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News Release #2
News Release.
To be released____________________________________
CHARLES MASSEGEE EVANGELISTIC SERVICE, INC.
P. O. BOX 96
For Bookings Call:
214/801-7383, 972/843-0463 ext. 7, or 800/267-4453
THE LIFE STORY OF BEVERLY MASSEGEE
A MIRACLE OF GOD’S GRACE
She steps to center stage, moving with unmistakable pride and
assurance. Blonde and blue-eyed Beverly Massegee speaks to the crowd
with ease before her contralto solo voice breaks into song. Her very
stance, her very gesture point to professionalism.
After all, Mrs. Massegee is a seasoned performer. The former
movie actress started entertaining in nightclubs when she was just 13.
Early in her successful career, she sang on such programs as the Grand
Old Opry, Big “D” Jamboree, and Cowtown Hoedown before traveling
world-wide on the Playboy and supper club circuits.
Mrs. Massegee is traveling a different circuit these days. The
stages she performs upon are not subtly lit, to make the most of her
still-glamorous appearance, and the songs she sings are not of
thwarted love, diamond rings, and night life.
Mrs. Massegee, a Christian now, says she gave up her way of
life for that of the Lord. As often as possible she travels as part of
her evangelist husband, Charles’ Meet Jesus Crusade team.
Charles Massegee is from Ranger, a small Texas town about 100
miles West of Dallas. Charles is a dynamic, energetic preacher, in
such demand that he turns down many invitations annually.
Mrs. Massegee says the popularity of her husband is partly
because “he is something a little out of the ordinary.” which is an
understatement at that.
At the age of nine,
Beverly
started winning talent shows for singing country and western songs.
She is a former nightclub entertainer who went by the name of Beverly
Oliver and sang everything from country and western to blues and pop
to jazz. And she is a former movie actress who once, under the name of
June Oliver, staring and co-staring in nine movies.
But here, the glamour ends, because Mrs. Massegee, then the
wife of Dixie Mafia leader George Albert McGann, was an addict who
needed a fix of heroin every six hours.
“To me,” she says, “happiness was being high - having enough
heroin to get me through the day. It was not even having a roof over
my head, because half the time I was not aware there was one.”
She started experimenting with drugs when she was just
fourteen, a girl already mentally and physically exhausted by her
nightclub stints. At first, she took doctor prescribed diet pills to
get “up” for a performance. Soon, she was taking sleeping pills at
night to counteract their effects.
When the doctors caught on, they stopped her prescription. But
Mrs. Massegee was not daunted and made a connection with a pusher who
introduced her to other drugs beginning with marijuana and progressing
to heroin.
She tells the story she has told so many times with a voice
which does not falter and eyes which are wide and open. It seems
almost as though she is speaking of another person, as though the girl
she once was is dead.
At fifteen, she had a child she gave up for adoption. Later she
met McGann, a professional gambler who was tied up with organized
crime. They were married only one year when McGann was convicted of
receiving and concealing, and expanding conspiracy. McGann was
sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.
The court, though, let him out on appeal providing they move to
Big Spring, Texas. There, three months prematurely, Beverly had a little boy
who lived only two hours. “I felt hate and bitterness,” she says. “It
made me hard. It made me mad at God, if I even believed there was a
God.”
Beverly
had been skin-popping heroin into the muscle, but says the loss of the
child drove her to begin mainlining. It was not long before she was
addicted and had to set her alarm clock at six-hour intervals for her
fixes.
“My life was empty,” says Mrs. Massegee. “I had a void even
though I had everything money could buy, a big car, lavish home,
diamond rings. I had a successful career, plenty of attention, but I
had a lack of a living Christ in my life.”
One evening, Mrs. Massegee says, she was passing a Baptist Church while on her way home and
impulsively stopped to hear evangelist Angel Martinez.
Mrs. Massegee walked into the gathering 30 minutes late and sat
in the back row, expecting nothing. “I had tried and tried to give up
drugs, but I couldn’t,” she says. “The evangelist said it was not
giving up anything, it was the taking in of Jesus Christ. With
child-like trust, I asked Him to come into my heart and He did.”
She says she came back to the church day after day, and
subsequently discovered she no longer needed her daily doses of
heroin. Explains Mrs. Massegee of her rebirth, “God made us with
physical hunger and a physical thirst. I believe God also created us
to thirst after Him spiritually.”
But there were rough times ahead. McGann was still involved in
Mafia-affiliated activities and told her he did not want to be married
to a religious fanatic. She tells of a time he pulled her off stage at
a revival where she was singing, drove to their home, put a gun to her
head and said he would end it for both of them.
Mrs. Massegee says she dropped to her knees, started to pray
and the murder-suicide was averted. But shortly afterward, just eight
months after his wife had turned to Christianity, McGann drove to Lubbock for a bookmaking
operation and later was found dead with four bullet holes in his back
and one in his stomach.
Mrs. Massegee then moved to Houston to be team director for a missionary
friend and to patch her life together. When she met Charles Massegee
at an evangelistic gathering, she says life was headed in the right
direction. They dated two months and were married just two days after
becoming engaged. That was in 1972!
She laughs now and says, “When counseling, I always say, ‘Oh,
no. You really have to get to know somebody before you marry him.’
But it worked out for us. I guess we have about as close to a
perfect marriage as there is.”
“We don’t celebrate our anniversary,” she says. “That way we’re
still on a honeymoon. We are newlyweds, and every day is special. I’m
not limiting myself to one anniversary a year.”
Mrs. Massegee has been singing for her husband’s crusade team
since January, 1972, while Massegee has been an evangelist since 1953.
They are Southern Baptists, although they are a separate entity from
the church and have preached in churches of other denominations.
Mrs. Massegee says that they are not hellfire and damnation,
but preach the love of the Lord.
In 1974, Mrs. Massegee added another dimension to the crusade
team by teaching herself ventriloquism, developing a method which uses
the diaphragm instead of the throat. She says she has increased her
voice, which spans three-and-one-half octaves, five notes on the lower
register and five notes on the upper register.
Mrs. Massegee, who has won several national awards for her
talents as a professional ventriloquist, uses her dummy, Erick, for “a
time to laugh and a time to just let loose.”
Erick, who is the subject of an album entitled “Pastor Pickin,”
entertains the audience by telling jumbled Bible stories which Mrs.
Massegee gets straight.
She also has starred in a movie called “Suddenly the Light,”
which is based on her life. The movie is available free of charge to
high schools, junior highs, prisons and colleges and churches.
She insists she does not miss the so-called glamour of her old
life and that the time developing her career was actually time well
spent.
“I didn’t know anything except living out of a suitcase,” she
says. “I believe God used that time in show business to prepare me for
this kind of life.”
The Massegee’s have four children, two sons and two daughters
-- Rocky Shane, Lora Lee Andra (Pebbles), Janie, and a precious little
baby boy in heaven, who died in 1977 at only three months of age. They
call him Trey. They also have six grand children. Charles and Beverly
have experienced many life and death crises that have helped prepare
them in this ministry to the hurting.
On November 20, 1981 their little girl, Pebbles, was diagnosed
as having Primary Oxalosis and told there was no medical hope. A
doctor in Dallas
(the name of which they do not wish to reveal) told them “Take your
four month old organism home and let it die.”
Oxalate, a normal byproduct of the body, is usually discharged
through the urine. When Primary Oxalosis occurs, the oxalate is
retained by the body. It combines with calcium and forms deposits in
the body organs. Children with the genetic disease rarely live more
than a few years.
While it can attack many of the organs, it was confined to
Pebbles’ kidney. Physicians in Dallas
told them of a hospital in
Minneapolis
but refused to recommend the baby because, at that time, no transplant
had been done on a child as young as Pebbles. The doctor at one of the
hospitals in Dallas wanted to sedate her
and let her die without pain.
Instead they took the baby to a clinic in Atlanta and then to Scottish Rite Hospital for Children
located in Atlanta.
Dr. Julius Sherwinter, a specialist in kidney disorders, put them in
touch with Dr. Jan Sheinman, a pediatric specialist, at the University of Minnesota
hospital.
The family went there on December 1, 1981. Once they were
certain of the child’s condition (part of which exhuming the body of
Trey and determining that he died of Primary Oxalosis), they began
looking for a donor. Mrs. Massegee was chosen despite the fact that
she had Lupus, a disease which affects the skin and internal organs.
On January 28, 1982, Dr. Najarian and a team of specialists
performed simultaneous operations on Mrs. Massegee and the baby.
Four-and-one-half hours later, the operation was over.
Doctors had removed both kidneys and the spleen from Pebbles to
expand her abdominal cavity to make room for her mother’s kidney as
explained by Dr. Najarian. Dr. Najarian explained that the kidney will
shrink to the normal size of an infant’s kidney and then begin to grow
as Pebbles grows.
All went well for two years. While the Massegees were in
revival in North Carolina,
Pebbles contracted a strange virus that caused her to reject her new
kidney.
She also suffered a massive stroke which paralyzed her on the
right side. This time Beverly’s nephew, Weldon Dean, donated his 30
year old kidney to the Massegee’s 30 month old little girl.
Another miracle was experienced. The second transplant was a
big success and lasted over 11 years. In 1995 she began to have
problems that ended in a kidney/liver transplant September 6, 1996.
She continues to be one of God’s walking miracles.
In reflecting back over the past Charles expresses his feeling,
“I never cease to be amazed at the hand of God in our lives. He is so
good to us. In times of trials and testing we either draw closer to
God or we are driven away from God. Please pray that we will not
misunderstand God’s dealings with us in this matter. When God uses
special trials and testing, it is for a special purpose. A valuable
vessel or a well finished tool cannot be produced without a high price
being paid. Only poor quality goods can be produced cheaply. Beverly
and I are trying to practice what we preach. Instead of praying for
lighter burdens, we are praying for stronger backs. God did not
promise to see us around our difficulties, but He did promise to see
us through them. He may not roll all our burdens away, but He will
help us to bear them, and we will be more usable because of it. The
Lord Jesus continues to teach us that our usefulness to Him is
determined, not by how much we suffer, but by how much obedience we
learn as we walk with Him in that suffering. The absence of suffering
does not mean the presence of joy, and the presence of joy does not
mean the absence of suffering. God has been so good to us and His joy
does indeed surpass all human understanding.”
Beverly could fit in perfectly
with a cast of Hollywood stars. The
voice surges in one breathe from angelic softness to monumental
grandeur. She is a published author, lecturer, singer and
ventriloquist. She has made several movies, starring in some and
co-starring in others. A full-length motion picture has been made of
her life story. She and her husband, Charles, played themselves in the
movie entitled, “Suddenly The Light”. Part of her life was portrayed
in the movie “JFK” directed by Oliver Stone and starring Kevin
Costner. Beverly
served as technical consultant to Oliver Stone. Beverly says, “My husband and I have but one
desire; to share with others the life changing power of Jesus Christ.
We want everyone to know that there is no life as exciting,
adventurous, and satisfying as the Christian life. We use every means
and platform possible to convey this message.”
Charles has spent his life explaining to others the meaning of
life, death and eternity. He has conducted over 1,500 church-wide and
city-wide crusades, peaking to crowds exceeding 10,000 people a night.
His message is geared to speak directly to the needs of today’s
fast-moving world. A message to those who are hurting, depressed,
discouraged and lonely; a message of love, forgiveness and acceptance;
a message that can free a person from the condemning feeling of guilt
and failure.
Charles gave his life to Christ when he was only nine years old
in his father’s church. At the age of eighteen he answered God’s call
to preach and the same year was licensed by the
Second
Baptist Church
in Ranger, Texas.
He helped organize the
Eastside
Baptist
Church
in Ranger at the age of nineteen and was the first pastor. Because of
football stardom and hundreds of invitations to preach revival
meetings, he entered full-time vocational evangelism. He completed his
education at Hardin Simmons
University in
Abilene,
Texas and Southwestern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Since then he has averaged over 35
crusades a year. Charles was elected president for an unprecedented
three terms of the National Conference of Southern Baptist
Evangelists.
Charles’ objective is simple – to help people in all walks of
life discover the truth about Jesus Christ, and find a personal
relationship with God through Him. THIS IS THE KEY TO THE MEANING OF
LIFE. His message has made sense to countless thousands around the
world. Invite him to your church and find out why.
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