.susanorlean remembers Brother Jed (1943-2022) and his sidewalk ministry.
No one had thicker skin than George Smock, Jr. . Smock, a preacher who went by the name Brother Jed, was imperturbable. No one shrugged off heckling, slurs, mockery, and jeering the way he did. In fact, he welcomed it as a necessary part of his preaching process, which he called the Five Stages of the Crowd. Heckling, or what he termed the Battle, was stage four. It was preceded by the Hook ; Cementing the Crowd ; and Incorporating the Crowd .
“Brother Jed had a very dramatic testimony,” his wife, Sister Cindy, told me recently. He grew up in an academic household; his father was the head of the English department at Indiana State University. Smock seemed to be heading in the same direction, and his first serious job was teaching junior high in the San Francisco area. At that time, he was still quite a heathen.
Smock could have settled down with a congregation, but he had missionary zeal and thought he could preach to more nonbelievers—potential converts—on college campuses than he would if he just headed a church. And so he set his course as an itinerant preacher. Most colleges have a free-speech area, where he could set up shop without invitation; otherwise, he would find an open sidewalk on the edge of campus and give his testimony there.
Whether it was hate-listening or curiosity or the fact that Brother Jed loved to deliver a zinger as much as a comedy-club regular, college students ended up flocking to hear him. He sometimes had audiences that numbered more than a thousand. Some came to protest, saying that he spread hateful messages of sexism, racism, and homophobia.
There was something very old-timey about Brother Jed and his sidewalk ministry, but he managed to stay current. His Web site includes a link to merch , and he and Sister Cindy were huge on TikTok. For nineteen dollars, you could get a personalized Brother Jed video on cameo.com. In 2014, a pilot for a reality series about Jed and Cindy and their five daughters, made by the documentarian Roger Nygard, was posted on YouTube.
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