From Heritage & Harvest by Dr. Harold T. Commons
©Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, 1981.
Reprinted by permission.
The present administration of ABWE has asked me to include my personal testimony in this history of the first fifty years. I felt a certain reluctance to write in such a personal vein, but I have yielded to persuasion on the grounds that such an account may demonstrate God’s grace and keeping power.
I came from an ecumenical background. Both my parents were of Quaker stock, my father from Illinois, my mother from Brooklyn, New York. I remember attending worship in the old Lafayette Avenue Friends Meeting House in Brooklyn as a child. My father started out as a Quaker preacher, holding pastorates in Clinton Corners and Yorktown Heights, New York. He became disenchanted with the Friends and went into the Congregational ministry, after studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He served Congregational churches in West Hartford, Connecticut; East Weymouth, Massachusetts, and Whitinsville and Waltham in the same state. I grew up in the parsonages of those churches. I remember particularly the thirteen years of my boyhood in Whitinsville.
Unhappily my father became more and more liberal in his theology, espousing the theory of evolution, accepting the higher-critical view of the Scriptures and winding up with a Unitarian view of the Godhead. As a result, I never heard the gospel during my formative years. The sermons I heard were of the “do-good and be-good” variety with no emphasis on what one should believe in order to be a Christian. The emphasis was entirely on character. I was sprinkled and became a church member at the age of twelve. I had no intelligent faith of any kind, but I thought I was a Christian.
I went through two years of high school in Whitinsville before going off to boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island. This was a Quaker institution of excellent repute and high scholastic standing, the Moses Brown School. I then went on to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
During my sophomore year at college I had my first religious experience. The so-called Oxford Group Movement was active on many college campuses in the twenties. It was then called “Buchmanism,” and subsequently known as “Moral Rearmament.” The movement recruited about twenty of us students to attend a weekend house party at a little New England hotel. There we engaged in sharing sessions. We sat informally around an open fire while the leaders encouraged us to bare our souls and compare our private lives with that of Jesus Christ to see how far short we had fallen from the four absolutes; absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute love and absolute unselfishness. This was designed to produce in each of us a conviction of sin and a desire to surrender ourselves to God and let Him take over our lives. We were told to arise early in the morning and have a quiet time. During these we would read the Bible and sit quietly in meditation with a pad of paper and a pencil handy, asking God for His directions for the day. We would write down what came to us and then pursue those objectives during the day, trying to put the four absolutes into practice in every conceivable set of circumstances. I came under deep conviction of personal failure and sin and experienced what I now look back on as a moral conversion. I sincerely determined to do business with God. I turned over a new leaf and started to live a new life, as did a number of the other fellows, including my only brother who was two years older than I. He quit smoking and drinking and started having quiet times, as did I. The trouble was that we were never given any foundation on which to build the new life. The gospel was never explained to us. We were never given any doctrine into which we could sink our teeth. Everything was in the realm of experience. The result in most cases was purely temporary. My brother’s conversion lasted two weeks. Then he threw it all overboard as an emotional binge. He proceeded in the opposite direction from then on. I might well have followed suite had I not shortly thereafter spent my Easter vacation visiting an uncle of mine. Paul Taber of Ridgewood, New Jersey was an earnest Christian who knew his Bible well. I told him of my experience and my new relationship to God through surrender to His will. He listened sympathetically and probed deeply enough to find that I had no clear understanding of the gospel and was doctrinally at sea. From his Bible he showed me passages dealing with salvation and the need for personal faith in Jesus Christ as the virgin-born, sinless Son of God who had died vicariously for my sins that I might be freed from the guilt and penalty of those sins and receive the gift of eternal life. He showed me that one is born again through believing and accepting God’s gift and not by doing anything else even though what I had done was good as far as it went. This opened up a whole new vista to me. I drank in everything he said. Then and there I received Christ as my personal Savior and planted my feet on the rock of the deity and lordship of Christ. Uncle Paul gave me my first Scofield Reference Bible, along with several good books on Bible study and Christian doctrine.
I went back to Williams and took a stand on the fundamentals of the Christian faith, no longer one of the wishy-washy, spineless variety of nominal Christians who didn’t know what they believed or why and really didn’t care. I began a one-man crusade on the Williams campus to restore faith in the Bible as the Word of God. Another uncle, John E. Taber, provided me with 700 copies of Philip Mauro’s book, Evolution at the Bar. I personally delivered the book to all the students I could contact in their dormitories and to every member of the Williams faculty. This caused no little stir. The professor of geology responded with a lecture, Fundamentalism at the Bar. He made a monkey of the little sophomoric upstart who was willing to throw over all the findings of modern science for an outmoded Book of myths, scientific inaccuracies and contradictions. I was promptly nicknamed “Fundy” and was written off by the majority as a religious fanatic. My father counseled me to stop my rash course and tend to the business for which I was at college, getting an education. But I had crossed my Rubicon and burned all the bridges behind me.
Shortly after this I met a beautiful girl, Corinth E. Tracy. She had been led to Christ by a well-known Bible teacher, Mrs. Carl R. Gray, wife of the president of the Union Pacific Railroad. Miss Tracy, an ex-Episcopalian, lived in Williamstown. Our new-found faith drew us together. We organized a Bible class and met in her home once a week. Several of the fellows who had shared my experience at the Oxford Group houseparty attended this class. We had many interesting sessions of discussion and Bible study before we graduated and went our separate ways. During my senior year, I became the acting pastor of the small Congregational church at North Pownal, Vermont, about ten miles from Williamstown. Miss Tracy went with me each Sunday and taught a girl’s Sunday school class. Several of those girls became earnest Christians, and we kept contact with them through the years.
I had joined the Student Volunteer Movement, thinking I would go as a missionary to Africa. I attended several student missionary conferences and was elected secretary of the Connecticut Valley Union of the Student Volunteer Movement. This included chapters on the campuses of Williams, Amherst, Wesleyan, Smith, Mt. Holyoke and several other New England colleges for both men and women.
I decided to get the best possible training for future service and selected Princeton Theological Seminary. Princeton, a Presbyterian institution, was recognized as the citadel of orthodox Christianity in the east, with such noted scholars as Dr. Robert Dick Wilson, Dr. Oswald T. Allis, Prof; J. Gresham Machen, Prof. Casper Wistar-Hodge and others. Miss Tracy and I were married during my freshman year at Princeton. God never gave to any man a better helpmeet than He did to me.
During my second year at Princeton the fundamentalist- modernist controversy in the Presbyterian denomination came to a head on the Princeton campus. Professor J. Gresham Machen was dropped from the faculty when he attacked the Foreign Mission Board for its failure to discipline one of its missionaries in China, Miss Pearl Buck, for her doctrinal heresies. At that juncture, I decided I could not conscientiously return to Princeton for my final year and applied for transfer to the Evangelical Theological Seminary (now Dallas Theological Seminary). During that summer of 1929, however, seven men on the Princeton faculty resigned in protest at the disciplinary action against Dr. Machen. These men decided to start a new seminary in Philadelphia, Westminster Theological Seminary. I cast in my lot with them. Twelve other students from my class at Princeton turned up in Philadelphia that fall. We became the first, graduating class of the new seminary.
By the time I was graduated, my perspective had shifted. I was still vitally concerned with foreign missions, but realized that the cause of foreign missions was tied irrevocably to the battle for the pulpits of churches in the homeland. The makeup of the missionary force is a cross-section of the churches at home. If the churches went liberal, it would not be long before the missionary force would go liberal as well. I decided I could best serve the cause of evangelical Christianity on the mission field by doing what I could to stem the tide of liberalism in the churches at home.
Both Corinth and I had become Baptists for conviction while I was attending seminary. On Easter Sunday, 1930 we were baptized by immersion in the Spruce Street Baptist Church of Philadelphia. We became members of that church, with Dr. C. Gordon Brownville as our pastor. I applied for ordination by the Spruce Street Baptist Church. The Baptist Union of Philadelphia examined and approved me after lengthy debate. Some negative votes were cast because I had refused to pledge my unqualified support of and cooperation with the boards and agencies of the Northern Baptist Convention. I promised support only as far as I could agree with the policies of those boards. At any rate, my ordination was approved. I promptly shocked the Baptist hierarchy by having a Presbyterian, Professor J. Gresham Machen, preach my ordination sermon.
I had received a call to pastor the First Baptist Church of Atlantic City, New Jersey. I accepted this call and began my pastorate there in July of 1930. This church was a member of the New Jersey Baptist Convention, and thus part of the Northern Baptist Convention. What little the church gave to missions went to the unified budget of the convention. The church had no missionaries of its own, and little missionary interest. My first suggestion was that the church reduce its missionary giving to the convention and take on the partial support of a new missionary to the Philippines, Miss Edna Hotchkiss, serving under the Association of Baptists for Evangelism in the Orient. Miss Hotchkiss was the sister of the Rev. Herbert Hotchkiss, one of my classmates at both Princeton and Westminster. The church accepted this suggestion and pledged $50.00 per month support. This was the beginning of a personalized missionary program for that church. It has expanded its missionary vision and program tremendously in the years since. Thus my vision of helping the cause of fundamental missionary work through an active pastorate had its small beginning. A year later, I became personally involved in the administration and promotion of the Association of Baptists for Evangelism in the Orient (ABWE) as recorded in the narrative in this book.
