Biography
Bascom Ray Lakin (1901-1984) was an American Baptist preacher whose ministry began near the West Virginia and Kentucky border. He was born on a farm near Fort Gay in the country around the Big Sandy River. Although he grew up in a Christian family, he later described a revival meeting at the age of sixteen as the turning point of his own faith. Accounts of his early life say that he soon began preaching. The work began among people and places far removed from the large auditoriums where he would eventually speak.
Early in his ministry Lakin travelled among mountain communities and small congregations, sometimes riding a mule to reach them. His limited formal schooling did not keep him from seeking further instruction. The Christian Hall of Fame account names Moody Bible Institute in connection with his studies, and he also served as pastor of several churches. This combination of travel, study and practical pastoral work shaped the direct and familiar manner for which his preaching later became known. He learned to speak to people whose daily lives he understood.
Lakin later joined the ministry of E. Howard Cadle at the Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis. Cadle had developed a well-known preaching and radio ministry, and the tabernacle drew substantial audiences. After Cadle died in 1942, Lakin became pastor and continued the broadcasts. Radio allowed sermons delivered in Indianapolis to reach listeners who had never entered the building. Accounts written by those associated with the ministry speak of audiences numbering in the thousands. Such attendance figures are reports from the period, not independently audited totals, but the scale of the broadcasting work was part of the historical setting.
In the early 1950s Lakin moved into extended itinerant evangelism, preaching in churches around the United States. He became known for humour, biblical exposition and direct appeals for people to respond to the Christian message. Later tributes report a demanding travel schedule and unusually large numbers of people attending or professing conversion through his meetings. Those statistics are best understood as the claims of the ministries that recorded them. His surviving sermons and the accounts of pastors who knew him provide firmer evidence for his preaching subjects and approach.
Among the people who worked closely with Lakin was Jerry Falwell of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. In the introduction to a memorial book preserved by Liberty University, Falwell recalled Lakin as a mentor and described many special meetings held in the congregation. He also recorded that Lakin and his wife lost their only son, Bill, in an automobile accident. That family grief belongs in the history alongside the public ministry. The same record remembers his wife as a partner who shared many years of the work.
Falwell wrote that Lakin preached his final sermon at Thomas Road Baptist Church on February 26, 1984, when he was already ill. Lakin died in Lynchburg on March 15 of that year. He was buried on the Liberty campus according to the same firsthand account. His career connects two stages of twentieth-century evangelical work: the circuit preacher moving between isolated rural churches and the preacher whose message travelled through radio and national church networks. Both were real parts of his life without any need to enlarge the record with unverified numbers.