The greatest missionary you’ve never heard of? Robert G. Tuttle Jr. IN 1938 TIME MAGAZINE named him “the world’s greatest missionary evangelist.” Today when we hear these words we might think of Billy Graham or recent famous TV preachers, or evangelists of past centuries such as George Whitefield, Billy Sunday, and Dwight Moody. But after Sunday, and before Graham, E. Stanley Jones (1884–1973) dominated the scene.
SWEPT OFF HIS FEET
Born outside Baltimore in 1884, Jones felt his childhood was not particularly notable, and he hesitated to talk about it. Nonetheless Jones’s mother and grandfather influenced his early religious experiences. At 15 years old, he first encountered God, but it did not sustain him. Two years later, in 1901, he responded to an evangelistic invitation in his local church. He rejoiced, “I’ve got Him,” meaning that now he did not have an “it” but a Him. He had Jesus and Jesus had him. Soon after, Jones met Henry Clay Morrison (1857– 1942)—soon to be president of Asbury College in
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WATER OF LIFE Stanley Jones studies by Panna Lake at his ashram in Sat Tal in the late 1960s.
Wilmore, Kentucky—while Morrison was holding meetings in a Methodist church in Baltimore. Jones was impressed. If he could learn to preach like that at Asbury, then to Asbury he would go. Probably in 1903, but perhaps as late as 1905, the first Asbury Revival struck the campus and then the entire town of Wilmore. There Jones recorded that he experienced the filling of the Holy Spirit and became a self-proclaimed “holiness preacher.” He and four or five of his classmates were praying in one of their rooms when something happened, without provocation, that would change his life. As they prayed he felt the Holy Spirit sweep them off their feet and fill them all. It seemed to him a new Pentecost and would become one of the most sacred and formative moments in his life.
Christian History
ESJ AT PANNA LAKE SAT TAL, INDIA. B.L. FISHER LIBRARY ARCHIVES, ASBURY THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
THE LIFE AND MINISTRY OF E. STANLEY JONES
