Henry Blackaby Biography

Most books about the Christian life tell you how to make a plan and ask God to bless it. Henry Blackaby spent his life teaching the opposite — that God is already at work, that He has a plan of His own, and that the whole task of prayer is to find out where He is moving and to fall in beside Him. It is a small idea and an enormous one. It came not out of a seminary lecture hall but out of a struggling church of about ten people on the Canadian prairies, where a middle-aged pastor had run out of programs and had nothing left to do but watch and listen. What he learned there became Experiencing God, a study read by millions, and the sentence people still repeat when they cannot see the way forward.

A Canadian boy and a long apprenticeship

He was born Henry Thomas Blackaby on 15 April 1935 in Williams Lake, a small town in the interior of British Columbia, and grew up partly on the coast in Prince Rupert, in a devout Baptist family. There is little in the public record of his childhood, and this account will not invent any; the man himself is best met further on, in the work.

He studied English and History at the University of British Columbia, and then, called to ministry, went south to the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in California, where he took a Bachelor of Divinity and a Master of Theology. He was not a research academic — the doctorates that later attached to his name were honorary — but he was a trained, careful reader of the Bible, and it showed in everything he built. At seminary he met Marilynn Sue Wells. They married on 3 June 1960, and she would be beside him for the whole of it.

He pastored Southern Baptist churches in California — San Pablo, then Downey — the ordinary settled work of an American pastor with a growing family. By every visible measure his life was set. And then, in 1970, he gave it up.

Ten people in Saskatoon

Persuaded by a fellow Canadian to come home, Blackaby left a comfortable California pastorate to take Faith Baptist Church in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan — a small, struggling congregation, widely described as about ten members, one account calling it a small, dying church. He was thirty-five. He would stay about twelve years.

This is the heart of the story, and it is worth being honest about what we know of it. We do not have a diary of those years, and there is no single lightning-bolt miracle to report. What we have is a pattern, and his own later account of what he was learning. In a hard and unpromising field, with no resources to generate the kind of activity a bigger church runs on, Blackaby stopped asking what he could do for God and began asking where God was already at work — and then adjusting the little church to join it.

By his ministry's own account, the results over those prairie years were far out of proportion to the congregation's size: the small church became a seedbed of church-planting across western Canada, helping to start dozens of new congregations and missions and helping establish what became a Bible college and seminary. Those figures come from the ministry's own retellings and are best held loosely as to their exact count; what is not in doubt is the shape of it — a tiny, unlikely church that grew and multiplied as it learned to move when God moved.

Experiencing God

What Blackaby had learned in Saskatoon he eventually put into a form the wider church could use. Developed first as an interactive Bible-study course and released through the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board — now Lifeway — Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God appeared in 1990, written by Blackaby with Claude V. King. It went on to sell millions of copies in English and to be translated into dozens of languages. Later expanded editions added his son Richard as co-author, but the original was Blackaby and King. He called it, simply, his life's message.

Experiencing God is my life's message.

— Henry Blackaby

The study is built around what he called the Seven Realities — a way of seeing the Christian life that runs, in substance, like this. God is always at work around you. He is pursuing a real, personal love relationship with you. He invites you to join Him in His work — not the other way around. He speaks, by His Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church, to reveal Himself and His purposes. His invitation brings you to a crisis of belief, where you must decide whether you really trust Him. Joining Him requires major adjustments in your life. And you come to know God by experience as you obey and He works through you.

People remember it best in one line — the study's well-known summary, repeated wherever it is taught: watch to see where God is working, and join Him. The book's own phrasing varies by edition (it also puts it as "find out where God is at work and join Him there"), and behind it lies the Gospel of John, where Jesus does only what He sees the Father doing. However it is worded, the counsel is the same, and it reorders everything. Prayer stops being the place where you inform God of your agenda and becomes the place where you receive His.

The relationship comes first

For all its practical bent, the center of Blackaby's teaching was not technique but love. Assignments, he insisted, flow out of intimacy with God and never around it; the love relationship is not a means to the work — it is the point.

The love relationship is why God created you.

— attributed to Experiencing God

And because God cares more about the person than the project, He works on the one He is sending before He works through him. Blackaby said it plainly, and it is a mercy to anyone who has felt unready for what God seems to be asking.

He will always work in you before He works through you.

— attributed to Experiencing God

A wider ministry, and a family in it

After Saskatoon, Blackaby served for a time as a director of missions in the Vancouver area before moving into denominational and writing ministry in the United States. Within the Southern Baptist Convention he worked in prayer and spiritual awakening, and served as a special assistant to the presidents of the International Mission Board and of Lifeway. He founded Blackaby Ministries International, based near Atlanta, to carry the message into churches, denominations, and the workplace, and it continues under his family today.

He wrote more than fifty books. With his son Richard he wrote Spiritual Leadership: Moving People on to God's Agenda, a title read far beyond church staff, into Christian business and nonprofit leadership — and its subtitle is really the whole of his thought in miniature: leadership is not moving people onto your agenda, but onto God's. His language of "joining God where He is working" passed into common evangelical speech, often by people who had never heard his name.

The life bore its most personal witness at home. Marilynn, who married him in 1960, went before him. All five of their children entered Christian ministry — the four sons as pastors, their daughter as a missionary — and Richard in particular carried the work forward and now leads it. A man who taught the church to watch for God's initiative had, it seems, watched for it first in his own house.

What he leaves

Henry Blackaby died in February 2024, at the age of 88. He is a recent figure, and much of the detail of his private life is thin; a devotional reader is better served by what is solid, and what is solid is the teaching and the fruit.

He leaves the church a reordered idea of prayer. Where much of modern religion begins with the self — its plans, its needs, its felt calling — and asks God to underwrite them, Blackaby began with God, already at work, already moving, and asked only that we learn to see it and to adjust. It is the least dramatic of counsels and one of the hardest, because it costs you your agenda. But it is also the most freeing, because it means the outcome was never yours to secure. The church of ten in Saskatoon did not build itself into a movement; it simply kept joining what God was doing. That, he spent a lifetime saying, is what prayer is for.