After Turner Johnston, an older deacon of Frankville Baptist Church began fervently praying in the early 1920s for God to call a preacher from their congregation, God has kept on calling full-time Christian ministers from that church. In particular, God has called the family descended from Joseph Napoleon and Nancy Jane Granade.
“The town of Frankville was small and had a little post office in my daddy’s little ole country store,” said Samuel “Sam” A. Granade, one of the14 called to ministry.
Frankville is in Washington County about 25 miles northwest of Jackson. In the 1920s the Frankville church met for Sunday services infrequently and when they did, turned their ears to the preaching of visiting minister J.B. Jackson, who traveled from Chatom to preach an afternoon service.
“In those days Frankville church (founded 1845) was a small wooden structure and for many years they didn’t build anything onto it,” Granade said.
“One Sunday Mr. Johnston asked the church to approve a special prayer service on the following Wednesday night for the purpose of asking God to call a preacher out of the church, for their church,” said Granade, now an 85-year-old resident of Montgomery.
“As a child, I attended services called to pray for God to call a preacher and was impressed with the earnestness of the people as they petitioned God to call a preacher from their midst,” he said.
One man’s prayer
When Granade was in about the fourth grade, Johnston’s home was at the end of a lane behind the schoolhouse.
“During lunch I was playing in the schoolyard and saw Mr. Johnston leave his house, cross a small field and enter a pine thicket. He did this every day, Granade said. “I found it strange behavior in a grown man. So I slipped up the fencerow to see what was going on in the thicket. I found Mr. Johnston praying, and praying out loud.”
For many days, the young Granade would slip out and listen to the deacon pray.
“As I listened, at some place in his prayer Mr. Johnston would always ask God to call a preacher out of the Frankville Baptist Church.”
As time passed, Granade’s family would move to Leroy, where his brother, Charles Jackson Granade, soon presented himself to Leroy Baptist Church to be licensed to preach. He was the first of the 14 called.
Sam Granade would be next. “I was a teenager about to graduate high school when I was called,” he said. “I began to feel that God was calling me. It was just a compelling feeling that I had, a feeling that He was calling me to preach. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I resisted — I didn’t want to be a preacher because I was too much of an outdoors person.”
Granade was only the second called and had no idea that so many of his brothers and cousins would also be called.
“I was the second boy out of the Frankville Church to feel God’s call and offer his life as a minister,” he said.
While he was studying at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
“I had a compelling feeling that I ought to volunteer.” Granade explained that the military would not draft him into World War II because he was an ordained minister, so he took the initiative and volunteered.
He would serve as a U.S. Air Force division artillery chaplain in the war and nearer to the war’s end as a division chaplain as part of he 82nd Airborne division.
A long way from Granade’s tiny world of Frankville, the war catapulted him into the world of transport missions during 1942–1943. On one six-month stint he recalled trips that took him to North Africa to take troops to drive the Germans out, to Scotland to pick up British troops and take them to South Africa and a stop at Casablanca to pick up prisoners of war. He would go on to train as a paratrooper before the war’s end.
After the war, Granade re-entered seminary and in 1948 became pastor of Evergreen Baptist Church, Conecuh County.
In 1973, he established the office of church-minister relations with the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions and was director of that office. He served until his retirement in 1983, and has supply preached, served interim pastorates and led conferences.
Granade said that after 20 years of retirement, his doctors have insisted that he quit hunting, fishing and preaching for the sake of his health.
During a March 2003 interview, his voice sounded strong, his resolve firm and his memory of Turner Johnston praying in the woods, vivid.
Other cousins would answer God’s call with each of their own stories sprinkled with the life-dance of happiness and sorrow.
The third to be called was Sam Granade’s first cousin, Audrey Pugh Granade, who helped begin Gulf Hills Baptist Church in Mobile, preaching in spite of a paralyzing spinal tumor that left him struggling between a walker and a wheelchair.
The next was Charles James Granade, who was the first of three brothers to enter the ministry, serving churches in Alabama and Georgia.
Charles Granade’s brother, Napp Nelson Granade was the next called to serve as pastor of churches, among them more than 23 years at Shirley Hills Baptist Church, Warner Robins, Ga.
Another of Charles Granade’s brothers, Gaines Calhoun Granade served Cusseta Church in Alabama and two churches in Georgia before becoming a lawyer in Atlanta in 1965.
Influencing the present
These six preachers were the grandsons of Joseph Napoleon and Nancy Jane Granade, but the story of God’s calling goes on.
The influence of this couple, Turner Johnston’s prayers and the Frankville church continues in the next two generations producing three ordained ministers and three women who married ordained ministers.
Two great-great-grandsons of Joseph and Nancy Granade would become ministers — Nelson Granade and Scott Allen Little. Two great-granddaughters — Billie Schultz, Mary Joyce Granade, and one great-great-granddaughter, Billie Nell Reynolds — each married Christian ministers to minister alongside them.
Reynolds married Leon Harris, who was converted and later ordained at Frankville Baptist, and pastor Billy Harris, who was also ordained at Frankville, is their son.
The latest relatives called are Katherine Jackson, a missionary journeyman in Bolivia and the daughter of Larry and Mary Jackson of Birmingham, and Charles Randall Granade, singles minister at Day-spring Baptist Church, Mobile, the son of Charles and Lynette Granade of Mobile.
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