Tony Evans Brings Up the Mixed Emotions of Remarriage After Loss
His engagement announcement reflects the complications of grief and celebration that Christians experience with second marriages.
Tony Evans stood before his Dallas congregation last week—with keyboards playing softly in the background and his four adult children standing behind him—to announce that nearly four years after losing his wife Lois, he was engaged to remarry.
“God, in his sovereignty, has brought someone into my life,” the 74-year-old told the crowd, which broke out in applause. He introduced Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship to his fiancée Carla Crummie, a widow who had lost her husband around the same time as Lois’s passing.
The announcement came with a sense of both somberness and celebration. “Pray for us,” he asked the church, calling it a “sensitive” and “tender” time.
Evans had been married to Lois for 49 years before she died of cancer at the end of 2019, and the famous preacher described how she had been his partner in life and ministry. He told his church, “This may evoke some grief in some people, which I can understand, because we’re reminded about the fingerprints”—the legacy of his late wife.
Christians who have lost their spouses know firsthand the mixed emotions that come with remarriage.
“I’m more aware than most people of the reality of joy and grief that need to coexist in the life of a godly person,” said Jonathan Pitts, who attended the service along with dozens of ministry colleagues to celebrate Evans’s birthday. Pitts lost his wife of 15 years, Wynter, in 2018. She was Evans’s niece.
“I was there to grieve with those who grieve but also rejoice with those who rejoice—to rejoice with Dr. Evans that he’s found love again and companionship, knowing that that tension is not a problem to ...