Heritage Series- E E Cleveland Interview (Biography)

adventistsermon... In this part of the Heritage Series, 3ABN presenters interview retired evangelist E E Cleveland.
E. E. Cleveland was preeminent in Adventist public evangelism during the second half of the twentieth century. As an exceptionally gifted preacher who trained thousands of pastors, Bible instructors, and ministerial students in evangelistic methods, his ministry had a global reach that transcended race. At the same time his leadership was of singular significance for the American church’s struggle to overcome its accommodation to racism during an era of rapid social change.
A Faithful Foundation (1921-1939)
Earl Cleveland’s father, William Clifford Cleveland (1890-1956), was born April 6, 1890 in Wartrace, Tennessee. He grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he and Eunice Pettigrew (d. 1943) met in high school and married in 1916. They would also unite in lifelong dedication to the Seventh-day Adventist faith that William had embraced in 1915 after studying the Bible in conjunction with the book Bible Readings for the Home Circle.1
Bill and Eunice Cleveland moved to Decatur, Alabama, where their first son, William James (1917-1991), was born. Soon thereafter, William C. Cleveland was drafted for military service in World War I, his plea for an exemption in order to provide for his wife and infant son denied. He withstood harsh intimidation in remaining faithful to his convictions as a noncombatant and Sabbath keeper.2
The Cleveland’s second son, Edward Earl, was born March 11, 1921, in Huntsville, Alabama. Two years later, with a resurgent Ku Klux Klan making its presence felt in Huntsville, William Cleveland decided to move his young family to Chattanooga, where he found employment as the custodian for the Girls’ Preparatory School and supplemented his income driving a truck to deliver coal, kindling wood, and other necessities. Another enterprise he developed was selling chipped ice in various flavors (“cool-outs”) from a mobile cart.3 On June 2, 1928, a third son, Harold Lovell (1928-2007), joined the Cleveland family.4
Earl came to regard his father as a “giant oak” who, along with his “quiet Christian mother,” provided a foundation for faithfulness.5 Though segregated, the racial climate in Chattanooga was not as intensely oppressive as in Alabama. Here, William Cleveland was a member of the Negro Voters League, an organization concerned with mobilizing black voting power, and took his sons to hear orators who exposed them to the ideals and rhetoric of freedom. He also forbade his sons from using the city’s segregated public transportation services.6
William C. Cleveland served as elder at his church in Chattanooga for 34 years. All three of his sons became ordained ministers. William J. Cleveland would serve as president of the Southwest Region Conference (1969-1976) and Harold L. Cleveland as president of the Allegheny West Conference (1972-1983).7
From early boyhood, it was evangelists who captured Earl Cleveland’s imagination. “I thought they were the greatest functionaries on earth, and I wanted to be one,” he remembered.8 He started preaching at age six, delivering sermons written by his father at churches of various denominations in Chattanooga.9
Young Earl learned much about public speaking from his father, who was an effective preacher. From his mother he derived a facility for writing. Eunice Cleveland shied away from public speaking and was not a published author, but her correspondence demonstrated an ability to “turn a phrase.” At an early age, Earl enjoyed writing poetry, and from his mother learned “the importance of catchy phrases, and the value of narrative and descriptive metaphors.”10
Education, Marriage and Early Ministry (1939-1946)
After graduating from Howard High School in Chattanooga as co-valedictorian and class president, Earl took the two-year ministerial training at Oakwood Junior College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Alabama. He thrived at Oakwood, where he held several leadership positions, including president of the senior class and editor of the student newspaper, the Acorn. During his final semester, Earl formed a relationship with Celia Marie Abney that would lead to marriage.11 They had been schoolchildren together in Chattanooga, where Celia’s father, Benjamin W. Abney, served as pastor until the Abneys left in 1931 for overseas mission service in South Africa.
During this era, C.E. Moseley, to whom students gave the honorific “rabbi,” was in charge of ministerial training at Oakwood. Moseley’s “sermonic style and substance was electric,” Cleveland wrote decades later.12 While Cleveland was a student, though, the two often clashed. Being well-versed in the Bible, Earl believed “there was not, really, anything new a Bible teacher could teach me.” With that attitude, he acknowledged, “I made my Bible teacher miserable.”13