Ever since I heard TV’s Jim Rockford call a mobster’s henchman a “pet squirrel,” I’ve had a hard time shaking the expression. Headed to seminary, I wondered whether I might one day become some congregation’s pet squirrel. Now, four years into my first pastorate, the threat still seems genuine.
Throughout seminary, in books, and from conferences to conversations, I’ve been cautioned to go easy-that boldness and bluntness are imprudent, or immoral. There’s always pressure to lighten up.
If darling Missy wants to marry a thrice-divorced avowed bisexual, then the pastor should comply, since to turn his back on their union would mean that he “isn’t loving” and “couldn’t minister to them later.” The furor raised if he doesn’t would underscore the maxims that “You have to be careful not to get too far out in front of your troops, or they’ll mistake you for the enemy and start shooting” and “You can’t lead them if you no longer work there.” You know the words.
Which brings me to Mordecai Ham.
I’d always heard of him as the preacher to whose invitation Billy Graham walked the aisle. I figured him to be a rawboned, disheveled original-what with a name like Mordecai-whose only claim to fame was Graham’s response to his preaching. But what did I know?
Rugged revivalist
In the midst of my study of Arkansas Baptist revivals, I found that Ham had captured the imagination of two of our state’s major cities in 1933. He was conventional and sleek in appearance and gifted in communicating to professionals. Under his preaching during the first fifty years of this century, hundreds of thousands made fresh commitments to Christ.
But a pet squirrel he was not. The accounts of Ham’s boldness remind me that I represent a shocking Lord, and woe to me if I restrict myself to the salons of diplomacy.
When Ham emerged as an evangelist from Kentucky at the turn of the century, he had a background in business and the study of law. From the start, his approach was zealous and blunt. He disdained the common practice of passing the afternoons swapping yarns with the local saints at revival sites. Instead, he insisted that he be taken to the worst sinners in the community.
One hid in a field, but Ham tracked him to a corn shock. The old fellow, a notorious infidel, anxiously asked the revivalist his intentions. Ham said that he was going to ask God to kill him. When the man protested, Ham observed that that shouldn’t bother him since he didn’t believe in God. But if there were one, then death would be appropriate for one who’d poisoned his family’s spiritual prospects.
The lost man begged Ham not to pray that, so Ham relented and volunteered to pray instead for his salvation. At the final meeting in that town, Ham baptized the man and his family.
Talk about buttonholing! But God honored it. And I feel not the least superior to Ham for my more refined tendencies.
Hostility to Ham
Delicacy consistently gave way to urgency in Ham’s approach. He was fond of saying that God didn’t get battleship material from rose gardens, that God’s true servants had to be put through the fire. And he was no stranger to fire. His life was threatened, and his reputation was under constant attack. Modernists called him a moron. The liquor interest sent court stenographers to his meetings in an attempt to catch him in an ill-chosen phrase. People almost tarred and feathered him in San Benito, Texas, in 1918, but the mayor called for nearby troops to intervene. On another day, a hog and ram were skinned for a mock funeral in honor of Mordecai and his song leader, William Ramsey.
Let’s be fair. Ham did go out of his way to provoke the liquor crowd. He’d load a banner-decorated trolley with kids, run this “gospel car” past saloons, and have his folks sing, “If you only loved your children more, you wouldn’t drink your rum.”
With the demise of trolleys, he organized “gospel parades,” with signs, singers, and up to two thousand cars. Several times he rented an old, horse-drawn hearse and prominently displayed a skeleton in it. As the hearse passed a tavern and the patrons emerged for a look, a hidden announcer broadcast, “Boys, once I had a big time too, but look where I am now. You’ll be joining me soon; better get right with God.”
Caustic Christianity
In a typical series of meetings, sometimes lasting for months at one site, Ham defined sin, named the spiritual foes, showed Jesus’ trial to be a legal travesty, explored the afterlife, exalted faith and renewal, condemned the age, analyzed our predicament, shamed the slack, explained deliverance, demanded discipleship, and offered the love of God.
One Texan was so struck by the fact that God could and would save him, even though he’d killed four men, that he jumped to his feet during a 1910 sermon and shouted, “Saved! Saved! Saved!” Jack Scofield, the musician for that revival, was so taken by this joyful declaration that he penned the popular hymn by that title the next afternoon.
Ham didn’t shrink from caustic expression. He spoke of “modernistic rot” and marveled that “a man who could talk so much like an ass” should express surprise that Balaam’s ass talked like a man. He castigated lodge “worship” and warned that members would find only a “silent god” in their hour of spiritual need. He scolded folks for wanting the minister to say nice things at loved ones’ funerals, even if he had to lie.
Current wisdom holds that this talk is counterproductive. This may be true, but Ham’s record offers evidence of astounding productivity. To the critics who claimed that he used a sledgehammer to pound church members, Ham retorted that every time he knocked a “halfway Christian” out of the doorway, he got a sinner in. These halfway folks, he explained, “hold onto the church with one hand while they play with the toys of this world with the other.” In one sense, Ham had no use for these folks. But in a deeper sense, he devoted his life to their correction.
A stimulant, not a model
I asked my seminary preaching prof if he had ever heard Ham. Yes, he had, down in Texas. He said it was a sweaty performance with handkerchief in full use.
I’m not particularly troubled by this, for though I do not myself match the style, it seems to me that impassioned speech and gesture are appropriate for life-or-death matters. I recall the bluegrass performances of Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe and their bands. The incongruity of flying fingers and deadpan faces was fun to watch. But it seems to me there’s also an incongruity in the studious delivery of soul-upheaving words. Ham had no place for such incongruity in the pulpit.
Ham was a pastor for a time at Oklahoma City’s First Baptist Church, but he’s not exactly a pastor’s model. It’s one thing to blaze prophetically through a town and another to abide for years as Christ’s vicar, from hospital bedside to pulpit to marriage retreat.
But the gap is not so great as many suppose. And a pastor without a fair measure of Ham’s candor and flame is no model of Christ for his people.
When Disney rereleased Song of the South in the seventies, I went to the theater in happy anticipation of the pleasure I’d found when I first saw it. But bless the old film’s heart, it didn’t age well. I winced at the racial stereotypes and Anglo arrogance woven into the Uncle Remus story.
Well, some of Ham’s material is also pretty embarrassing today. Three weeks into his 1933 Little Rock meeting, he spun out a conspiracy theory involving international collusion of string pullers and banking interests intent upon the demoralization and subsequent overthrow of governments and institutions tolerant to Christianity. And his response to the presidential candidacy of Roman Catholic Al Smith was ill-tempered and careless.
To me, Ham is not so much a hero as a stimulant and, from time to time, an indictment. Perhaps it’s better to savor than to imitate him. But in his model of single-minded zeal, I find a strong antidote to the temptation to become innocuous and even gratifying to a world unseemly to God. It’s clear that God blessed his ministry. And it’s equally clear that we can learn from it.
-Mark Coppenger
First Baptist Church
El Dorado, Arkansas
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
