edith long boyd (1917-2003)

Edith Long Boyd was the paternal grandmother of Jesse Boyd, Full Proof Gospel Ministries' founder. She was the faithful wife of a faithful pastor for more than fifty years and the paragon of the Proverbs 31 woman. While Jesse Boyd was studying the Word of God in college and seminary, wrestling with a call from the Lord to the Gospel ministry, he often visited his widowed grandmother in Greenville, South Carolina and spent hours feeding with her around the Holy Scriptures. The last time she spoke to him, a telephone call he made from the middle of nowhere in the California desert on February 16, 2003, Edith garnished enough clarity in her dying days to once again admonish her grandson, as she had done many times, to seek God's will and be obedient to it without compromise, "to make full proof of thy ministry (II Timothy 4:5). Jesse then told her he was going to ride a bicycle across America and preach the Gospel from coast to coast. She praised the Lord. Five months after her death, that bicycle ride began with a back tire in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Full Proof Gospel Ministries was born.

In her will, Edith Boyd left to her grandson an original page from a first-edition 1611 King James Bible that her husband received in 1998 as a token of appreciation from his flock for fifty years of faithful service in ministry. Interestingly, it was a page bearing II Timothy 3:1-4:13. Right there in II Timothy 4:5 on this 400+ year old Bible page is Paul's last exhortation to young Timothy: "make full proof of thy ministry." From this verse, Full Proof Gospel Ministries takes its name, a subtle recollection of this same exhortation often restated and reiterated by Edith Boyd to her grandson.