Cline Rex Paden

Cline Rex Paden was born in Wagner, a small town in Texas, on 22 Aug 1919, one of seven children born to John Calvin Oscar Paden (29 Oct 1888, Washington Co., Arkansas -- 24 Apr 1957, Lubbock, TX), farmer, and Lona Elizabeth nee Hardin (24 Jan 1889, Tennessee-16 Dec 1975). His older sister, Gwendolyn, died of diptheria at the age of three, and his older sister Mildred at the age of 18 from rheumtic fever. His parents were prominent in the local Church of Christ, and participated in founding Boles Children's Home. This was passed on to their children, three of whom (Cline, Harold 1922-2001; and Gerald, 1924-2015) served as missionaries. The family moved around, following tenant farming opportunities in the hard scrabble life of dry land farming.

He was educated at Idalou High School in Lubbock County, and Abilene Christian College (Class of 1947), where his studies included bible, evangelism and mission studies. He did not graduate, but began his preaching career in Hawley, Texas, where he delivered his first sermon. He then moved to preaching positions at Rosenburg and Brownfield.

Paden absorbed the millennialist confidence that it was the role of the Church to evangelize the world. American nationalism, Restorationism, anti-Catholicism and ant-Communism were central tenets of the family's view of the world. The experience of World War II - in which his brothers Harold and Gerald fought (the former in Italy) - propelled post War reconstructionism, including the American expansion into the world.

On 3 July 1947, Paden married Jo Iris nee Cathey, at Smith, Texas. They would have three children: Tim (b. Rome, 1949: married Metta nee Moudy); Terry (b. Rome, 1952; m. Becky, and lived in Abernathy, north of Lubbock), and Tanja (b. Copenhagen, 1958; m. Randy Couchman, and later lived in Boerne, TX).

Harold's service with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy propelled him into study of Italian when he returned to the USA: he kept insisting to Cline that they go to Italy on mission, and Cline later remarked that he mainly agreed in order to keep Harold out of trouble. Not long after they married, Cline Paden and several of his classmates and their partners made a survey trip to Italy. On their return, Cline and Jo Iris itinerated among churches for a year, virtually living in their car, to raise support for their Italian vision. In 1949 Harold and Cline, and later Gerald (who joined them in 1953), went as Church of Christ missionaries to join the 13 strong COC mission team in Italy. In part because of American misunderstandings about European legal and social culture, and in part because of direct opposition by Italian elites, they quickly ran afoul of the Catholic church and Italian police. When they preached in local towns around Rome and Frascati (particularly in Castel Gandolfo), they were subjected to abuse, stoning by mobs often stirred up by the local priest and even, in one case, the dynamiting of one of their jeeps. Paden entered Italy as a tourist, and so his application for a permanent residence permit was delayed. When authorities repeatedly refused his team a license to operate, they proceeded anyway. To manage its assets, the mission set up a limited liability company, called 'Società Speranza', which purchased various properties in the area and, later in Rome. Among them the most important was a “war scarred, but otherwise beautiful villa” – renamed Villa Speranza (literally “the villa of hope”) – in Grottaferrata, near Frascati, which cost the then princely sum of US$70,000. The villa was converted into a school and an orphanage. Again they were confronted with operating without a license. Paden's arrest for unlicensed activity sparked a diplomatic incident with the US State Department and the Italian government, which was (under pressure from the Catholic Church) continuing to use Fascist period regulations to restrict Protestant and missionary practice. When Paden posted a sign reading “Chiesa di Christi” [sic] (“Church of Christ”) on the church’s meeting place on Via Achille Papa in Rome, police repeatedly removed the sign and turned parishioners away from the building. Paden's brother Gerald had locked himself in a car to take pictures of the incident, but the police broke into the car and took him off to jail. COC representatives in the USA put pressure on the State Department both about their treatment, about related religious liberty issues. COC members flooded US diplomatic offices with 'thousands' of letters of complaint and petitions. (Lubbock Avalanche-Journal 8 Jan 1950, 14) Meanwhile, Paden continued to preach. Time magazine reported on his struggles with Italian authorities in the 1950s. “You can close the doors of the church buildings, (but) the church is God and you cannot close him down,” Paden, then 33, told the magazine in 1955.

Both Paden and his supporters in the USA saw Catholic and state opposition as evidence of the rightness of their cause. Gerald Paden would remain in Italy after Cline's visa ran out and he was advised to leave by Italian authorities in case he might 'just turn up dead.' Gerald's experiences of Catholic Action bullying and property destruction would feature in Harold's pamphlet opposing the election of John F Kennedy, the first US President of Catholic faith, in the campaigns of 1960.

Cline and Jo Iris Paden moved to Denmark in 1957 and served as a missionary there before returning to Texas to serve at a church in Plainview, TX/ In 1962 he collaborated with West Texas Church of Christ leaders to commence the Latin American Bible School (later the Sunset International Bible Institute) in Lubbock, TX, with the aim of training of Spanish-speaking preachers. Paden was particularly interested in training preachers in Cuba where (after his experiences in Italy) he sought government approval first. The first class started with six students. In 1963, it moved into the facilities of the Sunset church, where Paden was made an elder, and was renamed West Texas Bible School. In 1964 the name was changed again to the now well-known Sunset School of Preaching (SSOP), providing instruction was now given for both English- and Spanish-language preachers. By 1969 the student body had swelled to more than 175 students. In 1973 the Adventures In Missions (AIM) program was started for college-age young people with Don Solomon later becoming the full-time director in 1977. The school began its Extension School department to offer SSOP courses via correspondence in 1974 under Virgil Yocham. The school later extended into Deaf, Slavic, Chinese and other languages, and established a training centre in Mexico City as well as an extensive correspondence school. Their materials were used in preacher training schools in Canada and Guyana, and the Atlantic International Bible Institute in Miami, which had a particular focus on Cuba. In 1993, Cline Paden was succeeded as head of the College by Truitt Adair with Paden as Chancellor.

Paden served as an elder for the Sunset church for 30 years. As a missionary teacher and preacher, he produced a significant number of articles, sermons, pamphlets and books.

Paden died on 26 May 2007 after a lengthy fight with Parkinson's disease, at his home in Lubbock, Texas, and was buried at Resthaven Memorial Park, also in Lubbock. A significant figure in COC US missionary history, as Del Pero and others point out, his legacy was greater in its aftereffects than in any direct growth of congregations in either Italy or Denmark. The legal fights sparked by their work in Lazio contributed over the longer term to the fight for religious freedom in Italy, and his work putting together the mission team for Denmark acted as the basis for broader, longer-term churchplanting work by others in Scandinavia.

Sources:

Conservapedia, https://www.conservapedia.com/Cline_Paden

Del Pero, Mario, 'The Cold War and the religious question in Italy. Microhistory and the “normal/exceptional” case of the mission of the Church of Christ of Brownfield, Texas', in Mark Hutchinson & Paolo Zanini, Brill Global History of Italian Protestantism, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

Paden, Gerald, Obituary, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/lubbockonline/name/gerald-paden-obituary?id=18510597

Paden, Harold O., 'Religious Freedom and Roman Catholic Power!', Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Presidential Campaign Files, 1960, JFKCAMP1960-1021-015-p0007.

Scott, Truman, The Gray Eagle, Lubbock, TX: Sunset Institute Press, 2012.

Tryggestad, Erik, 'Longtime missionary, ministry school founder Cline Paden dies at 87', The Christian Chronicle 26 May 2007, https://christianchronicle.org/longtime-missionary-ministry-school-founder-cline-paden-dies-at-87/