Robert T. Ketcham - Early Ministry

Early Ministry

At sixteen, Robert, a stubborn young man who disliked his parents' discipline, quit high school and left home. Nevertheless, in 1910 he was converted at the Galeton Baptist Church and, despite his lack of formal education, was called in 1912 to pastor the tiny First Baptist Church, Roulette, Pennsylvania, on the Allegheny River. (There were thirty-three members, twenty-eight of them women.)

Roulette was a village, but its religious and political demographics were unusual. For instance, the town had many Seventh-day Adventists and Spiritualists, and the majority of its voters were socialists. (Eugene Debs had spoken there.) Ketcham, who was studious by inclination, read extensively to understand and refute these opposing ideologies. He also began taking a correspondence course from Crozer Theological Seminary but gave it up during his second year when he detected theological liberalism in an assigned text.

Meanwhile, Ketcham's eyesight began to fail with keratoconus. Although he could read with a book pressed almost to his nose, he began to memorize scripture so as not to call attention to his loss of sight while in the pulpit. After one service, a deacon dryly told him that he had read the scripture flawlessly while holding the Bible upside down. Ketcham was virtually blind for most of his career although he continued to read printed material with a magnifying glass and in the pulpit used rudimentary notes written in very large letters on black paper with a white grease pencil.

Ketcham’s pastorate in Roulette was extremely successful, and many converts were added to the church. During an evangelistic campaign in 1914, four hundred people made professions of faith, about the same number as the population of the town. In 1915, Ketcham was reluctantly ordained by a local Baptist council despite his fundamentalist beliefs and lack of formal education. The same year he accepted the call to the Baptist church of Brookeville, Pennsylvania, where he contracted influenza during the pandemic of 1918.