"I Notice Two Children Walking Down a Dirt Road"

(My Father, the "Bus Ministry" and Fundamentalist Baptist Child Abuse)

Thanks for visiting Tim Gilmore’s deadpaper! I’m grateful for every single reader. If you think my work here or my writing at JaxPsychoGeo.com or elsewhere is valuable, then I’d be grateful if you’d consider becoming a paid member. Here’s another entry in my series about revising my 2016 book Devil in the Baptist Church.

“I never did believe all that later stuff I heard about Bob Gray,” my father once told me, “him doing those things to children. Men like Bob Gray and Brother Wally Beebe built up the church and the Gospel. God had his hand on those men. All those things that was said was the work of the Devil.”

Wally Beebe traveled to Baptist churches all over the South, around the country even, showing church leaders how to start and promote a bus ministry and telling them how the ministry could accelerate their growth.

The bus ministry was mission work and being a “bus captain” meant you were a missionary right here in America, the nation God had chosen to lead the world.

Beebe, whose nickname was “Mr. Bus,” ended up writing several books, and he dedicated his 1968 All about the Bus Ministry: How to Start and Maintain Bus Routes, Do’s and Don’ts, Questions and Answers, Pages of Proven Methods, a Manual for Bus Captains to 16 men, and my father’s one of them.

Pastor Jack Hyles of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, where the fundamentalist Baptist bus ministry was born, wrote the introduction.

Of Beebe, Hyles wrote, “The bus ministry that he leads at the great Trinity Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, under the direction of its Pastor, Dr. Bob Gray, is a challenging and inspiring one.”

I’ve also been holding, looking it, flipping through the giant picture Bible that was always central in my house when I was a child. I'm not sure, but I think it's Bob Gray's handwriting on the dedication page — "Presented to Leslie Gilmore, Bus Captain, by Trinity Baptist Church," January 23, 1972.

Flipping through the staplebound pages of Beebe’s book, I read, “We had prayed for some time about starting a bus route out in Jacksonville Beach. This is a long way from the church and would require at least 45 to 50 minutes of driving each way for the bus even after they picked up all of their bus riders. One of our men moved to the beach area and was within five miles of the beach. He consented to start the route. For two weeks (which is my usual policy), I visited with him and showed him how to make the visitation calls and to start winning souls there on the route. The first Sunday there was just a handful, something over 10, on the bus. The next Sunday it went up to 19 or 20.”

But that’s not all.

“The second week that we were visiting on the route, I noticed two children walking down a dirt road.”

Bob Gray, from the 1989 Trinity Christian Academy yearbook

Mr. Bus constantly advised bus captains to do everything they could to talk to children wandering alone, children who looked unsupervised.

So Wally Beebe stopped the bus and asked the kids if they’d want a ride.

It was a time when adults still considered hitchhiking a safe and legitimate means of cross-continental travel. But parents and victims’ advocacy groups increasingly warned that runaway teens — the great terror of the 1970s — were prime targets for drifters and ne’er-do-wells and perverts.

“I stopped beside them,” Beebe wrote, “and asked them if they went to Sunday School.

“They said, ‘No.’

“I asked them to point to their house.”

Jesus had said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

After Mr. Bus asked these children to point to their house, he said, “They did and met us around the corner as we started to talk to the mother. The mother consented for them to come to Sunday School on the bus. Within a week or two, all of the children had come, and several had been saved on the route.”

Through the “salvation” of children, parents too were often brought to the Lord.

Wrote Beebe, “The mother had been led to Christ by the wife of the bus captain and within three weeks the father had trusted Christ also under the testimony of the bus captain on the route. On the fifth Sunday of his route, this bus captain had 61 on the route and seven were saved that Sunday from his route.”

In the introduction, Jack Hyles wrote that when Bob Gray put Beebe in charge of the bus ministry, Trinity had five buses that brought 150 people to church every Sunday morning. A year later, seven or eight buses brought 750 people to church each week. By 1974, the year I was born, the Trinity Baptist Church Bus Ministry would have more than 20 buses that brought in about 2,000 people weekly, hundreds of them children.

For the rest of his life, my father was proud of having been a bus captain for Trinity, during which time he never knew he was bringing children to an environment where pedophiles thrived, to an institution led by a pedophile, one of the most powerful fundamentalist preachers of his time.

On page 69 of his book, Beebe reproduced a “bus captains’ report.” Most of the names are typed. My father’s is written in at the bottom. On Sunday, March 31, 1968, my father claimed to have spent five hours that week, “visiting,” knocking on doors and trying to line up bus passengers for church. He had 47 passengers on his bus that Sunday morning. My dad was 44 years old. I wouldn’t be born for another six years. I know he was proud, with each week’s report, of the work he believed he was doing “for the Lord.”