Henry Allan Ironside was a Canadian-American evangelist, author, often called the "archbishop of fundamentalism". He was one of the most prolific Christian writers of the 20th Century and published more than 100 books, booklets and pamphlets. He pastored Moody Church in Chicago from 1929 to 1948.
Background
Henry was born on October 14, 1876 in Toronto, Canada, the son of John Williams and Sophia Stafford Ironside. His father, an emigrant from Scotland, was a bank teller of modest means and a lay preacher identified with the Plymouth Brethren. He died in 1878. Sophia Ironside thereafter earned a meager livelihood for the family as a dressmaker. In 1886 she and her two sons moved to Los Angeles, California.
Education
Ironside completed grammar school in Los Angeles, California.
Career
In 1890 Ironside experienced a religious conversion and began to devote his spare time to street preaching. Two years later he joined the Salvation Army and ultimately rose to the rank of captain, with responsibility for a large corps of Salvationists in California. Ultimately convinced that the Salvationists' interpretation of the second blessing was without basis in scripture, Ironside left the organization in 1896.
Later, he joined the Plymouth Brethren as an itinerant evangelist. At first identified with a faction known as the Open Brethren, which held that each assembly should judge for itself all matters of doctrine, and later with the "Grant Exclusives, " a group founded in 1885 by Frederick W. Grant of Plainfield, New Jersey, and committed to the teachings of J. N. Darby, he read widely in the works of Brethren theologians and embraced their doctrines on dispensationalism, premillennialism, and scriptural inerrancy. He also shared the Brethren's objections to creeds, ritual, and an ordained ministry. Although continual dissension within Brethren ranks finally caused him to abandon the movement, his association with it profoundly influenced both his career and his theology.
In the early years of the twentieth century Ironside traveled throughout California, conducting Bible conferences and tent revivals. He attempted to win converts among the Japanese and Jews in San Francisco and regularly preached outside saloons and dance halls elsewhere in the state. In the same year he first worked with Indian tribes in the Southwest, a practice he continued each summer for a decade.
As his reputation spread Ironside held revivals and Bible conferences throughout the United States and Canada. For eight years, beginning in 1918, he conducted a two-week summer preaching mission in the Old Tent Evangel in New York. He accepted his first assignment with the extension department of the Moody Bible Institute in 1924; thereafter until 1930 he was a principal figure in its summer institutes in Florida. In the meantime, in 1925 the Dallas Theological Seminary persuaded him to become a visiting lecturer, a position he held each spring until 1943.
At the age of fifty-four Ironside assumed his first pastorate. His decision in 1930 to become pastor of the Moody Memorial Church in Chicago marked the final break with his Brethren past. His interest in foreign missions resulted in his election to the presidency of the Africa Inland Mission in 1942. Throughout his tenure at Moody Church, Ironside held revival crusades and Bible conferences. In 1930 he preached more than 650 sermons. From 1936 through 1939 he made annual evangelistic tours of Great Britain. He also, from 1937 to the end of his life, wrote weekly Bible lessons for the Sunday School Times. His first publication, Notes on Jeremiah, appeared in 1900; Except Ye Repent (1937) won the American Tract Society's $1, 000 prize.
Following his retirement from Moody Church in 1948, he continued to preach and to write. In 1950, the year before his death, he preached more than 400 times, contributed columns to two monthly magazines, and completed manuscripts of two books on Bible exposition. He died at Rotu Rua, New Zealand, while on a preaching mission.
Achievements
Religion
The Salvationists' emphasis upon the "second blessing" - an experience by which an individual was lifted into a state of holiness and perfection - continually troubled Ironside. In Ironside's view it deluded the Christian into believing that he had been relieved of his sinful nature and resulted in a lowering of standards and a tendency toward "cunningly concealed hypocrisy. "
Views
Although Henry Allan emphasized personal evangelism and considered the social gospel as "extrascriptural" at best, he displayed less antipathy for liberals, intellectuals, and scientists than some of his fellow evangelists.
Personality
Ironside had prodigious energy, a retentive memory, and a powerful, resonant voice, and was a master of the brief expository sermon delivered in a conversational style and interspersed with humor.
Connections
On January 5, 1898, Ironside married Helen Georgia Schofield, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister; they settled in Oakland, California, and had two sons. Helen Ironside died in May 1948, and on October 9, 1949, Ironside married Ann Hightower.