BLOG 10/26/15. THE LEGACY OF CHARLES E. FULLER
A week from today is the observance of (some of) the Christian church’s tradition of All Saints Day. I have been blessed for many years of using it to give thanks for the Christian folk who have been instrumental in my own Christian formation. One of those is Charles E. Fuller. Many today are quite aware of Fuller Theological Seminary, which has attained international status and has been marvelously fruitful over its history. At the same time, I find that very few are aware of Charles E. Fuller for whom it is named and who as the one instrumental in its founding. My vanishing generation may be the last to remember this remarkable man.
Charles Fuller was a businessman in California, who went to Bible school and ultimately became a Baptist minister. Along the way he founded a radio broadcast known as The Old Fashioned Revival Hour. Now, stop and take a moment to retrieve something of the cultural climate of those late 1930s. It was toward the end of the Dwight L. Moody-Billy Sunday era of popular ‘revival meetings’ which were gospel preaching events, often held in tents or pubic auditoriums. It was also the era when the theological ‘modernist-fundamentalist controversy’ was still very much in the air (what with the Scopes Trial, etc.).
All this said, here was Charles Fuller with a passion that people know Jesus Christ, and so he founded a radio broadcast (when radio was the media) produced in a studio in California, which became nationwide over the old Mutual Radio Network. But as he gained a following, and as World War II began, Charles E. Fuller had the foresight to move the Old Fashion Revival Hour to the large civic auditorium in Long Beach, California. He was an evangelist through-and-through. Stop think: those Southern California ports of San Diego, Long Beach, and Los Angeles were the point of embarkation for the tens of thousands of young men and women in our armed forces—a naval port from which our troops were being sent to what, at that time, was not at all a certain victory over a much better equipped and deployed Japanese navy and army. The possibility of death hung over that huge number of young adults, drafted out of their normal lives in our nation’s attempt to retrieve the security of our interests (not only in the far away places, but actually even the Pacific coast).
Fuller had a passion to see these young men and women know Jesus, and so to go to battle with a sustaining faith. He was modest and warm and simple in his presentation, but his invitations were fervent, sometimes emotional. Not only was he pleading with those soon to be employed service persons, but he was pleading with a radio audience to know and embrace Jesus. His preaching was accompanied by lively music, and by the reading of many letters of testimony by Fuller’s wife each week. They were a great testimony to the effectiveness
(Here is where my affection for him comes into the Blog. I was a spiritually hungry teen-ager whose local exposure to the faith was a fairly dismal Protestant church. So I became a devoted listener to the revival hour.) Untold thousands of service persons came to Christ. Charles E. Fuller became a rallying point for those of strong Christian and evangelical convictions. So after the war significant Christian leaders rallied around Fuller with the decision to establish a place to train gospel preachers and strong orthodox theologians, and hence the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary in the late 1940s. The first president was the renowned Harold John Ockenga, who was pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, who initially commuted to Pasadena as the seminary emerged. Fuller now is one of the most influential theological and missiological training schools in the world … though I have found many of its own current personnel don’t remember Charles E. Fuller. So on this All Saints 2015 observance I give my God thanks for Charles E. Fuller, and his passion for the message of God’s love for us in Christ.
