where he lived at the time he realized he had to serve God. "I had been out partying all night. I went to work the next morning and just started crying and I knew it was time to serve. I had just gotten a raise and a girlfriend, but I left all that behind," he says.
He returned to Tennessee—a place he lived when he was younger—to start his life over. Shortly after that, Bridges had two dreams. In the first, he watched a tornado ripping through a beautiful stand of timber. He tried to warn people of the storm, but they would not listen. In the second dream, he saw a man in a white robe, pointing at a mountain. "If you love me, lead my sheep," the man said.
"He was telling me to go out on the street corner," he says.
It wasn't easy at first. "I was scared." But once he started, he says, "I felt the anointing come down on me and I felt the Spirit in me."
Bridges used to preach more often, but his work schedule at Baptist Hospital now only leaves Mondays and the weekend open for proselytizing. For the most part, people are cordial to him.
"The thing about preaching is you're not preaching to the majority. Sometimes the Holy Spirit will get ahold of folks, set them down and make them listen," he says.
Sometimes, people do curse or confront him. "It makes me swell up a little. I just tell them God loves you and go on my way."
Many of Knoxville's street preachers shy away from any personal attention. Several of them come from the same church, but one that doesn't have a name. Their preaching is low-key, unobtrusive—more reliant on passing out tracts than on preaching out loud. Their cadence is flat, unemotional. "Return to Jesus/ Save your soul from Hell/ He laid down his life/ So you may live in eternity," says one, while his two young sons sit on a nearby bench and watch. A friend passes out tracts to passersby.
One or more members of this church make it to Market Square several days a week. One of them says, "I just felt it was a duty of mine to try to help. We don't try to make a big deal of it. We just hope people will hear. We don't try to make a name for ourselves."
The preachers say they work out of a sense of doom for the world. "The world is ripe for judgment now. Things can't go on much longer. It's just a question of whether the church is ready for rapture," says another member of the anonymous church.
"The Anti-Christ is alive and well right now, waiting to come forth," says Bridges.
There's an apocryphal thought among some of the preachers that they need a permit to preach anywhere but the corner of Market and Union. However, the city law department says there are no laws regulating street preachers—and that as long as they are orderly and don't disturb the peace, they can preach anywhere in public.
It's difficult to know how long people have been preaching in Market Square. Malcolm Muggeridge, educator and columnist, wrote in his diary in 1947 of a visit to Knoxville seeing a black street preacher "ranting the ancient doctrine of justification by faith—'Ah shall have everlasting life not because Ah'm good; Ah shall have everlasting life not because of anything Ah'd done or not done. Ah shall have everlasting life because Ah believe in Jesus Christ. Ah'm so happy this morning because Ah shall have everlasting life.'"
In general, street preaching is older than Christianity. And in a sense, it was what Jesus and the Apostles did to gain followers, taking their message out to public places.
Most preachers found on the streets of Knoxville, and around the United States, today work out of an Evangelical or fundamentalist tradition—one that interprets the King James Bible literally. But it hasn't always been that way, says Charles Campbell, a professor at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. Campbell isn't exactly an expert on street preaching—it's tough to find any on the subject—but he is studying its history and tradition.
"A lot of what we see out there today is of the fundamentalist variety," Campbell says. Because of the sometimes hostile, judgmental techniques the fundamentalists use, many people are turned off by street preaching. Still, street preaching has been practiced by remarkably diverse faiths. Those of the radical religious left have taken their messages to the street, protesting against institutions and wars. In the middle of this century, Catholics preached on the streets not to convert people but as a way of bridging the gap with Protestants.
"Street preaching is one of the areas where women and lay people have been given important roles they didn't have in the church institutions," he says. "It is a place to challenge the institutional churches."
John Vespie isn't out to change the world. He doesn't have any hope for it. Instead, he spends his time shouting out the Gospel as he sees it, warning of a certain damnation that awaits people—unless they repent.
"All through the Bible, the word preach is found 150 times. It's not anything we cook up or do for attention," Vespie says. "The word preach means to stab or thrust. Those people we go out and preach to aren't going to be in church on Sunday. I know it seems rough out there but people get saved on the street."
"If you can see folks going to hell, the only moral thing is to go out and rescue."
A lifelong resident of Wartburg, Vespie works out of the Lighthouse Baptist Church, a small nondescript aluminum-sided building with no sign. Parked around it are vans with scripture passages painted on them. Vespie and several members of his church go out weekly to the streets to spread the word. They go to Knoxville and Gatlinburg, and have traveled as far as New Orleans and Mobile to preach.
Vespie says he wasn't always devoted to Christ. He didn't grow up religious, and in his younger days was quite a hell raiser. He owned a bar, did drugs, played in a rock band singing AC/DC's "Highway to Hell."
"I'd have guys come into my bar and say, 'Man, you've got it made.' But there was a void," he says. "I was leading people for the devil."
He inherited a King James Bible from his grandmother, and started reading it. One night, after reading from the book of Revelations, he dreamt of the Second Coming.
"I had a dream that he was really coming back and I wasn't going to go. This dream was so real, it was more real than you and I sitting here," he says. Men were screaming, the earth shook, and there was thunder.
"It scared me so bad. When I woke the bed was still shaking and I could see power lines shaking." At that moment, six helicopters were flying overhead, he says.
"If a man dies in his sin, there's no way out. A man doesn't have a life without Christ."
Although it often seems that street preachers enjoy confronting people they see as evil sinners, and bask in a feeling that they're one of the few people doing God's work, Vespie denies that there's anything fun about it. "Nobody enjoys it. The only joy we get is seeing someone saved."
Asked why he is so certain Christ is God, he refers to the Bible. Asked about the possibility of alternate interpretations to the Bible, Vespie says, "There can be various interpretations but there can be only one truth. It's not my interpretation. It interprets itself."
For a half hour, Vespie patiently answers questions about his faith, but then he takes control of the conversation and tries to convert the interviewer.
"I think you were sent here for a reason," he says. He tries to convince the interviewer that he is evil and that Jesus is all that can save him.
"I'm trying to prove you're a sinner. We're all in the same boat," he says. "What'd you say your name was again?...Well, Joe, what are you so afraid of? Why are you so nervous?
"I can lay my head down on my pillow at night and sleep like a baby. You can't do that. You know you can't do that."
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