Finis Alonzo Crutchfield, Jr.

Finis Alonzo Crutchfield Jr. ( – ) was a noted American clergyman and a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He began his pastoral career after graduating from Duke University Divinity School in 1940. His first assignment was First United Methodist Church in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He remained there until he was sent to Norman, Oklahoma, in 1950. Ten years later he became senior pastor at Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa. He was credited with bringing Oral Roberts into the Methodist Church (although Roberts later left) and served as a negotiator in the 1968 merger of the Methodist Church with the Evangelical United Brethren Church.

Early life Crutchfield was born in Henrietta, Texas, on August 22, 1916. His father, Finis Crutchfield Sr., was a Methodist minister, as was his paternal grandfather. The father was sent by the church to many different towns while his son was growing up. These included Denton, Wichita Falls, Denison and Dallas. (Finis Jr.) was five years old when his father was posted to the Tyler Street Methodist Church. There, he first met Benja Lee Bell, who would marry him twenty years later. Crutchfield then arranged a meeting between Roberts and Angie W. Smith, then the Methodist bishop over the Oklahoma Conference and who was Crutchfield's superior. Crutchfield reassured Roberts by saying, "I have fine men in my church who are from your university. Thirty two people died in the fire, including Reverend Bill Larson, the local minister of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC). The lounge had recently served as a temporary home for the UFMCC in New Orleans, and although that function had recently moved to another site, this was the third fire in the first half of 1973 at a UFMCC church facility Huffington Post later reported the attendance at the July 1 service was 250. This resulted in some measure of popular panic that AIDS was communicable through casual contact, later disproven. Charles accepted his father's statements, adding that, "It is not in my father's character to have lied to me."