The most quoted preacher of the 20th century
by Doug Kutilek
Vance Havner (1901-1986) was one of a kind. He was born in rural North Carolina some dozen miles south of the town of Hickory. His people were devout fundamental Baptists, and he was raised in the faith of his fathers. Vance’s father pursued many different trades by turns, for a time being a potter, earning the nickname “Jugtown” for the “wide-spot in the road” where he made and sold his wares. Vance was an avid reader all his life, and early on displayed a mastery of the English language in speaking and in writing. He began teaching a Sunday school class at nine, and had items published in the local newspaper at that early age. He was converted to Christ at age ten, and began preaching at age 12. Naturally, many came to see this “boy-preacher.” Often the congregations numbered 100 and more, once even reaching 1,800. The written remnants of sermons from those days reveal a surprising level of maturity. Never having any desire to be anything but a preacher, Vance was ordained at 15.
Vance attended briefly several colleges — Catawba, Wake Forest, and Moody Bible Institute, among them — but never graduated from any of them. He pastored three churches, two in North Carolina (one of them twice) and First Baptist Church of Charleston, SC (1934-1939), considered the mother church of the Southern Baptist Convention, though in rather difficult straits when he took the congregation. While in Charleston, he spoke frequently on the campus of the Citadel.
For a time in his twenties, Vance came under the influence of the siren song of Harry Emerson Fosdick of New York City, an influential radio preacher who was a committed anti-supernaturalist and peddler of the social Gospel. For several years, Vance’s preaching lost its emphasis on the supernatural Gospel of salvation; his sermons and his published newspaper columns in those days were eloquent, expressive — and sadly devoid of biblical content and perspective. He gained a reputation as a homespun philosopher-humorist along the lines of Will Rogers, and was in demand as an entertaining after-dinner speaker, but not as a man with a message from God. He was rescued from this error in part by the influence of J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, which sets forth with clarity the fundamental differences between biblical Christianity and the apostate theology of “modernism.” Havner was once again and thereafter a self-proclaimed fundamentalist.
While in a meeting at a college in Florida, 38-year-old Vance met an eligible lady on the college staff, Sara Allred, several years his junior. There were no “sparks” at their first encounter, but when they met again a year later, it was love, and soon marriage (December 1940). During their third of a century together, she was an essential component of his itinerant ministry. When she died in 1973, he was emotionally devastated. His best-selling book, Though I Walk Through the Valley (1974), was written about this great personal loss.
Havner became an itinerant revivalist, focusing on stirring up the saints to greater commitment, faithfulness, and service, rather than on evangelizing the lost. Their first decade in ministry was primarily in the northern U.S., with the Havners living in Minneapolis. From about 1950, with a relocation to Greensboro, NC, Havner’s sphere of activity was primarily in the South, though he ultimately preached in nearly every state. He conducted over 1,000 meetings and preached more than 13,000 times. His sermons were often recorded, and are still broadcast on some Christian radio stations; some are accessible via YouTube.
Always a prolific writer, Vance had articles published in most of the leading conservative Christian periodicals of the day — Revelation, Moody Monthly, Our Hope, The King’s Business, The Sunday School Times (all now defunct) — as well as in various newspapers in the South. Many of his nearly 40 books (the first, By the Still Waters, 1930) were compilations of either written essays or sermons. In his lifetime, more than a half million copies of his books were sold, and even so, they used to be hard to find and expensive in the used market. In recent years, many titles have been reprinted and are now much more readily available.
Vance was a genius at turning a phrase, creating a witticism, or composing a pun. His comments regularly had a sharp but necessary point, and were distinctively and memorably phrased. Anyone who reads Havner’s writings will find himself jotting down not-to-be-forgotten quotes.
While Havner often records autobiographical incidents in his books, to my knowledge, the only book-length account of his life is Vance Havner: Journey from Jugtown (Revell, 192 pp.), written in 1977 by his friend of 40 plus years, Douglas White.