My Life with Verbal Bean

"You're going to love my evangelist." Nita Shoemake first heard those words from her uncle James during a family visit to San Antonio. Days later she walked into his church in Houston, saw the young evangelist standing on the platform, and — before he had sung a note or preached a word — fell, in her own words, promptly and irrevocably in love.

Verbal Bean, born in a rural Louisiana community on the Sabine River, had become one of the most sought-after evangelists in Apostolic Pentecost: a holiness preacher who sang and played guitar, who was used in the gifts of the Spirit, whose revivals carried him from Texas to California, and whose lessons on prayer and the works of the Holy Ghost are still being read, quoted, and worn to tatters half a century later. In My Life with Verbal Bean: The Man — The Minister, Nita Bean-Hodges tells the story she long resisted writing. The revivals and the road. The trailer years with two little girls. The pastorate at Greens Bayou Apostolic Church in Houston, and the Hippie Revival. And the Saturday night in April 1977 when the car carrying Verbal, Nita, and their baby son home from Louisiana never made it back to Houston.

Gathered from her own memory and from the testimonies of ministers and friends across five decades, this is a portrait drawn without exaggeration — because, as she writes, his ministry stands on its own and needs none.

Read by the author, with additional parts read by Rev. Joel Bean and Rev. Martyn Ballestero.