The Secret Place of R. A. Torrey

Reuben Archer Torrey was born on January 28, 1856 in Hoboken, New Jersey, into a home that prized learning and moral seriousness. As a young man he studied at Yale College and then Yale Divinity School, where he wrestled with questions of authority and truth in an age stirred by new criticism and old unbelief. After further study in Germany at Leipzig and Erlangen he returned convinced that Scripture must stand as the final rule and that the church's first work is prayer and evangelism. Ordained to the Congregational ministry in 1878, he pastored in Garrettsville, Ohio, and then in Minneapolis, where his preaching and city mission work baptized his convictions in the needs of the poor and the prodigal. He had the mind of a scholar and the heart of an evangelist, and he learned early that the two are never enemies when both kneel.

In 1889 Dwight L Moody invited Torrey to Chicago to lead the Chicago Evangelization Society which soon became Moody Bible Institute. Torrey shaped the training of workers by putting the prayer meeting at the center of the school's daily life. Students rose with the Word, gathered again at noon for united intercession, and went out in the evenings to preach and to pray in halls and tenements. He taught Bible doctrine in the classroom, then bent his knees with the same students in the prayer room. After Moody's death Torrey shouldered more public preaching and leadership while guarding the same hidden practices that had given his sermons weight.

The world opened to him at the turn of the century. In 1902 he began a series of international missions with the song leader Charles M Alexander. Australia and New Zealand saw vast gatherings in open spaces and public halls. Britain received him with a hunger that filled the great buildings of London, Glasgow, and beyond. Asia welcomed him in India, China, and Japan. Reports from these years tell of cities hushed by prayer, noon meetings that drew crowds from factories and shops, inquiry rooms crowded with seekers, and pastors revived to teach their people to pray. Torrey's preaching was plain and scriptural, Christ in the Scriptures with the cross in the center and the call to repent and believe never delayed. Behind the platform stood prayer bands and quiet rooms, and behind those rooms stood the habit of a lifetime, hours with God before a line was spoken.

In 1912 he accepted an invitation to Los Angeles to serve as dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles and pastor of the Church of the Open Door. He did not build a monument to himself. He built prayers into the mortar of a new school and a new congregation. Lectures in the morning, visitation in the afternoon, prayer meetings that stretched until burdens lifted, and evangelistic appeals that expected immediate obedience to the gospel. He remained in that work for years, forming workers who would serve across the world with a Bible in one hand and a burden for souls in the other. In his later days he wrote and traveled, steady as ever, until the Lord called him from Asheville, North Carolina, on October 26, 1928. Those who knew him did not remember a celebrity. They remembered a man who could take a promise of God and wrestle with it until heaven answered.