Biography
Herschel Harold Hobbs was born on October 24, 1907, in Talladega, Alabama, in a family of moderate means. He grew up in the South in the years before the Great Depression and attended the local public schools. He was a studious boy who was drawn to the church from an early age. He was converted at the age of sixteen and soon felt a call to preach. He studied at Howard College, now Samford University, in Birmingham, and then at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He later earned a doctorate and took further studies in Hebrew and Greek.
He began as a pastor in small Baptist churches in Alabama. He held a number of posts in the 1930s and 1940s, serving in Alabama and Kentucky. In 1949 he was called as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City, one of the largest Baptist churches in the nation. He served there for twenty-three years, until 1972. Under his leadership, the church grew and expanded its ministries. He was a gifted expositor who preached through whole books of the Bible and taught his people to know the Word.
He was a prolific writer. He wrote more than a hundred books, including commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible. His books were plain and clear and were widely used by Sunday school teachers and lay people. They include The Baptist Faith and Message, in which he set out the main teachings of the denomination, and many commentaries on Scripture. He also wrote for the Sunday school quarterly of the Southern Baptist Convention, and for years he was one of the most widely read Baptist authors.
From 1958 to 1972 he was the speaker on the radio program The Baptist Hour, which was heard across the nation. He was a calm and persuasive speaker with a deep voice. He also was a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention and served as its president from 1961 to 1963. In that role, he presided over a convention that was growing rapidly and facing questions about its identity. In 1962 and 1963 he was chairman of the committee that revised the denomination's statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message. The revised statement, adopted in 1963, remained in use until 2000. It affirmed the Bible as the Word of God and set out the beliefs of the denomination.
He also held to the principle of the soul's freedom before God, which was a central belief for Baptists. He argued that every believer has the right to read the Bible for himself and to come to his own convictions. He was concerned that the denomination should avoid making a creed that would be forced on all, and he saw the statement as a guide and not a test. This position later put him at odds with some who wanted to make the statement a stricter standard in the controversy of the 1980s. He took a moderate path and spoke against the divisions.
He was a man who lived a life of steady work. He was a faithful pastor and a devoted husband to his wife, Frances. He also suffered the loss of friends and the passing of old ways. He was not a man of dramatic gestures. He did his work with care and consistency.
He died on November 28, 1995, in Oklahoma City, at the age of eighty-eight. His life shows the lasting effect of a pastor who writes for ordinary believers and who teaches the Bible plainly to the church.