The three children of Howard and Jane Norton sat at their parents’ breakfast table at their home in Searcy, Ark., on a Sunday morning.
They prayed and took the unleavened bread representing Jesus’ body, then the fruit of the vine symbolizing the Savior’s blood — a practice they’d witnessed their parents follow countless times.
Jane, 87, had passed away 17 days earlier. They knew their father was close behind.
As they shared the Lord’s Supper in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice, “our father went home to be with God,” Tom Norton told The Christian Chronicle, the publication Howard Norton once served as editor. “Happy he’s with Mom and surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses as he is united with God.”
Howard, 88, died Oct. 22 after a long battle with cancer and other ailments.
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“Outside of my family, he positively changed my life more than anyone else,” said David Duncan, minister for the Memorial Church of Christ in Houston. When Duncan was 12, his father died, and at 17 he enrolled at Oklahoma Christian University.
As his Bible professor, Norton became “the biggest male influence in my life,” said Duncan, who followed in Norton’s footsteps as a missionary to Brazil.
“He would sit with me and other students outside of class for hours and talk about spiritual matters and church work,” Duncan said. “He helped us believe we could do more for the Lord than we had imagined.”
Dogs, guns and gospel
The couple met on the campus of Abilene Christian University in West Texas. They sold Bibles door to door as they trained to serve as missionaries.
“We got used to dogs and guns,” Howard Norton said with a chuckle as he reminisced with his wife in 2021. Jane chimed in, “You might say, ‘Not easily discouraged.’”
The couple spoke to media during the 60th anniversary of the São Paulo mission. The Nortons were part of a team of 26 adults and 18 children who journeyed to the Brazilian metropolis in 1961.
“We brought the church with us,” Howard Norton said. When team members disagreed, “we’d go to the mat for our ideas, but then, after the fight, we’d go get coffee or we’d have lunch together, or maybe we’d go to each other and apologize. I think the Brazilians saw that — that we respected each other, but that we also made mistakes and knew how to resolve those mistakes.”
About 350 Igrejas de Cristo (“Churches of Christ” in Portuguese) came into existence due in large part to the team’s efforts, said Michelle Mickey, the daughter of one of the missionary families.
The team’s work inspired the creation of Great Cities Missions, a nonprofit that prepares teams to teach, preach and plant churches throughout Latin America.
The São Paulo team also influenced future missionaries, including Bob Eckman, who serves a Church of Christ in Nottingham, England.
“I was at the dockside in the Port of Houston when the Nortons sailed for Brazil,” Eckman said. “It had a profound impact on my life, but I never dreamed then that I would spend more than 57 years on the mission field.”
Teaching and Chronicling
The Nortons served in South America for 16 years, returning to the U.S. in 1977 to work for Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City. Jane taught Portuguese, and Howard was a professor of Bible and missions. From 1992 to 1996 he served as chair of OC’s College of Biblical Studies. He also served as pulpit minister for the College Church of Christ, now the Memorial Road Church of Christ.
In the late 1970s, John and Dottie Beckloff, missionaries to Nigeria, took oversight of the Chronicle. Despite their efforts to keep the paper alive, a lack of subscribers and funds forced the couple to cease publication in 1980.
Howard Norton and his cousin and former Brazil teammate, Don Vinzant, made plans to buy the newspaper and keep it going, only to learn that the Beckloffs had given the publication to Oklahoma Christian. Terry Johnson, the university’s then-president, tapped Norton to serve as editor.
The paper resumed publication in 1981. In his first editorial, Norton called for Churches of Christ to “awaken again to its responsibility and assume its divine role as the body of Christ.
“The church is not a political party, a civic club nor a country club,” he wrote. “It is to be the body of Jesus.”
Norton served as editor until 1996. A year later, he and Jane moved to Searcy. Howard served on the Bible faculty at Harding University and directed the annual lectureship. He edited Church and Family magazine.
One more mountain in Honduras
In 2008, Howard Norton preached a sermon at the College Church of Christ in Searcy, Ark., titled “Give Me This Mountain,” inspired by the teachings of minister Reuel Lemmons.
“Even as I preached, I was thinking to myself, ‘I really would like to have another mountain,’” Norton said in an interview the next year in the Central American capital of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In 2009, Norton accepted the offer to serve as president of Baxter Institute, a school that prepares preachers and their wives for ministry in Iglesias de Cristo (“Churches of Christ” in Spanish) across Latin America. He and Jane served in Honduras through 2012.
Among the Baxter students the Nortons influenced is Yariel Olivera, a preacher in Cuba. “He told us many stories, jokes, songs,” Olivera said of Howard, who also taught that Jesus can “unite his children — no matter what country, race or political system we come from.”
Preaching and living the word
As tributes for the Nortons poured in from around the globe, their children, who shared communion at their parents’ kitchen table, reflected on the couple’s legacy.
“Dad was the front man … groomed his entire childhood to ‘preach the Word,’” said Ted Norton. “Mom loved Dad and supported her front man in everything.”
As they reminisced about Jane’s life, “Dad told us … that there were two times in his life that Mom ‘carried’ him,” Ted Norton said. “He told us the first time and then lost the thought on the second. The three of us suggested several possibilities … and Dad said, ‘Well, she did then also’ for each of them. She carried him many times so that he could continue preaching the Word.”
Laurie Diles, the Nortons’ daughter, said that Howard “was a lot of things to a lot of people, but he was my Daddy. … He thought I could do literally anything.”
Diles and her husband, Allen, served for 11 years as missionaries in the Czech Republic. She earned a doctorate and teaches in Harding’s communication department.
She and Howard “spent many, many hours together these past six months as he recovered from a ruptured aneurysm, learned to live life at a different pace, joined me for visits with Mom at rehab,” Diles said. “I am so happy for him that the days of weakness are behind him forever.
“His constant advice was that the most important thing is to be faithful in Jesus. He was faithful.”
This story first appeared in The Christian Chronicle.
Erik Tryggestad is president and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. He has filed stories for the Chronicle from more than 65 nations.
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