Not much is known about the praying ladies of Gainesville, and all of their names — with one exception — are almost certainly lost to history. Here’s what we do know:
In Dance, Children, Dance (later retitled From Bondage to Liberty), Jim Rayburn III quotes his father as saying,
“I found out that across the street from the high school a group of elderly women had been meeting for six years, every Monday morning, getting down on their knees in the living room of dear old Mrs. Frasher’s. They prayed every Monday morning for six years, long before I ever heard of Gainesville, Texas, for the high school kids across the street. I was there a year before I heard of that prayer meeting. I used to go over there with those five or six old ladies and get down on my knees with them after that club started to roll. That was the thing the Lord used to start it.” (From Bondage to Liberty, p. 36)
While Jim Rayburn often told the story when he was alive, it had never appeared in print until the release of Dance, Children, Dance in 1984. Since then it has become the stuff of Young Life legend.
A few trips to Gainesville twenty-plus years ago and lots of research have fleshed out some of the details about this particular episode in Young Life’s history.
The first thing I found out, searching City Directories of Gainesville, church records, the local cemetery, and the city newspapers is that the “Mrs. Frazier” referred to in Dance, Children, Dance, was actually Clara Ann Frankenberger Frasher, the wife of Henry Leonard Frasher, better known as “H. L.”
I asked Jim III where he had gotten the story in the first place and he said it was from an old talk his father had given. From that I inferred that the name had been spelled phonetically by whoever transcribed that message (F-R-A-Z-I-E-R rather than the correct F-R-A-S-H-E-R). As a result, it now appears in From Bondage to Liberty correctly as “Frasher.”
According to city records, the Frashers did indeed live across the street from the high school. The house, however, as far as I can tell, no longer exists.
In an interview I did with him, early volunteer and staff member Murray Smoot told me about Mrs. Frasher, whom he got to know well during his short stint as associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Gainesville. (Mrs. Frasher and her husband were active members there.)
“She would sit on her front porch, not too far from Gainesville High, and watch the kids, [go] back and forth, back and forth. God gave a great burden on her heart. And she would sit there in a rocking chair on the front porch. (And I’ve been there on her front porch many a time, I knew Mrs. Frasher well.) And she prayed for these kids. She said ‘I don’t know what I can do, but I pray that someone will rescue these kids. They don’t know where they’re going, they’re just wandering back and forth and going where, nobody knows.’ It was her prayer life that really brought Jim Rayburn to Gainesville High.”
Murray described Mrs. Frasher as “just a guiding light. There were four or five women who were of the same spirit and of prayer,” saying further that Mrs. Frasher was “a warmhearted person.” (I should note that it’s my impression the origin story for Young Life was given to Murray by Jim, not by Mrs. Frasher herself.)
I wish I had asked Murray if he remembered any of the other women, but I did not.
The timeline that evolves would be as follows:
Mrs. Frasher began praying for the kids at the high school around 1934. At some point she enlists some other ladies.
In the spring semester of 1939, Jim begins a Miracle Book Club at Gainesville High School, seventy-five miles from where he is in seminary in Dallas. I have not been able to find any recorded reason (other than Mrs. Frasher’s prayers and God’s plans, that is!) as to why Jim went so far afield to do this work, as there were plenty of schools in Dallas or Fort Worth at which to start an MBC chapter.
In the fall of 1939 Jim is hired by the First Presbyterian Church of Gainesville to be “Christian Education Director and Choir Director,” having been noticed by the church’s young pastor, Clyde Kennedy, for his work with Miracle Book Club. There was a lengthy discussion by the elders about this move. It was finally brought to a vote by none other than Henry Frasher, Clara’s husband.
Jim goes to work for the church in the late fall (November?) 1939. By January of 1940, Jim’s Miracle Book Club has exploded, thanks to the prayers of Mrs. Frasher’s group, the prayers of some of the early “club kids,” and the radical step of moving the club meetings from afternoons after school to a weeknight in a member’s home. It is, in fact, the largest Miracle Book Club group in the nation.
The success in Gainesville led Jim to trying out a series of “Young Life Campaigns” in the subsequent summer (1940, after Jim’s graduation from Dallas Theological Seminary), first in Gainesville, then in Houston, and finally in Dallas. These are the first events Jim ever held using the name “Young Life.” (While Jim strongly disliked the name “Miracle Book Club” and some of the organization’s practices, he did end up borrowing some key concepts from them, primarily the idea of centering an evangelistic outreach around a single high school rather than around a particular local church.)
During the 1941 school year (Fall 1940 - early Spring 1941) Jim was out of seminary and still working for Miracle Book Club, but he increasingly used the name “Young Life Campaign” and, by March of 1941 he had made his break from MBC. Young Life was born. (It would legally incorporate in October of that year.)
Some final notes about Mrs. Frasher: She actually was closer to Jim’s younger brother Bob, who served as the pastor of First Presbyterian, Gainesville, after Jim left seminary, though Jim knew her first (Bob was at DTS at the time of his pastorate).
I don’t think Jim kept up with Henry and Clara, though I believe they knew of Jim’s early Young Life work. Sadly, Young Life left Gainesville a few years later.
Mr. Frasher lived to the ripe old age of 92, dying in 1960. Clara preceded Henry in death by six years. Mrs. Frasher died at 83 after a long illness on July 14, 1954. In what I see as a heavenly coincidence, she died the very same week that the ministry in whose founding she was so unknowingly instrumental welcomed its first campers to its newest property, Malibu Club. She got to watch Malibu open from the heavenly bleachers, where she and her old friends have long since reunited and have no doubt cheered on the tens of thousands of kids coming to Christ in Young Life ever since they met on their knees in the 1930s.
Written by: Kit Sublett kitsublett@earthlink.net