Modern Evangelicalism Mourns the Loss of One of Its Founding Fathers

With the death of Harold John Ockenga, Christianity has lost one of the handful of men most responsible for giving shape and credibility to the modern evangelical movement. In a 1947 convocation address at Fuller Theological Seminary, Ockenga coined the term “the new evangelicalism.” He succumbed to cancer on February 8 at his home in Hamilton, Massachusetts, at the age of 79.

In his commitment of service to major evangelical organizations, Ockenga was virtually without peer. “He probably served on more boards than any other evangelical of our time,” said theologian Carl F. H. Henry.

To name a few of his many accomplishments, Ockenga was the first president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, which he co-founded. He served as chairman of the board throughout CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s first 25 years, and as president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, where he was president emeritus until his death.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY advisory editor Kenneth Kantzer says that it was as a churchman that Ockenga made unique contributions to the evangelical cause. “He became the trusted counselor of other leaders, who sought his guidance and spiritual wisdom,” Kantzer said. “The church of Christ will sorely miss his great leadership from which it has profited greatly over the last 50 years.”

Ockenga left his greatest legacy with Boston’s historic Park Street Church, a citadel of Christian orthodoxy in New England. He was pastor there from 1936 to 1969. His emphasis on powerful preaching, church renewal, and world evangelization helped make Park Street a much-emulated model of evangelical witness.

“I don’t think I know of anyone who was quite as visionary as Dr. Ockenga,” said Paul Toms, who has pastored the church since Ockenga’s departure. “And yet this vision was accompanied by a very practical, down-to-earth approach.” Toms said Park Street has continued and built upon the traditions Ockenga established, noting that the church gives more than $800,000 annually to support world missions.

Toms is one of many Christian leaders who served as assistant pastor under Ockenga and regarded him as a mentor. Others include Gleason Archer, language professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Chris Lyons, who is the pastor of the 1,200-member Wheaton (Ill.) Bible Church.

It was Ockenga who convinced Archer that Christianity is intellectually defensible, thus steering him away from a career in law and toward the ministry. “His was a mind set aglow by the love and knowledge of God,” Archer said. Ockenga’s reasoned messages attracted students from prestigious universities such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In a great university city like Boston,” Lyons said, “it was freely admitted that Harold Ockenga had one of the greatest intellects.”

Ockenga’s dream in the 1940s to bring revival to New England was at first frustrated by Boston-area pastors who did not share his enthusiasm for a young, unknown evangelist named Billy Graham. But Ockenga persisted and succeeded in bringing Graham to Boston for a series of meetings early in 1950. Because of a continued need for additional space, the location of the meetings had to be changed from Park Street Church to the 6,000-seat Mechanics Hall auditorium, then to the Opera House, and finally to the Boston Garden. On January 16, 25,000 people flooded the huge sports arena and the streets outside; more than 1,000 made decisions for Christ. Many of them ended up at Park Street Church.

Carl Henry called Ockenga “one of the pioneers for evangelical impact when New England was largely a barren, liberal, and Unitarian field.” But Ockenga’s influence extended far beyond New England. In the 1930s, he and J. Elwin Wright criss-crossed the country to drum up support for what was to become the NAE. Ockenga insisted that evangelicals maintain a non-antagonistic stance toward the National (then it was Federal) Council of Churches (NCC). This led to a falling out with Carl McIntire, who pulled away to form the fundamentalist American Council of Churches, which has remained antagonistic toward the NCC.

In 1944, Ockenga passed up the opportunity to become full-time executive secretary of NAE. He said there was too much unfinished business at Park Street. That was not the only attempt to lure Ockenga away from his beloved church. In 1954, he announced that he was leaving Park Street to become full-time president at Fuller Theological Seminary, which he had served as president-in-absentia since 1947. In addition to the presidency, Ockenga was offered the chance to begin a television ministry with the seminary’s backing.

But parishioners at Park Street called a special meeting and voted that his resignation be reconsidered. That expression of loyalty and love sent Ockenga into a period of prayer and fasting, and he eventually changed his mind. Had he accepted Fuller’s offer, Carl Henry assures that “Ockenga would have become the ‘Fulton Sheen’ of American Prostestantism.”

Ockenga was a superb administrator and fund raiser. (Park Street donated more than $260,000 in three years to help get CHRISTIANITY TODAY off the ground.) But he always maintained that preaching was the heart and soul of his success in the ministry.

“The sermon is a message from God,” he wrote in a 1958 article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. “It should be born in prayer, or devotion, or Bible study, or in the fire of human experience.”

During his 33 years at Park Street Church, Ockenga delivered an average of four sermons per week. He appealed primarily to the intellect, not to emotions. He had a thorough command of biblical themes and was a brilliant apologist. All of his sermons were carefully written out, but he never used notes. He typically spent hours memorizing sermon outlines and texts.

Clyde Taylor, NAE secretary of public affairs from 1944 to 1974, said Ockenga was at his best when he was in the pulpit or at the podium. Taylor recalled a conference on church-and-state affairs held 35 years ago at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. “One of the principal speakers had to cancel,” Taylor remembers. “I knew Harold John was in town. I called him, and with less than two hours’ notice he gave one of the most terrific addresses I’ve ever heard on church and state. He used the Reformation as an illustration and reeled off facts like he’d just finished reading the textbook yesterday.”

Taylor credited Ockenga with giving “the whole evangelical movement respectability and intellectual credibility.” Current NAE executive director Billy Melvin crystallized the sentiments of the many who knew Harold Ockenga: “To Audrey [Ockenga’s wife], the family and friends, we send our deepest sympathy and Christian love, rejoicing in the confidence that ‘to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.’ ”

Harold John Ockenga: A Man Who Walked with God

Billy Graham remembers a trusted counselor.

The following article was adapted from a eulogy delivered by Billy Graham at the funeral service of Harold Ockenga.

I’m going to take a verse of Scripture out of its context to describe Harold Ockenga. Genesis 6:4 says there were giants on the earth in those days. I first came in contact with Harold among some of those spiritual giants when I was a student at Wheaton [Ill.] College. The first National Association of Evangelicals convention was being held, and he was elected president. There he was … young, brilliant. I’d never heard such an address as he gave. He used as his text, if I remember correctly, 1 Thessalonians, the first chapter. He talked on that passage of Scripture and stirred all of us to a new unity.

He was a giant among giants of his generation. He was a giant intellectually. I’ll never forget when I came to Boston in 1949 to speak at the Park Street Church on New Year’s Eve. The place was filled, and there were hundreds of people in the streets. Later, Harold and I toured New England together. We went to every state, every major city, and every major university from Harvard to Brown.

When we went to speak at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], there were 10,000 students in the audience, and I was scared to death. I said, “Harold, would you stand up and use all the big words you can think of? Let them know at least one of us knows something!”

Harold stood up, and I couldn’t tell you what he said. I don’t know whether it was Greek or Hebrew or Latin, but it was something. I’ll never forget that introduction. When I got up, they said, “Well, boy, he must be something to have an introducer like that!”

I remember one day Harold was praying for revival. (He was always a revivalist and an evangelist at heart.) As I went into his study that day, I heard somebody crying, but I couldn’t find anyone. I found Harold under the rug in humility before the Lord in prayer. And I thought to myself, “Well, if he needs to pray like that, what about me?”

He was a spiritual giant. He could open the Scriptures almost anywhere without a note and just get up and speak. He was a giant in every way that I can think of describing a man of God. And you can sum it up by saying that he was a man who walked with God, who was a friend of God, and who showed us how to be a Christian at all times.

We give glory and praise, not to him, but to Christ. And we can see today that there’s a joy in the air. This is not just a service for a person who has died. This is a person who has graduated and is now with our Lord Jesus Christ. His family understands that, and Harold’s wife, Audrey, understands that. And this comforts her. Of course, it’s right to have some tears. We do grieve, but not as those who have no hope.

We give praise and glory and honor today for the life and ministry of Harold John Ockenga. Nobody outside of my family influenced me more than he did. I never made a major decision without first calling and asking his advice and counsel. We served on several boards together, we founded several things together, and I thank God for his friendship and for his life.

Harold John Ockenga: The Park Street Prophet

Former CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor Harold Lindsell remembers a fellow pilgrim.

Harold John Ockenga and I co-la-bored in significant endeavors that marked what I like to call the golden age of evangelicalism in the United States.

Harold was an unusual and attractive person whose mystique and charisma were obvious from the moment anyone met him. Many people regarded him with a sense of awe, for he seemed to reign from Olympian heights. But once his reserve was penetrated, one found him to be a congenial, down-to-earth, delightful man who was warm and tenderhearted. The students in the first class at Fuller Theological Seminary passed along an apocryphal story about how they rose at six in the morning, turned to the East where Harold lived as in-absentia president of the institution, and bowed down three times.

He was a man without guile. He was open, forthright, and sensitive, yet commanding. He was a puritan whose life was blameless. He and his wife, Audrey, formed a united team. Their loyalty and devotion to each other stood the test of time.

Harold was the co-founder (with Charles E. Fuller) of Fuller Theological Seminary. I was his first lieutenant for most of the 17 years I spent at the seminary. Later, I was editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY; Harold was the magazine’s chairman of the board.

In 1969 Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary came into being as a result of the combined labors of Harold, Billy Graham, J. Howard Pew, and others. Harold assumed the presidency of the school from its inception until he retired in 1979. I was chairman of the board of the institution and worked closely with him during that period. His monumental contribution to the work of the seminary cannot be overestimated.

Harold was an extraordinary churchman. His beloved Park Street Church was the focus of some of the finest years of his ministry. For more than three decades, he proclaimed the gospel there in the power of the Holy Spirit. His annual missionary conferences were known around the world.

As a pulpiteer, Harold had no peer. He never used notes. He had instant recall and was able to command an array of factual knowledge that staggered my imagination. His sermons and addresses were meaty, organized, and moving. His audiences hung on to every word. At a time when other downtown churches were closing their doors, his church on Brimstone Corner prospered.

The resurgence of evangelical faith in New England was in a large measure due to the work and ministry of Harold and Billy Graham, who came to Boston for evangelistic outreach that began at Park Street. The outreach eventually made a lasting impact on all of New England. When the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was formed, Harold became a board member and remained on the board until his death.

I saw Harold a week before he died. He was lying in bed at home, attended by his wife. When I entered his room, I realized this dear friend was close to death. He had been operated on for cancer 18 months earlier.

He had suffered a stroke, which made it difficult for him to speak. His body was shrunken, but his eyes were alert. We prayed together for the last time. We had prayed together many times before, but this was the most precious prayer time of them all. I knew I would see him no more in this life—but I will see him again in a resurrection body. How do I know this? I know it because the Word of God says so, and this is the sure Word Harold believed without mental reservation. It is the sure Word he preached all the days of his pilgrim journey.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.