Sunday, September 30, 2007
AKRON (AP) — The Rev. Rex Humbard was remembered Sunday at a memorial service for a ministry that grew from revival tents to the new medium of television, a pioneer who reached a worldwide audience larger than an evangelist in the 1970s.
About 550 people gathered for Humbard’s “Home Going Celebration” at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, just a few miles from the Cathedral of Tomorrow, a 5,000-seat nondenominational where he broadcast Sunday services.
“Rex was focused on one thing: to tell people they need to be saved,” said Humbard’s brother-in-law Wayne Jones, who worked in the televangelist’s ministry. Humbard, 88, died of natural causes Sept. 21 at a South Florida hospital near his Lantana home. The last time Jones saw Humbard, he was in a weakened state and said: “I told the Lord when I can’t win any souls, it’s time to go home.”
The memorial service was outdoors held under a large white tent, a fitting setting for the former itinerant preacher. After a decade preaching on the road, Humbard settled in Akron in 1952, the same year he saw one of the first television programs broadcast live in Northeast Ohio. He watched a Cleveland Indians-New York Yankees baseball game through the window of a downtown department store and was inspired.
The son of Pentecostal evangelists, Humbard saw the power of television, Jones said, recalling how Humbard visited a TV station manager a dozen times — refusing to give up on his vision — before he agreed to put him on the air.
Humbard began with a renovated theater in 1953 and later the $4 million domed Cathedral of Tomorrow, which included velvet drapes, a hydraulic stage and a cross covered with thousands of red, white and blue light bulbs. The broadcast, also called “Cathedral of Tomorrow,” developed into a mixture of preaching and music, with Humbard’s wife, Maude Aimee, an accomplished gospel singer, and the Cathedral Quartet as regular performers. The Humbards’ children also performed.