He Waits to Be Wanted - A. W. Tozer

The Street Preacher and the Attic

Aiden Wilson Tozer was still young enough to be working in an Akron factory when a street preacher gave him a sentence he could not leave on the street.

The preacher said, in substance, that if a person did not know how to be saved, he should call upon God.

Tozer went home.

In the crowded family house he found privacy in the attic and prayed.

Later retellings of the scene can make it sound like the beginning of an already famous spiritual life. At the time it was simply the conversion of an unknown young labourer with little formal education and no path toward public ministry.

The attic matters because so much of Tozer’s later life was built around the conviction that a person must deal with God directly.

Programs could not substitute for it. Religious vocabulary could not substitute for it. Correct doctrine, important as it was, could not substitute for it. The Christian life had an inward centre: the knowledge of God Himself.

That burden became the organizing theme of a ministry that lasted more than forty years.

Rural Pennsylvania and Akron

Tozer was born on April 21, 1897, in the rural community of Newburg, Pennsylvania.

His childhood was materially plain. Farm work and the responsibilities of family life came early. He did not grow up on a path toward higher education or professional ministry.

The family later moved to Akron, Ohio, during the years when the city’s rubber industry was expanding rapidly. Tozer entered factory work while still young.

The contrast between the Pennsylvania farm and industrial Akron helped form the background of his adult life. He knew manual labour. He knew what it meant to work without status. The polished religious world was not where his life began.

His formal schooling remained limited.

This fact later became part of his reputation because he eventually read and wrote at a level that made the absence of a college or seminary degree surprising. But he did not become educated by rejecting learning. He became educated by pursuing it for himself.

Conversion gave that pursuit a new centre.

He read Scripture relentlessly. He read theology, church history, devotional writers, biographies and older Christian literature. He read authors with whom he did not agree in every detail if he believed they had seen something of God that he needed to understand.

He was intellectually independent, but never intellectually casual.

Conversion and a Life of Self-Education

Tozer joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the movement founded by A. B. Simpson.

The Alliance combined evangelical preaching, missionary concern and an emphasis on the deeper Christian life. Its spiritual vocabulary gave Tozer a home without requiring the formal academic route that might otherwise have blocked his entry into ministry.

He learned by reading and by doing.

He developed a lifelong affection for writers whose work emphasized communion with God. His reading moved across denominational boundaries. Church fathers, mystics, Puritans, hymn writers and evangelical teachers all entered his mental world.

That breadth did not make him doctrinally vague.

Tozer held firmly to the authority of Scripture, the deity and saving work of Christ, the necessity of conversion, the work of the Holy Spirit and the call to holiness. But he was impatient with the idea that doctrinal correctness alone guaranteed spiritual health.

A church, he believed, could defend truth with precision and still become inwardly cold.

The danger was especially great for conservative Christians because they might mistake having the right position for having the reality to which the position pointed.

This concern would eventually make his writing both loved and uncomfortable.

Ada Pfautz and the Beginning of Ministry

In 1918 Tozer married Ada Cecelia Pfautz.

They would raise a large family together.

The following year he was ordained in the Christian and Missionary Alliance and entered pastoral ministry without seminary training.

His early assignments were small.

That part of his life is easily skipped because later readers meet him through books already detached from local church life. Yet Tozer spent most of his adult years as a pastor, not as a travelling author with a platform built around publishing.

He preached, visited, prayed, studied and learned the demands of serving ordinary congregations.

The work did not begin with influence.

There were no bestselling books, no established conference reputation and no expectation that Christians in other countries would one day read him.

He was simply becoming a pastor.

Small Churches and Ordinary Pastoral Work

Tozer served several Alliance congregations before Chicago.

The years taught him something that remained visible in his later criticism of church life: he knew the machinery from inside it.

He knew meetings, boards, budgets, preaching schedules, denominational expectations and the recurring demands of local ministry.

When he later warned that religious activity could become a substitute for spiritual life, he was not speaking as a detached critic of pastors and churches. He had spent decades inside exactly that world.

He was not against organization as such.

He worked within a denomination all his ministerial life. He edited its magazine and served its broader work. He understood that churches need order.

What he feared was organization that continued running after spiritual reality had become thin.

The more competent a church became at operating without evident dependence on God, the more dangerous the condition seemed to him.

Southside Alliance Church

In 1928 Tozer became pastor of Southside Alliance Church in Chicago.

He remained there for more than thirty years.

Chicago enlarged his field of influence while keeping him anchored in one congregation. He preached week after week to people who could compare his words with his life over time.

The church grew.

His reputation spread beyond the congregation.

Yet he never became a celebrity evangelist in the style of some twentieth-century figures. His authority came largely through preaching, writing and the moral seriousness people sensed behind both.

He was capable of humour, but he disliked a casual approach to worship.

He believed Christian gatherings should help people become conscious of God rather than simply entertained by religious activity.

This placed him increasingly at odds with trends he saw in American evangelicalism.

The middle decades of the twentieth century were years of expanding Christian institutions, radio ministries, publishing, conferences and professionalized church growth. Tozer did not reject every new method, but he repeatedly asked what the methods were producing.

A successful church could still be spiritually shallow.

That became one of his persistent warnings.

Prayer, Reading and the Hidden Life

People who knew Tozer repeatedly described his habits of prayer and reading.

He sought solitude.

He read with a pencil, a Bible and a mind trained by repetition rather than formal classroom systems. Hymns also mattered to him because he believed older Christian poetry often carried theology and worship together in a way modern religious language did not.

Prayer was not merely preparation for public work.

It was part of the work itself.

Tozer’s public severity makes more sense when this hidden life is remembered. His strongest criticisms were usually aimed at the distance between what Christians said about God and the amount of God they appeared actually to desire.

He distrusted borrowed spiritual language.

A preacher could learn how to sound earnest.

A church could learn how to create excitement.

A writer could learn how to repeat accepted convictions.

What could not be manufactured, in Tozer’s view, was the reality of a person who had learned to wait before God.

That conviction gave his writing its searching character.

It also made him demanding.

The Pursuit of God

In the late 1940s Tozer wrote the book that became most closely associated with his name: The Pursuit of God.

The book emerged from a burden he had carried for years.

Tozer was writing to believers, not mainly to unbelievers. His concern was the strange possibility that a person could genuinely belong to Christ and yet become satisfied with a distant, second-hand knowledge of God.

“To have found God and still to pursue Him” was, in his language, the paradox of Christian love.

The famous line “He waits to be wanted” captured the same concern.

The book challenged a Christianity content with correct explanations about God while lacking hunger for God Himself.

Accounts associated with Tozer’s ministry describe much of the manuscript being written during an overnight train journey. Whatever romance later attached to that scene, the content itself was not sudden. The book distilled years of preaching, prayer and reading.

Its endurance came partly from its refusal to offer a complicated method.

Tozer did not propose a new program.

He called believers to remove what hindered them, come honestly before God and seek Him.

Alliance Weekly and a Wider Voice

In 1950 Tozer became editor of the Alliance Weekly, later known as Alliance Life.

The editorial desk gave him a national and international readership.

He wrote on worship, prayer, holiness, the Holy Spirit, Scripture, ministry, worldliness, Christian culture and the danger of reducing faith to accepted habits.

Short editorial writing suited him.

He could state a problem in a few paragraphs with unusual sharpness.

The strength of that style was clarity.

The weakness was that a compressed judgment could sound broader than the evidence allowed. Tozer sometimes wrote about “the church” or “evangelicalism” in sweeping terms. Readers who shared his burden found the sentences prophetic. Others could reasonably ask whether the diagnosis made enough room for churches and believers who did not fit the criticism.

That tension belongs in an honest reading of him.

He was a watchman by temperament.

Watchmen see dangers early, but the habit of watching danger can also make the landscape appear darker than it is.

The Knowledge of the Holy

In 1961 Tozer published The Knowledge of the Holy.

The book opened with a conviction that became one of his best-known statements: what comes into a person’s mind when thinking about God is of immense importance.

The argument was theological and practical at once.

If God is imagined as small, manageable or essentially like an enlarged human being, Christian life will eventually become small as well.

Tozer therefore wrote about divine attributes: God’s self-existence, eternity, omniscience, wisdom, holiness, sovereignty, love and other perfections.

He was not attempting an academic systematic theology.

He wanted doctrine to lead to worship.

The difference mattered to him.

Theology severed from worship could become sterile. Worship severed from truth could become sentiment.

The church needed both.

The book remains a useful window into the way Tozer read older Christian theology. He drew heavily from classical Christian understandings of God and presented them in language ordinary readers could follow.

His lack of formal theological training did not prevent depth, but it did mean he worked outside some of the normal academic processes of qualification and debate.

That independence was both strength and limitation.

Worship, Holiness and the Holy Spirit

Tozer’s Alliance background placed him inside a tradition that expected more from Christian life than intellectual assent.

He preached holiness.

He called believers to surrender.

He spoke strongly about the Holy Spirit and warned against trying to conduct Christian ministry without conscious dependence upon Him.

At the same time, he resisted sensationalism.

Tozer’s interest in spiritual experience was not interest in experience for its own sake. He wanted the believer brought under the lordship of Christ.

Worship occupied a central place.

He believed the highest work of the church was not simply producing converts, operating programs or maintaining institutions. The church existed for God.

This conviction explains why he could sound so severe about entertainment in worship. He feared that Christians were learning to evaluate gatherings by whether people enjoyed them rather than whether God was rightly known and honoured.

Some of his criticisms belong clearly to the media culture of his own era.

The deeper question remains recognizable: can Christian methods become so concerned with holding attention that they weaken attention to God?

Simplicity, Severity and the Cost of Intensity

Tozer lived simply.

He was not impressed by wealth or ministerial status. He did not build his identity around possessions. He often gave money away and treated royalties with less personal interest than many successful authors would have.

This simplicity supported the credibility of his warnings against materialism.

Yet an honest account must also look at the cost of his intensity.

Biographical accounts of the Tozer household describe a man whose devotion to prayer, study and ministry could leave emotional distance at home. Ada carried substantial responsibility for family life. Later recollections from relatives and biographers suggest that the inward intensity admired by readers was not always easy for those closest to him.

This should neither be exaggerated into a verdict nor omitted to protect a reputation.

Christian biography becomes dishonest when public spiritual strength is allowed to erase private limitations.

Tozer’s life itself warned against confusing gift with maturity.

That warning should be applied to him too.

He was not a flawless model of family presence because he wrote accurately about God.

He was a man whose strongest virtues could become costly when they were not balanced.

Toronto and the Final Years

After more than three decades at Southside Alliance Church, Tozer accepted a call to Avenue Road Church in Toronto in 1959.

He was already in his sixties.

The move gave him a final pastoral setting outside Chicago, but not a long new era.

He continued preaching and writing.

The same themes remained.

God must be known, not merely discussed.

The church must depend on the Holy Spirit.

Worship must be centred upon God rather than the preferences of the worshipper.

Holiness is not an optional interest for unusually serious Christians.

Religious activity can conceal spiritual poverty.

By this stage, Tozer’s voice had acquired the tone of a man who had been repeating the same warning for years and believed the need had not diminished.

He died on May 12, 1963, after a heart attack.

He was sixty-six.

Death and the Growth of a Posthumous Influence

Tozer’s influence expanded dramatically after his death.

Many books carrying his name were compiled from sermons, editorials and previously unpublished material.

This requires editorial care.

Not every Tozer book encountered by modern readers was a volume he personally organized and approved in its final form. Some represent posthumous collections.

That does not make them false, but it affects how quotations and arguments should be attributed.

The books he prepared himself, especially The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy, provide the clearest access to his deliberate written voice.

Later compilations extended that voice to new generations.

His work crossed denominational lines.

Pentecostals, Baptists, Reformed Christians, charismatics, missionaries, independent evangelicals and members of historic denominations found something in his call to the knowledge of God that did not depend on sharing every feature of Alliance theology.

The man travelled less widely than his books eventually did.

What Tozer Was Warning Against

A. W. Tozer’s importance does not rest on predicting modern church culture in every detail.

Some of his judgments were tied to his temperament and era. He could generalize. He could sound as though decline were more visible to him than grace. His distrust of religious machinery could be quoted in ways that undervalue faithful organization, theological education or forms of ministry he did not personally prefer.

But the central warning survives those limitations.

Christian work can continue after desire for God has weakened.

Preachers can speak accurately about a God they are no longer seeking.

Churches can become skilled at producing activity without asking whether the activity is forming people in Christ.

Readers can admire spiritual books without entering the life the books describe.

Tozer’s answer was not novelty.

It was pursuit.

The unknown factory worker who heard a street preacher in Akron went home and sought God for himself.

The pastor who later addressed thousands never believed that anyone could live forever on another person’s encounter.

“He waits to be wanted.”