C.J. Duvall

Executive Vice President of ALLTEL – Little Rock, Arkansas
Eden Board Member

At four, C.J. Duvall sat quietly in his daddy’s church, then just a one-room church in rural Ballwin, Missouri, built on land where slaves had once been auctioned. Kindly old men and women, most of them retired house servants for wealthy families in west Saint Louis County, gathered around the potbellied stove and sang hymns. “You could look in their eyes and see they’d had hard, hard lives, but they were at peace with it,” he says.

C.J. went to Webster Groves High School, “right around the corner from Eden, but I sure never thought I’d end up there! Some people have an early understanding; I did not.” At Missouri Baptist College, he worked as a janitor to supplement a basketball scholarship, and spent long, quiet hours mopping and waxing floors. “I did a lot of thinking and meditating,” he says, “and I found myself singing those old hymns I’d heard when I was four. That was the beginning of me attempting a relationship with God.”

He went on to earn a masters in industrial organizational psychology at Indiana University/Purdue, became a trainer, a consultant, a human-resources specialist. His goal was always to climb into management. But the week he got the coveted promotion, he was sitting at home eating Cheerios in his gym shorts, and instead of reading up for his big new job, he reached for his dusty Bible. It flipped open at Matthew 10:32, “the passage where Jesus says, ‘if you deny me, I will deny you.’”

It felt as if someone turned on the lights.

C.J. struggled with that passage for two days. Then he went in to work, thanked his boss and said he’d be leaving for seminary in the fall.

“It felt as if someone turned on the lights,” he says, the joy still in his voice. “I studied scripture and wrote my thesis under Stephen Patterson, about early Christian life. That excited me. It reminded me of that little church in Ballwin.”

He’s now an executive vice president of ALLTEL, a $6 billion telecommunications company in Little Rock, Arkansas. “My job there is also a place where I minister,” he remarks, a tactful reference to executives who have “more than most people in society can ever dream of,” yet still feel empty. As for C.J., he adores his wife and their two little girls, he’s on Eden’s board and the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters — and the rest of the time he’s volunteering and preaching at Theressa Hoover United Methodist, an inner-city church where half the congregation is living in the shelter or has come through the chemical dependency program. “Working there changes me every day,” he says.