Ministers take their calling seriously, and although some may fight their calling originally, others embrace the calling and know exactly what God wants them to do.
Ed Smith knew exactly what he was being called to do years ago, and part of what he felt called to do went all the way back to his childhood.
“I started in the ministry in 1976. I answered God’s call to the ministry then, and it was a special kind of call. I was called to preach, and I stood up from the alter saying that I knew that God wanted me to work in Christian radio,” stated Ed Smith. “In 1976 where I grew up in Georgia, that was unheard of. There was no such thing as full time Christian radio. The closest I knew to it growing up was the local country station would play what they called sacred music on Sunday morning, which was country artists recording Christian music. That was my introduction to Christian radio, and the rest of the time, they sold airtime to local preachers. They filled up a Sunday morning with preaching, but that was just not my idea of Christian radio. My idea of Christian radio was full time, all the time. It was already happening in some parts of the country but not where I lived.”
He willingly answered the call and began his education in the ministry. He also started a job that would help lead him into his other calling with the radio ministry.
“Once I accepted the call in 1976, I enrolled in a bible college in Florence, MS, that is closed now. It was a little independent college, and I spent five years there. I like to say I got my four year degree crammed into five years. I worked a lot, took part time classes, changed my major once, and added some things to it which is why it added an extra year,” recalled Ed. “It was during that time, I got my first job in radio broadcasting in Jackson, MS, with WJXN. We used to call it the Colonel, your gospel station. I got my first job there working with Jeff Steel, who is now with The Steels, and met him right off the bat in the radio industry. Jeff told me how to run a console.”
Once he officially started his job in the ministry, Ed found it difficult. Not everyone was as confident as he was about his calling to work in radio ministry.
“After I left college, I went into the ministry and took my first church in Georgia and got a job with a little radio station there. I was struggling a lot because people were telling me that if I was called to preach then I needed to grab a bible and go preach,” remembered Ed. “I believed that and never doubted that, but I also knew God wanted me to work in Christian radio. I was being told that that was ego, wrong, not biblical, and all kinds of things. I got the job at the radio station in Forsyth, Georgia, part time anyway because I was a part time pastor, and I had to have a job to make a living.”
While he was working at the station one night, something happened that confirmed for Ed that he was doing exactly what God wanted him to do. Although he was already sure of himself, it was exactly the motivation and confirmation he needed to give him the strength to press on despite others not understanding it.
“I was there one night filling in for someone since it had to be manned 24 hours a day with live people at the time. It was about 10:00 on that Thursday evening, and it was just a wonderful evening. The Lord was there, and I was praying on radio and reading scripture, and I’d introduced a brand new song by the Happy Goodmans. As the song played, I felt the Lord’s presence in the studio. It was unbelievable, and I was having a one man church that night,” reminisced Ed. “The phone rang, and there was a lady on the other end who asked me if she could ask a personal question. I told her yes and she asked me if this was just a job to me or if I really meant everything that I’d been talking about. I told her I meant everything. She asked if I was a preacher, and I told her that I was. She started to cry and told me that I just may be her last hope because she was sitting there with a pistol aimed at her forehead and that if I couldn’t give her a good reason not to, then she was going to pull the trigger. I froze. We had talked about that type of scenario, but I never dreamed I would be in that situation. I prayed for God to give me the words to say, and in the course of about an hour, God helped me talk her out of committing suicide. She promised me that she would not commit suicide, and this lady was living in an abusive situation. Her husband was an alcoholic. She had a 13 year old son who lived with her, and the husband had started beating him too. He’d put her in the hospital several times. We were able to minister to her, and she was finally able to get away from him. She ended up sending us a card at Christmas time with a long letter to tell me not to stop what I’m doing because God used me through the radio to save her life and that her son and her were back in church and had gotten right with the Lord. I knew for sure at that moment that that is what God wanted me to do. I told God that as long as he left that door open, then I would never leave. Now here I am 45 years later in Quitman, MS.”
While Ed and his wife, Marie, run the large station in Quitman, they also have other radio stations in other areas and states that they control since it can all be done remotely through the internet. Thanks to the station being controlled through the internet and having a website to play the music through, they are able to minister to people worldwide through the local station, Joy Christian Radio.
“This radio station is a 25,000 watt station that covers most of Laurel, most of Quitman, most of Meridian, and even goes as far as parts of Alabama. We have listeners in Gilbertown and Butler. We also own a radio station in Jasper, GA. We’ve been there for about eight years now. We’re in the process of getting our newest station in Louisville, MS,” expressed Ed. “Our ministry is just all about sharing the hope of the gospel. We have listeners all over the world, including Russia, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. We’ve even had a missionary to China tell us that every now and then the station is able to somehow make it past the blockers in China, and people will listen to us until the blockers catch on and block the station out. We’re a worldwide organization, not a business. We’re a ministry and run just like a church. We have worship services and hold bible study from time to time. I do preach regularly. In fact, I’m a pastor now. I pastor at a little church in Eucutta. We haven’t quite been there a year yet, but it’s a wonderful extension of our ministry.”
Although he now owns and runs the various stations for Joy Christian Radio, Ed did not start out by buying his own station. In fact, he worked for a major network and was able to see how much potential it could have and was able to use what he learned from that job to achieve his dream.
“I worked with American Family Radio for almost 10 years total, and I helped them build the big network they have. That was part of my job: travelling all over the country, getting tower sites, and working with managers. I also did a lot of work inside the engineering department and was a news anchor,” explained Ed. “I did a lot of things for them, but my dream was always to have my own station. It was something the Lord laid on my heart at a young age, and of course my calling was honed in to doing this type of network after I saw the potential of what it could do.”
It was after working for American Family Radio that Ed was able to create a plan to follow through with what God was leading him to do with a radio station. Now, they are very successful and do everything they can to minister to and help others through encouragement and messages on the radio.
“I sat down around the kitchen table on January 1, 2000, with my three kids, and Marie and I laid out my plan because it’s what God wanted me to do. We were going to build a radio network and just didn’t know how big. We were just going to do what God said, and we were going to use internet instead of using satellite. We’ve dealt with some very slow internet services over the years, but we still do it. This is my heart, and it’s my heart because it’s people,” declared Ed. “I realized just how impersonal a radio station is, so we turned it into a ministry and can do personal things as well. The radio station is kind of like going fishing. We pitch out the gospel to whoever is listening and present it in a way that they want to listen. Then, when they respond, we’re able to minister in different ways. We’re not in competition with the local church. We operate like a church, but we are independent and don’t connect with any specific denomination or group, and we’re only owned and dominated by the Lord Himself.”
He doesn’t seclude himself to just playing music and preaching. Just like any other ministry, Ed makes sure that the radio station is part of the community as well. In fact, he started a program with nursing homes in the areas that his stations are located where they are able to minister to the residents. They particularly have one major project for the nursing homes around Christmas time, but he would like to expand that and do something similar multiple times a year.
“We send Christmas cards to the nursing homes in the areas where our stations are located. We give each patient one card per day for what we call the 12 Days of Christmas, and it ends on Christmas day,” stated Ed. “We bundle them up and take them to the nursing homes, and they distribute one per day to the residents. The cards are signed by different people, and some have artwork done by kids. We just do different little things to try and make it special.”
Ed devotes the majority of his time to his ministry, and he loves being able to interact with the public and help them as they go through life. Although he has had multiple close encounters over the years, the Lord has kept him here on Earth. As long as he continues to live, Ed is dedicated to serving the Lord in every way that he has been called.
