The Lord's Will

In Boston's red brick, white-steepled Park Street (Congregational) Church last Sunday, the collection plates held exactly $163,478.22.

It was the final day of Park Street's annual Missionary Conference, and the congregation held nine hours of services to raise funds for the missionaries the church currently supports--a spectacular 106 of them. Pastor Harold John Ockenga (rhymes with talk and pray) was more dynamic and persuasive than ever. "We are aware that there are still unreached tribes and peoples numbering probably 600 million people in the world," he said. "We believe it is our responsibility to get the Gospel to those people."

Preacher Ockenga, 45, has not been content with merely shoring up Park Street's Protestant fundamentalism against Boston's Roman Catholics and Harvard's intellectuals. He is also part-time president of a theological school in California, a founder and the first president of the

National Association of Evangelicals, and an indefatigable guest preacher throughout the country. In 1936, when he went to Park Street, the church contributed $3,360 to missions; for each of the last three years the congregation has raised $100,000 or more.

The King Tut Shuffle. Harold Ockenga was not always concerned with world evangelism. As president of his Chicago high-school fraternity, a biographer records, "he sparked a dance in the La Salle

Hotel in Chicago. He could do the then popular but now extinct King Tutankhamen shuffle without blundering a flick of the toe."

But even while he flicked his toes in the evening, Harold began to spend more & more of his daylight hours in the work of the Methodist Church. On Sundays he would attend six or seven church services or study groups, and in time he made up his mind to be a minister. During his undergraduate years at Indiana's Taylor University, he spoke more than 400 times at meetings and churches throughout the Middle West. From Taylor he went to Princeton Theological Seminary; when a right-wing group of the faculty broke away to form the fundamentalist-minded Westminster Theological Seminary, "Ockie" went along. He switched from Methodism to Presbyterianism soon after.

The Old Fires. When "the Lord opened the door" to Park Street, Preacher Ockenga found himself in the country's most historic bastion of Protestant conservatism. Founded in 1809 to resist the wave of Unitarianism then sweeping Boston, the high-spired church overlooking the Common got to be known as "Brimstone Corner" because of the gunpowder that was stored in its basement during the War of 1812. The fiery preaching that echoed there helped keep the nickname alive; William Lloyd Garrison gave his first public address against slavery at Park Street; Moody and Sankey led revivals there; Henry Ward Beecher preached there and his brother Edward was its pastor.

Harold Ockenga has kept the old fires burning. Shocked at the goings-on under Boston Common's shadowy trees during the long summer evenings, he made it a practice to preach from the Parkman bandstand after his regular vesper services. When city authorities refused to renew his permit, he had an outdoor pulpit built on to the church, from which he and his assistants regularly address the Common's assortment of bums, tarts, sailors, tourists and Harvard boys.

"A Man's Got to Know." As Ockenga's fame has spread, offers have poured in to him from congregations across the country. In 1941 the First Presbyterian Church of Seattle offered its pulpit at a tempting boost in pay (a starting salary of $8,500 a year, with annual increases of $700 guaranteed up to $12,000). After nearly two months of soul-searching, Ockenga turned the offer down, to his congregation's surprise and joy. "Now what you say to us will mean more," said a member of his flock, and the Park Street Church has grown by 50% since that time. Last year Ockenga was sparkplug and chief organizer for Boston revival meetings with Evangelist Billy Graham that netted "at least 3,000 decisions for Christ" in 18 days.

Ockenga is currently approaching two other decisions about his ministry. Pasadena's Fuller Theological Seminary, which he helped found, is urging him to accept its full-time presidency. He has also been invited by the National Association of Evangelicals to become its executive vice president. At week's end his mind was still not made up. "A man's got to know what the Lord's will is," he said.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.