June 19. Stuart Epperson. Stu grew up on a tobacco farm. When he was about sixteen, he and a buddy were hoeing corn on a mountainside in Virginia when they saw smoke rising and ran to check it out. Turned out to be one of Stu’s relatives and the buddy’s brother operating a corn-liquor still. Stu’s first shot at being an entrepreneur!
He said that summer was when he knew he had been created for entrepreneurship.
He went on to found the Salem Media Group, the leading US radio broadcaster, internet-content provider, and magazine publisher for Christian and traditional-values programming. He has more than 100 radio stations, including 67 in all of the top 25 markets and SRN News with more than 2,400 Affiliates.
On this date in 1967, Stu founded the Winston-Salem Rescue Mission. He also founded Salem Pregnancy Support Center, One Kid At A Time, the Christian Association of Youth Mentoring, and Kidz Xtreme, an intercity Christian youth program focusing on Section 8 Housing. Not bad for a boy hauling moonshine. Today’s story takes a look at a moment in Stu’s grown-up family life.
The man who understands his influence can use it for generations to come.
One December morning, almost as soon as Stu had settled in his office, he learned someone had broken into his son’s home. There was gunfire. And his daughter-in-law Julie was there. Stu grabbed his phone and dialed her.
Her phone rang, and it rang, and it rang.
At last Julie picked up. With a crack in her voice, she told Stu what had happened.
Like every weekday morning, she had dropped the kids off at school and gone back home.
She was pulling back into their garage when she saw a pile of shattered glass on the ground. And the door she had locked just moments ago was now standing wide open. Instinctively, she grabbed her phone from her purse and managed to dial 911.
She threw the car into reverse to back out of the garage, but a man in a black ski mask appeared at the door with a gun in his hand. He shouted at her to get out of the car, but she floored it, and he opened fire. Two shots exploded from his .45, but both bullets miraculously missed her. Julie’s car slammed into a tree, and the criminal escaped on foot.
Within minutes police arrived and found Julie at a neighbor’s home—shaken, but happy to be alive. The police also discovered that as he fled the scene, the criminal had dropped his ski mask and his knife—evidence they could use to bring the masked man to justice.
On the day that appointment with justice arrived, Stu accompanied Julie to the hearing where the criminal would be sentenced for attempted murder.
Having worked with troubled youth through various organizations he had founded, Stu was familiar with the process. But this time, a young man’s anger had literally come to his family’s doorstep, nearly taking Julie’s life. Through all of this, it had been a challenge for Stu to respond in a way that honored God.
Rather than take this personal story to the airwaves of his national media empire or use his power to destroy the young man who had nearly destroyed his own family, Stu showed up in court and looked for an opportunity to positively influence the outcome. Could any good come out of this?
“When it came time for sentencing, the judge allowed family members to speak on [the criminal’s] behalf. The only male family member present was his great-grandfather. With tears welling in his eyes, the old man told the court he was a ‘good boy who fell in with the wrong crowd.’”
Stu asked the judge for permission to speak to the court, and he asked why this boy’s father or his grandfather were not here for such an important hearing. It came out: sadly, neither one had been involved in the young criminal’s life. Two generations of fathers had been absent from duty. And the judge said he saw this “all the time.”
“Prisons are full of young men who have fathers—if they can be found,” Stu later wrote about the experience.
As a founding board member of Christian Association of Youth Mentoring, he is committed to help lead troubled young men out of a lifetime of bad choices. This happens through close relationships with father figures who are willing to invest in the young men. Over the years, Stu has seen the lives of many young men restored.
“I have witnessed the positive results when an absentee father or adult male mentor chooses to get involved in a child’s life. Forging an emotional bond is true fatherhood and the best hope to stop this epidemic,” Stu said.
“Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1 NIV).
You have influence; use it productively. The man who understands his influence can use it for generations to come.
Stones Cry Out. “50 Leaders of the Evangelical Generation: #43 Stu Epperson.” Radio Transformer. May 24, 2010. https://stonescryout.org/?p=3348.
Epperson, Stuart Sr. “What it means to be a father.” Winston-Salem Journal. June 16, 2018.
Do You Want to Learn More About This Man?
Stu’s first shot at being an entrepreneur was making moonshine with a relative.
They filled the trunk of his 1940 Ford with ten dollars’ worth of sugar and corn mash and turned it into moonshine, which they sold all over the mountain for five dollars a jug. Stu said he knew then that was what he had been created for. Entrepreneurship—not moonshining.
At the end of that summer, the relative got busted. He went to prison; Stu went to Bob Jones University. He says, “We argued about who had the most confinement.”
At Bob Jones, Stu learned how to live in God and how to build a radio station, and after he graduated, two years after his family home got electricity, it also had its own radio station. “It was illegal, but it was built,” he says.
Next—to realize his dream—he needed a building to house a legal radio station. So he bartered. A builder would put a fully equipped building on Stu’s land, and after the radio station was up and running, Stu would advertise the builder’s company. Thirty-five builders turned him down before one agreed that the country needed a Christian radio station.