Mordecai Ham - Targeting Texas

Targeting Texas

Ham held more than seventy-five meetings in Texas, including Beaumont, Houston, Austin, Galveston, Bay City, Port Arthur, Corpus Christi, Fort Worth, and Longview.

Ham held his first Texas meeting in 1903 in the community of Hico, with 150 decisions for Christ. Similarly, there were 160 decisions thereafter in Garland east of Dallas. J.B. Gambrell, editor of The Baptist Standard newspaper, described Ham's Garland meeting:

"Brother Ham is a young man and has been preaching but a short time. He has distinct elements of power. In the first place he preaches certainties and not doubts. An evangelist of doubt is a sorry traveler in these low grounds. He believes the great truths of the Bible up to the hilt, and he preaches with directness and great aggressiveness."

Evangelizing along the Gulf of Mexico, Ham held meetings at the First Baptist Church of New Orleans, which brought thirty converts in 1903. He returned to New Orleans in 1908 for a meeting jointly sponsored by Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, and three thousand responded.

In Fort Worth, Ham held a meeting with J. Frank Norris, another conservative evangelist known for his strict biblical interpretation. The two developed a personal and professional relationship which was sometimes strained. Norris in most instances tried to dominate his friends and associates to his advantage and benefit.

Ham used several unique strategies for reaching people, often confronting individuals face-to-face. He employed "gospel cars" in several cities to draw attention to his revivals. While in Houston, the gospel car approached an individual on the edge of a bayou who was contemplating suicide. The man was converted to Christianity as a result. If street cars were unavailable, Ham used horses and wagons. In one of the meetings in Houston, the parade assembled included more than two thousand vehicles, including a hearse.

In 1911, the meetings in the border city of Laredo, a traditionally Roman Catholic area, and in Tyler, the largest city of East Texas, netted three hundred decisions each.

In 1915, there were 1,200 decisions in San Angelo in Tom Green County in west Texas. E.J. Lyon, pastor of the First Baptist Church of San Angelo encouraged other Baptist pastors to assist Ham in his crusades:

". . . Baptists in the states will make no mistake in working with, as they usually get more members than any other churches in the meetings. Then they get more than they could get in a church meeting of their own. Yet again, the general tone of Christian living is lifed in the whole religious life of the city, which makes it easier for the new members to be strengthened in Christian service."

In 1915, there were 1,100 decisions in Denison, the birthplace of Dwight D. Eisenhower. That same year, there were 850 conversions in Temple in Central Texas. In 1937, Ham returned to Houston, where there were seven thousand decisions. His last Texas meeting was in 1940 in Fort Worth, where 3,900 professed Christ. The 61,260 decisions in Texas were the largest number in a single state that Ham would achieve. His second greatest number was 55,763 in Tennessee. Other strong showings were in North Carolina and Oklahoma. In his later meetings in Texas, Ham concentrated on the larger cities of the Gulf Coast and Central Texas, where he had witnessed the greatest numerical success.