A.W. Tozer — The Prophet in the Pulpit

Who He Was Aiden Wilson Tozer was born on April 21, 1897, on a farm in Newburg, Pennsylvania, and converted to Christianity at age seventeen after hearing a street preacher in Akron, Ohio. He was entirely self-educated in theology — he never attended seminary or college — and was ordained as a minister in the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1920. He served as pastor of Chicago’s Southside Alliance Church from 1928 to 1959 — thirty-one years — and then at Avenue Road Church in Toronto until his death in 1963 at sixty-six. He edited “Alliance Life” magazine for many years and authored over forty books, the most celebrated of which is “The Pursuit of God” (1948), widely regarded as a Christian classic. He was known as a “prophetic voice” in the evangelical church of his era — a man willing to say what others would not, who saw the church’s compromises clearly and named them plainly.

His Vision for the Pastoral Calling Tozer’s pastoral vision was that of the prophet-pastor: the man who does not merely manage a religious institution but guards the spiritual integrity of the community he serves. He was deeply concerned throughout his ministry that American evangelicalism was in danger of exchanging the authentic pursuit of God for a comfortable religious experience that demanded nothing and transformed no one. His books and sermons were acts of pastoral alarm — urgent, sometimes sharp, always rooted in the conviction that the church of Jesus Christ was meant to be something far more serious and far more glorious than what most of its members had settled for.

Tozer’s foundational pastoral text was also his personal biography: Paul’s great declaration in Philippians that the consuming purpose of his life was not achievement but knowing: “I want to know Christ — yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10–11, NIV). The pastor’s first obligation was not to build a program, grow a congregation, or produce publishable results but to know God. Everything else — preaching, counseling, administration, evangelism — was downstream from that knowing.

The pastor who was not himself in genuine pursuit of God was dispensing borrowed capital, and it would eventually run out.

He was prophetically alert to the encroachment of entertainment culture on the church’s worship.

As early as the 1950s, he identified a drift toward spectacle and away from genuine encounter with God — a drift that substituted the thrill of religious experience for the substance of divine encounter. He found the corrective in Jesus’ own declaration about the nature of true worship: “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in the Spirit and in truth” (John 4:23–24, NIV). Spirit and truth: both, together, inseparably. Entertainment could produce neither. Only the Spirit of God, working through the truth of God’s Word, could produce the worship that God was actually seeking.

Tozer’s pastoral theology of the presence of God was rooted in his personal experience of seeking God in the depths of contemplative prayer. He read widely in the Christian mystics — Brother Lawrence, François Fénelon, Teresa of Ávila, Meister Eckhart — and found in them a tradition of experiential knowledge of God that he believed the evangelical church had largely abandoned. He held up Isaiah’s vision as the standard against which all genuine pastoral ministry should be measured: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1, NIV). The pastor who had seen the Lord as Isaiah had seen Him — in His holiness, His majesty, His consuming presence — would never be satisfied with offering his congregation anything less. That vision was the foundation of all genuine pastoral prophetic ministry.

He was equally concerned with what he identified as the “snare of popularity” in pastoral ministry — the constant temptation to say what would be received well rather than what needed to be said. Tozer read his culture carefully and was not deceived by numerical growth. He understood Paul’s warning as a description of a perpetual pastoral danger, not merely a future one: “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:3–4, NIV).

The popular pastor, he warned, was often the most dangerous kind — not because his congregations were large but because their size could give the false impression that everything was well when the Spirit had long since moved on.

His personal pastoral simplicity was itself a teaching. He lived modestly, gave away his royalties, refused to negotiate his convictions for the sake of institutional advancement, and spent hours each week alone with God in a way that shaped and sustained everything he preached. He had taken to heart the great command at the heart of the Shema: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30, NIV). He pursued God with all four of these: with heart in devotion, with soul in surrender, with mind in study, and with strength in discipline. He was not a perfect man. But he was a man seriously in pursuit of a perfect God — and his pursuit called his congregation to the same.

A Prayer: Consuming God, deliver us from the pastoral safety of saying only what our congregations want to hear. Give us Tozer’s courage to speak what the Spirit is actually saying, even when it is uncomfortable. Renew in us the hunger to know You — not merely to know about You — and let our pursuit of Your presence be the invisible fire that warms everything we do in ministry. Where we have made the church too easy, too comfortable, and too entertaining, restore the weight of Your glory. Amen.