For the Whole World: A Century of Mission at Asbury Theological Seminary

By J. Steven O'Malley

From its small beginnings with just three students in 1923 to its status today as the largest theological school in the Wesleyan tradition (and one of the largest theological schools in the world), Asbury Seminary serves under its motto of "The Whole Bible for the Whole World." Now, as part of Asbury's centennial celebration, J. Steven O'Malley explores its history in depth, showing how the seminary remains faithful to the mission for which it was founded. This important milestone is the perfect time for such a tribute.

O'Malley introduces each of the eight presidents in terms of the era from which he came and his own faith journey and call to ministry. The history begins with founder H. C. Morrison's vision of a theological school that would be loyal to the Bible while preparing Spirit-filled and sanctified preachers to go into all the world. The author traces the challenges and successes of each administration. Here you will find stories of all sorts of people-members of the Board of Trustees, faculty, staff, students, friends, donors, and, especially, alumni who have been and are a part of the Asbury Seminary family worldwide. Their prayerful support and influence have been blessed by God to guide the seminary in faithfulness to its mission. The story of Asbury Seminary's first one hundred years is indeed framed by the motto of the centennial celebrations: "Thanking God for the Past, Trusting God for the Future."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seedbed
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781628249644

Book preview

One

Henry Clay Morrison

FROM AWAKENING TO ACADEMY

GRATEFULLY DISCERNING THE ETHOS that represents Asbury Theological Seminary is an invitation to come to terms with what is distinctive about its mission in the world as expressed by its principal founder and first president. The mission, grounded in the whole Bible, was focused upon reaching the whole world for Jesus Christ and His kingdom of holiness of heart and life. Underlying that extraordinary fact is the acknowledgment of its humble origin, where the living message of the Bible became connected to a human life, a man whose vision was to share its proclamation of full salvation in Jesus Christ for all persons to the ends of the earth.

Just as full salvation includes pardon, regeneration, and sanctification, so did the founding of the seminary entail a series of crises in faith. One was the rescue of Asbury College from near collapse after a promising launch, and the other was the rebirth of its School of Theology as Asbury Theological Seminary in its founding year of 1923.

Breakthrough to Faith

The story of Asbury Theological Seminary is presented as our witness to an epic account of God’s creative involvement in the vision of a Kentucky preacher named Henry Clay Morrison (1857–1942). Our location is the southern highlands of Kentucky in the early twentieth century, where Morrison has been a man much revered and interpreted in the last century from both within and outside of the seminary. In this study, he is viewed from the perspective of his seminal role in its founding and his imbuing the seminary with the mantle of divine appointment and mission, which was the outcome of his vision for what it could and would become. Morrison was born in 1857 in Barren County, Kentucky,¹ in the lineage of Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and English ancestors of prominence in the American colonial era.² At the age of two years he experienced the death of his mother, who had dedicated him to God’s service after his birth.³ Circumstances were to keep his father away from their rural home for two years, while young Henry remained with his kindhearted paternal grandfather, where his sister and their grandfather’s single daughter also lived. Religion and Sabbath observance were prized in this household.

After this prolonged absence, his father finally returned home for one week. Henry remembered his father’s affection as though it was singularly devoted to him. With tears in his father’s eyes and arms wide open to young Henry, father and son were inseparable for that week. His joy was brief in duration, since his father’s departure for business in Mississippi⁴ abruptly followed. It was 1861, and his father had horses to sell. Soon word came that he had been killed, and the details were never discovered. A great pain shot through young Henry’s heart. Clinging long to fading hope, Bud (the childhood nickname Henry’s grandfather had given to him) learned to pray, Our Father who art in heaven, with mingled thoughts of his earthly father.⁵

In time, Henry’s discovery of the love of his heavenly Father would be deferred until some years after the Civil War. On one occasion, while plowing with mules in a field, young Bud caught sight of an old Methodist circuit preacher riding by on his horse. He had seen that preacher before, and he knew him to be a holy man. As the young plowman watched the holy man go by, he felt the power of his godly presence from that distance in the field and, as one of my Asbury mentors put it, Such a sense of conviction of sin came over Morrison that he dropped to his knees between the corn rows and made his vow, alone, to give his heart to God.⁶

In 1870, a younger representative of the holy life arrived at the Boyd’s Creek Methodist Episcopal Church, South, near Glasgow, Kentucky. He was an earnest Methodist circuit preacher, James Phillips, to whom Henry was drawn by his preaching of the key theme of revival. Neither a learned nor a great sermonizer, Phillips was strongest when on his knees interceding before the Lord, pleading for the lost in their meetinghouse, until the congregation would melt into tears.⁷ Henry’s older sister and cousins all went to the bench as penitent mourners for several days, until filled with radiant joy in their conversion. However, no one ever asked little Henry to join them. He stood brokenhearted on a bench in a corner, while stretching his neck to see the children shout for joy. Satan, he later explained, was telling him no one loved him. He sensed what it meant to become tormented by fear of death as a sinner, drifting rapidly in the wrong direction.

Young Henry then vowed to seek religion again, but only if Brother Phillips should be returned to their circuit. If the preacher did not return, he would then be free of his vow, he reasoned, and could throw off restraint.⁸ Nevertheless, at the back of his mind, young Henry could not forget what he was told his mother had announced after his birth. She had proclaimed that he would somehow become a preacher of the gospel.⁹

After a season, the praying preacher he longed to see returned to their circuit. New revival meetings were appointed, and these brought moments of travail for Henry. In Luther-like fashion, the Tempter resisted his effort to seek repentance at the mourner’s bench. Sensing himself to be sinking down beneath God’s righteous frown, he was visited while at prayer by a godly Baptist uncle who, noting the child’s agitation, leaned over Henry, whispering, God is not mad at you. God loves you . . . why, He gave His only Son to die for you.¹⁰ This was his moment of conversion, when these words penetrated his yielded heart, and his sense of abandonment was overcome by unspeakable ecstasy and peace, knowing that God so richly loved him.

Henry’s first deed for Christ after his conversion was to set up an altar for family prayer in his grandfather’s house. This young man began and continued daily morning and evening worship, becoming the prayer leader of the family and of others who came as visitors to the home. This continued for three years until his grandfather’s death, when he moved from Glasgow to Perryville, Kentucky.¹¹

Perhaps, then, our first expression of gratitude for the legacy of Asbury Seminary is directed toward that kairos moment of divine visitation upon a young orphan boy, awakened in that distant moment by Christ’s atoning work on Calvary, so that he was no longer his Father’s enemy but his beloved child. Here was a message he longed to share with others, and this burden would lead him to seek colleagues in that great task, preachers, and, ultimately, a seminary to train them for such kingdom work.

Yet, that seminary would be bereft of the most vital and distinctive feature of its evangel had young Henry not been led to meet with sanctified persons, those filled with the perfect love (agape) in Jesus Christ promised to those who are joined to Him in faith.¹² Some years passed after his conversion before that higher stage of grace surfaced in his awareness.

Before this could occur, there was a significant relocation in his home environment. An early step toward education was his move, after his grandfather’s death, to live with his maternal grandparents, the Durhams, in nearby Perryville. As an affluent family, they were able to send him to a private academy, which prepared him later to be enrolled for a year at Vanderbilt University. He also became active in a debate society, honing his gift for public speaking on important issues of his day, such as alcoholism.

After resisting a call to preach, which harkened back to his late mother’s prophecy for his life, Morrison found himself yielding to that divine call, apparently hastened after surviving a close call on the back of a runaway horse. Licensed to preach by the Perryville Methodist Episcopal Church, South, (MECS) in 1878, he assisted his pastor and early mentor, T. F. Taliaferro, and then was appointed to circuits of rural congregations before being received on trial by the Kentucky Conference of the MECS in 1881.¹³

Morrison returned to his duties in the Kentucky Conference in 1884, following a year’s leave to study theology at Vanderbilt University, where he expressed esteem for his classical Wesleyan professors who taught at that prominent Southern Methodist institution. He had contracted what he called a revival spirit as one who loved Christ and longed for souls.¹⁴ Assigned to the county seat and then to city churches, young Henry steadily gained regional and later national prominence as a revival preacher guided by Wesleyan orthodoxy.

In 1887, when he completed his ordination to the order of elder in his conference, two events shaping his future occurred: (1) Morrison’s family life began with his marriage to Laura Dodd Bain,¹⁵ and (2) he became aware of the second half of the plan of salvation, concerning sanctification and the life of holiness through the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Breakthrough to Ministry

Henry’s attention turned toward this second part of salvation through several influences. First, he had not forgotten his reading of John Wesley’s A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. It had occurred during his pastorate at Covington, Kentucky, two years previously in 1885.¹⁶ He received his copy from a fellow preacher, Horace Cockrill, who was himself quietly seeking holy love, and chiding Henry for his levity, he urged him to seek entire sanctification. Then came conversations with an eminent retired Methodist theologian, Thomas Ralston, who lived nearby. Ralston long advocated that holiness here is to be followed, not at death, but now while mingling with the affairs of this life.¹⁷ He had been among those classical Wesley scholars of the early nineteenth century who viewed sanctification as the marrow of theology.¹⁸

Through these influences, the plan of full salvation began to coalesce in Morrison’s heart and mind. He would later muse: I was in no need of a second blessing, but, on second glance, it was at this point that he had to admit: There was a shallowness in my spiritual life.¹⁹ Yes, he did have occasion to hear the doctrine of perfect love preached and would surmise: If I had met sanctified people, I would have sought the experience without hesitation.²⁰

Meet them he did, and not all were of the same caliber of authenticity. An initial encounter with this claim came in the form of a popular traveling lecturer on the Higher Life, one George O. Barnes, whose message was a reductionist God is love, and nothing else. There seemed to be no conviction of sin, no repentance, no reformation, no regeneration, no baptisms, and no joining of the churches with that lecturer.²¹ What Henry did notice was evidence of a widespread apostasy following Barnes’s revivals, which prejudiced him against sanctification itself, as a doctrine. Something vital was amiss. Having been soundly converted and established in the first principles of Methodist doctrine, he rejected Brother Barnes, and all his teachings.²²

Morrison was also becoming alarmed by the signs of spiritual erosion in American Methodism that reflected changes in the larger society. The Civil War was over in the South and the initial period of readjustment, the Reconstruction era, was past. It was the era of the rapid growth of cities and record immigration, with fourteen million (mostly German and Irish) immigrants arriving between 1865 and 1900.²³ The Pietist and Wesleyan legacy of the Second Great Awakening (1801–1857) was being now superseded by a humanistic concern for moral obligation freed from religious scruples.

Morrison Encounters the Sanctified Life

There were two contrasting movements in this postwar culture that impacted Morrison and his ministry. This was the era of the beginning of Methodism’s theological unraveling. By 1866, Methodism in America had grown to become the nation’s largest denomination,²⁴ and along with this triumph was the eclipse of its early emphasis upon the salvation of souls, based on revival. It was a shift marked by the end of circuit-riding preachers in deference to a stationed ministry and the cessation of the early Methodist class meetings,²⁵ where the spiritual accountability of all members had been upheld alongside spontaneous worship. In their place would arrive large upscale church edifices with organs and choirs. Alongside these trends, there began the abandonment of historic Wesleyan doctrinal distinctives, a lapse that soon became widespread.

In fact, there was only one person Morrison had met whom he could regard as a sanctified person when, as pastor of his first station church at Stanford, Kentucky, he met Mary McAfee, a very plain maiden woman who quietly worked as a toll keeper. She was known throughout the town as a great power in revivals and led many to Christ.²⁶ She also prayed for Morrison to be wholly consecrated and filled with the Holy Spirit. It was not foremost a matter of purity and power, which became the later theme, but Morrison would in time be won in a moment of crisis to full salvation in Christ, thanks to her walk with God, who first reflected the spirit of undivided prayer, forgiveness, and love.

Despite his revival successes in the salvation of souls, Morrison came to recognize somewhat begrudgingly that something was amiss. Somehow, there was a shallowness in his spiritual life, in his thoughts and desires, as well as a lurking volcano of evil temper that would have cut him off from the Lord altogether, but for His longsuffering.²⁷ He confided: My heart was in my work, but there was evil in my heart.²⁸ He was being awakened to a hunger and a deeper thirst for the pure holiness of God’s presence.

The basis for Morrison’s ultimate vision for the seminary is likely to be found in his transformative encounter with the Holy Spirit—called sanctification—or the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which he would receive. What would make Morrison’s grasp of the sanctified life enduring and appealing was that it was no mere verbal profession of faith, but the result of a prolonged struggle of soul, subsequent to regeneration and terminating in a powerful breakthrough of the Holy Spirit’s anointing and indwelling that filled his heart, mind, and affections.

This breakthrough occurred while serving as pastor in Danville, Kentucky, in 1887. Through the urging of a fellow pastor, this crisis erupted as an inner conversation with his heart: I know I am a child of God, but I am not a holy child . . . and only He can make me so, and He will. He quickly found a private room and prostrated himself before God. Then, suddenly overcome with a vivacious sense of the Holy Spirit’s power falling upon him, Morrison collapsed and lay lifeless. When a companion urgently roused him, he replied, dazed: It was the Lord working with me. I had received my Pentecost.²⁹

Even then, it appears that God had not yet fully shaken the vestiges of the old carnal self from his mortal frame. Morrison’s ministry continued to be hindered because this encounter with the Holy Spirit was burdened by a false humility preventing him from wanting to testify to what God had done in his life. The result was an unexpected, sudden loss of spiritual power as well as physical stamina. After immersion in Scripture and prayer, he realized the source of this chastening and proceeded to profess audibly the cleansing work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification, which brought stability to his heart and life.

With that act of obedience, Morrison’s bold witness to God’s work in his life was unencumbered. Not only was he now God’s child, he was indeed a holy child, because of Whose he was, and to share this testimony was not a mark of pride but an uplifting of the work of God in his life. It was no longer a matter of his ministry, but of the ministry of the Holy Spirit through him. This means ministry was now being attended by awakening, because he had met the condition that was the key to the first awakening within Protestant Christianity, of owning his status as God’s holy child.³⁰ He knew from his heart not only that Jesus Christ had died for him but also that the resurrected Christ now lived within him through the witness of the Holy Spirit. Morrison sensed at that point that he was clothed with the power of the Spirit, received as the outpouring of the cleansing and empowering love of Jesus upon his soul. This kairos moment also precipitated his transition from pastor to full-time evangelist, which occurred in 1890.³¹

His largest revivals in Kentucky now commenced. At the Hill Street Church in Lexington (later the First United Methodist Church), the most prestigious in the city and state, Morrison was invited to preach twice daily for three weeks, and he did so to standing-room-only crowds. Since he was away from his appointed station, his presiding elder had to ask him to cease this revival and return to his own lost sheep.³² The Lexington newspapers were all impressed with the boy preacher, as Morrision still was being called, and an ecstatic impact was made at Winchester, where the lasting results included the formation of a Young Men’s Christian Association chapter as a way to keep alive the revival fire among the young men of the city.³³

In the decade of the 1880s, the holiness movement was making headway in American Methodism, and Morrison recalled attending their conferences, fully embracing their doctrine, and praying as a seeker at the altar many times for three years following the loss of spiritual power and physical stamina he had experienced in Danville.³⁴ The National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness had begun in 1867 under the leadership of a Methodist presiding elder, John Inskip, at Vineland, New Jersey, and had been growing exponentially since then at its quadrennial conferences.³⁵

In the wake of his personal encounter with the reality of a Spirit-filled and sanctified life, Morrison understood this as the indispensable part of salvation in Jesus Christ which was what enabled the apostles of our Lord to fulfill His Great Commission to go to all the world with this gospel of salvation (see Matt. 28:16–20). Morrison would also envision a seminary with the distinctive commitment to be a community dedicated to preparing persons called into this ministry to be equipped for its spread over the earth. As a practicing Methodist pastor and evangelist, he did not regard this in any sense as a marginalized, sectarian doctrine, but one directed to the heart of the apostolic gospel, once for all delivered to the saints. This is nothing less than scriptural Christianity.³⁶ It is the message of Pentecost, which complements and completes the message of justification by grace through faith.

Finding the Way Forward with the Pentecostal Herald

After securing his theological grounding on the apostolic message of full salvation in Christ, upon which Wesley himself was grounded, Morrison’s pathway toward the founding of Asbury Theological Seminary would follow the story of a remarkable periodical which would be called the Pentecostal Herald. It was launched by Morrison to generate awareness and receptivity for the recovery of a distinctive Wesleyan doctrine largely sidelined within the corridors of a gentrified Methodism. The founding of Asbury Theological Seminary requires an adequate understanding of its importance as the vehicle for disseminating the foundational theme embedded within its mission.

In the aftermath of his encounter with sanctification and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, while still in his early twenties, Morrison’s days were divided between serving increasingly prominent pastorates in Kentucky Methodism (such as the one located in the state capital at Frankfort) and accepting calls to assist in revival work at city churches and camp meetings. He had gained a wide reputation as a revival preacher; however, he was frustrated by his inability to accept all the invitations to preach the gospel of full salvation.

While agonizing over this problem one sleepless night during a revival, the idea of using printer’s ink to send out the message³⁷ occurred to him. Though a novice in writing, he envisioned this as a way to multiply his communication of full salvation in Christ to a far larger audience. He prayed about this and sensed the affirmation of the Holy Spirit. His focus became publishing a holiness paper and to devote his life to the spread of the doctrine of full salvation.³⁸ In this new endeavor, his single-hearted intent would be to testify that the blood of Christ sanctifies my heart from all sin.³⁹ He composed the first issue that night and had it published under the title the Old Methodist by a local printer in Frankfort the next day.⁴⁰

This endeavor would also include a polemical focus: advancing the message of full salvation in Christ was, in Morrison’s eyes, shedding God’s light upon the dark forces of liberal German theology which was beginning to swamp the theological schools of mainline Protestantism, including Methodism. The people of God were losing their direction when they crossed the line where there is no recognition of human depravity before God, the deity of Christ, the atoning death of Christ, the resurrection, and the acceptance of the Wesleyan message of full salvation in Christ through the sanctified, Spirit-filled life. These would be the subjects of numerous articles in his journal.

In the years editing this journal, Morrison had the sense that the majority of the population in American culture still supported traditional Christian belief and morality, but that it was the leadership of church and academy who had the intention of replacing traditional belief and morality with a modernist agenda through reeducation. It was his purpose to stand against that stream before that influence should become pervasive throughout the culture.⁴¹ Unlike much of Protestant fundamentalism, however, Morrison’s larger purpose was a proactive message of full salvation in Christ that God had in mind for the renewal of humanity into His image.

Morrison’s initial effort seemed too meager to succeed. After two years of monthly publication, he accrued a debt of three hundred dollars, which was not covered by the subscriptions received. With strong determination, he then took the risky step to withdraw from the itinerant ministry, with local relations to the Annual Conference, to restart the paper under a new title, the Kentucky Methodist, published in Lexington.⁴² His heart remained warm for this ministry, gaining friends as well as strong opposition and even bitter enemies from those opposed to his message. At least he could pay his debt to the Frankfort printer, observing that "the Kentucky Methodist was something like the Hebrews in Egypt land where, we are told, the more they were oppressed, the more it grew."⁴³ In addition, local newspapers in the Lexington area were publishing favorable reviews of his revival meetings in central Kentucky (a feature that would not be possible in current newspapers).

Once again, he changed the location of the paper, this time moving it to Louisville. Hoping to bring him back into regular pastoral ministry, the bishop of Kentucky Methodism moved to appoint Morrison as interim pastor at the large Broadway Methodist Church in Louisville. After filling that interim post, Morrison remained resolute not to be diverted from his divine call to resume evangelistic work, with a focus on his paper.⁴⁴ His determination, born of his baptism in the Holy Spirit, enabled him to hold steady in this course, even when Morrison was rebuked by the editor of the established Nashville Christian Advocate, who sought to discourage him from bringing his holiness paper to Louisville.⁴⁵ Morrison went forward with his work amid these challenges.

In 1891, Morrison renamed his journal the Pentecostal Herald,⁴⁶ highlighting its purpose as an apology for the message of full sanctification and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. What Morrison wanted was an abiding Pentecost of the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.⁴⁷ This name was giving testimony to the many letters reporting people who were converted and sanctified through this paper. In doing this work, he was scarcely aware that he was adopting a title that had been used in the first revival in modern history, occurring some two centuries earlier.⁴⁸ Further, when Morrison founded the seminary, he would not only be commissioning it for a future global mission but also launching it on the platform upon which the first awakening in modernity was launched. From this perspective, the mission of Asbury Theological Seminary would remain distinctive both in its inception and in its strategic, long-range goal.

When Morrison changed the name of his journal to the Pentecostal Herald, it was positioned to address the growing controversy in Methodism on the subject of the so-called second blessing sanctification. The publishing of pamphlets and articles in the columns of the church periodicals highlighted the intensity of his debate. Persons professing to be holy were ridiculed by bishops and presiding elders in several annual conferences, including Kentucky.⁴⁹ Morrison reports huddling with pastors being ridiculed in their annual conference session for witnessing to the sanctifying power of our Lord Jesus.⁵⁰

As a growing number of laypersons embraced his message of Pentecost in his revival meetings, he resolved not to reply to the numerous attacks directed against him by clergy across the denomination. He wrote of maintaining a wonderfully sweet peace in my heart under the barrage of these attacks. On one occasion when he lapsed and defended himself, he reported having a loss of inner peace and warning from the Spirit, saying, If you wish to take care of yourself, I see no need to take pains to take care of you.⁵¹ He found that prophetic word to hold true throughout his life.

Concurrent with this paper, his ministry with his increasingly influential and anointed preaching reached a peak in the thousands he addressed in revival meetings across the nation. These trips included a protracted stay at the Glide Methodist Episcopal Church in San Francisco, which became a holiness preaching center for the West Coast.⁵² This expansion was reflected in the rapid growth of subscribers to the Pentecostal Herald, which became the leading evangelical publication in America by the early twentieth century.

Holiness camp meetings began to be organized in the wake of his travels, the first appearing in Texas. It arose from a group of devout men who had received the grace of sanctification after their regeneration.⁵³ Morrison, reporting these meetings in the Pentecostal Herald, viewed them as being quite like Methodism in the old days under the leadership of Wesley in England and the early fathers in our country.⁵⁴ In his preaching and in his editorial writing, he discerned contrasting patterns among Methodists in his day: On the one hand, there are no people who will become more quickly aroused and more bitterly opposed to a true spiritual awakening than dead, formal ecclesiastics. He continued:

If, under these conditions, the Lord’s people will hold closer to one motive, with no selfishness, their prayers will be answered, divine power will be manifested, and the multitudes, most likely of the humble classes, will hasten to their ministry, believe the truth, and gracious revivals of saving power break out.⁵⁵

His vision for this mission was being extended through his strong churchmanship as well, serving as a delegate to five world (general) conferences of Southern Methodism and guest preacher in fifty-three different annual conferences of world Methodism through his long ministry.⁵⁶

Morrison offered his rendition of this pivotal doctrine of Wesleyan theology in his 1900 pamphlet The Baptism with the Holy Ghost. He set forth in succinct form a supplement to the Pentecostal Herald, viewed as an important Bible truth, in a plain, simple way.⁵⁷ It was published the year of his location from the itinerant ministry to that of a full-time Methodist evangelist. This publication presented an explicit account of the necessary components in the doctrine of entire sanctification with the baptism in the Holy Spirit, which was destined to become foundational to the mission statement of Asbury Seminary.

Morrison took a theological leap by introducing the baptism with the Holy Ghost as the grounding for his Christology. He made this connection by pointing out that this baptism is Christ’s prime credential, proving his Messiahship.⁵⁸ This represented proof from prophecy, since his position was based not upon appeal to the nature of His personhood but upon John’s prophecy: his definite declaration that Christ would bestow the baptism with the Holy Ghost.⁵⁹ From this it may be extrapolated that, for Morrison, Pentecost was considered the ultimate historical evidence for the Messiahship (e.g., divinity) of Jesus Christ, from which it could be inferred that a denial of the importance of entire sanctification (the full outpouring of the love of Christ), which was then occurring in Methodism at the time of the founding of Asbury Seminary, was tantamount to being a denial of the full divinity of Jesus Christ.

Important for the future global mission of Asbury Seminary, Morrison provided here a foundation for envisioning the global dimensions of God’s mission, inaugurated at Pentecost. He traced the ever-expanding perimeters of that mission, from the Twelve to the 109 in the Upper Room with them, to the three thousand for the remission of sins, and for the children of the three thousand, for all who are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.⁶⁰ Call signified regenerate, he noted, and all those are the ones who have the promise of the baptism with the Holy Ghost.⁶¹

The rejection of the Holy Ghost is fatal to Christian experience.⁶² Here he set forth a stark warning: church members, in this new dispensation, who reject the Holy Ghost, will commit an even more grievous and fatal sin than that committed by the Jews in rejecting Christ.⁶³ This was because, as our light is greater than theirs, our sin will be more inexcusable than theirs.⁶⁴ By contrast, all who genuinely have the forgiveness of sins will gladly embrace the Holy Spirit, for whom the Son prayed. In light of Pentecost, if the Holy Spirit is repeatedly rejected, He will finally take His departure to return no more.⁶⁵ Then our human condition will be desolate indeed. The last person in the Trinity has come, and has finally taken His departure from those who would not receive Christ in His sanctifying and indwelling power.⁶⁶

Breakthrough for a New Seminary

Just as full sanctification entails pardon, regeneration, and sanctification, so did the founding of Asbury Seminary require a seriation of theological and economic crises. These ranged from the rescue from total collapse of the holiness college founded by John Wesley Hughes to the rebirth of its College of Theology as the independent Asbury Theological Seminary in 1923. Each development represents the intervention of the redemptive interaction of the triune God with obedient and courageous human channels. Each was enabled by the Spirit-filled walk of faith led by one man selected by his peers for this task: Henry Clay Morrison.

Perhaps the earliest reference to the topic of a seminary in the memoirs of H. C. Morrison is found in his account which followed the reception of his license to preach. Since he was not yet assigned to an appointment, he linked up with another young preacher to assist him on his Jacksonville, Kentucky, circuit.⁶⁷ He and his colleague Charles Cooper had each made only one previous effort to preach. He likened his task to a skillful fisherman, devoting himself to intense evangelism in pulpits and homes, in fields and at barns, admonishing each person to give his heart to Christ that he might be prepared to train his children in the fear and admonition of his God. When he and Cooper were in a revival meeting, taking turns preaching each night, their habit was to conduct themselves as students in training in their spare time, in this fashion:

We used to go into the woods and pray, then sit on a log and talk over the thoughts we desired to present to the people. Such exercises are not a bad seminary. In these conversations, we gave each other suggestions, our minds got active, we read our Bibles and grew in grace. I regret we did not spend more time in this greatest work of all—the earnest seeking of the lost to win them to Christ.⁶⁸

As a prelude to his founding of the seminary, Morrison was called to become president of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, in 1910. Its founding president, John Wesley Hughes, had retired five years earlier, and the fledging institution soon found itself in dire financial straits. Founded in 1890, Hughes opened it as the first four-year holiness college in America with a liberal arts curriculum, since other schools launched in the holiness movement were Bible schools. His concern was the lack of a holiness college in Methodism.

Wilmore, the site selected by Hughes for the location of his holiness college, was within rural Jessamine County, in the rolling bluegrass hills near the Kentucky River. The village had been the site of a revival led by H. C. Morrison in 1885, his first, at the recently constructed Methodist Episcopal Church, South, congregation in Wilmore. Hughes discovered that Wilmore was also adjacent to the site of the first Methodist college in the West, named Bethel Academy, founded in 1790 by none other than Bishop Francis Asbury, the founding bishop of American Methodism.⁶⁹ In its short history, Bethel was the site of several conferences of western Methodism and was frequented by Asbury. Hughes set his vision on founding a worthy successor to Bethel Academy and decided to name his Kentucky holiness college Asbury College.⁷⁰

As indicative of the widespread hostility of official Methodism toward a holiness college, the bishop of an adjacent Methodist college wrote that, if the new school’s intent is to promote that fanaticism called sanctification, we endeavor to destroy it.⁷¹ Hughes remained unintimidated and resolute in his intentions for proceeding with the school, and it thrived under his leadership and under the official motto he adopted: Full salvation for all men and free salvation from all sin. Hughes remained convinced that what makes a college truly Methodist is not whether it was authorized by a Methodist conference but whether it teaches Methodist doctrine, which, for him, signified regeneration and sanctification, accompanied by a consecrated, holy heart and a holy life with warm hearts and cool heads.⁷²

Morrison Meets E. Stanley Jones

Being a full-time Methodist evangelist, H. C. Morrison used every opportunity available in his traveling ministry to introduce qualified persons to Asbury College, which was thriving under Hughes’s consecrated leadership. Perhaps his most noteworthy recruit was secured as a result of his perseverance at a place where local authorities discouraged him from preaching. When a group of devout people invited him to hold a holiness convention in Baltimore in 1903, the local presiding elder (now called the district superintendent) overruled a pastor whose church was then barred to Morrison’s use for that purpose. He proceeded and held the service at a little mission around the corner. Since those who gathered were cut off from human sympathy from the local Methodist presiding elder, they were driven to God in deep humility and trust, with gratifying results. These were the desired features of a revival: sinners converted, backsliders reclaimed, and believers sanctified.

One evening after the meeting, a young man with an unusual classic and pure face came to Morrison and eagerly announced: I feel I am called to preach the gospel. I want to go where I can be educated and be prepared to preach in a spiritual atmosphere; a safe place for the development of my soul and my spiritual life, along with my intellectual training.⁷³

Morrison replied: Asbury College, at Wilmore, Kentucky, is the very place you are seeking. He directed him to the place, and the young man arrived, enrolled, and in due time fell under deep conviction for full salvation and received a gracious baptism with the Holy Ghost in sanctifying power.⁷⁴

After graduation from the college in 1907, this young man left for the vast mission field of India, where he labored successfully among the Hindu people, influencing not only the Methodists but also devout missionaries of all churches. Modest, with a saintly appearance, he gained the confidence of those he met. Morrison received word that this young man was wielding a wider and more profound spiritual influence than any other man in India and was one of the best known and most loved men in Methodism.⁷⁵

His name was E. Stanley Jones. Morrison humbly observed that he claimed no credit, but he asked himself what would have occurred had he not disregarded the orders of the presiding elder and obeyed the higher orders—the voice of God in my soul.⁷⁶ Above all, Jones gave definition to the mission not only of the college, but of the seminary which would be birthed from it.

Reflecting on Hughes’s point about the necessity for a holiness college, Morrison mused: Had [Jones] gone to some school where he would have been taught that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, that Daniel was a myth, . . . that regeneration was not necessary, that sanctification was a mere religious hysteria, and that the Bible . . . was no longer recognized as divine revelation, . . . could he possibly become the man he is?⁷⁷ From this, Morrison derived a maxim for his ministry, which offers insight into what enabled the mission that is Asbury Seminary to become what it is: we proceed never in the spirit of lawlessness or daring, but always under a profound conviction that God is leading, and that I must go forward or grieve the Holy Spirit.⁷⁸

Morrison’s Leadership at Asbury College as Prelude to the Seminary

Due to a destructive fire, Asbury College moved in 1908 from its original location on Main Street in Wilmore to its present location, the site of a former Presbyterian secondary school, Bellevue Academy.⁷⁹ The college had a succession of four presidents in five years after Hughes’s retirement in 1905, and its financial viability tumbled. Its student body was reduced from two hundred to fifty by 1910. Alarmed, its trustees were fearful that the school would soon close, barring an unexpected miracle.⁸⁰

In response to this dangerous turn of events at the college, Morrison recalled in his memoirs that it was Trustee A. P. Jones who was dispatched to put the matter before Morrison. Jones hastened to intersect Morrison on an emergency basis, while Morrison was conducting a revival in Indiana, following his arrival from his world mission tour. With great urgency, the college trustee put it straight to him: If you do not undertake the presidency of the school, it seems inevitable it will be sold, and that means the end of Asbury College, as it has stood and labored for the spread of Scriptural Holiness.⁸¹

After devout and intensive prayer, Morrison surprised himself, as he would later recall, by accepting that invitation.⁸² This decision launched his heroic, Spirit-filled effort on behalf of the college, activating the sacrificial giving of the holiness community through its commitment to the gospel of full salvation.

Accepting the call to the college, and later the seminary, would become a strategic part of that larger mission of preaching the message of full salvation. Since he had located from the Kentucky Conference to become a full-time Methodist evangelist in 1900, he had moved his family, including his second wife, Geneva Pedlar Morrison, and their children, to Wilmore in 1907.⁸³ In addition, Morrison had long worked closely with former President Hughes and spoke and raised funds for the college as a special lecturer and trustee.⁸⁴

His acceptance of the college presidency occurred in the wake of two important developments. Morrison had begun receiving numerous calls to preach and to assist in revival meetings in large city churches across the nation, from Boston to Richmond, Virginia, to New Orleans and on to Denver, and in smaller towns and open places throughout these regions.⁸⁵ Many of these sites were centered in the South, and from that following, as solidified in the readership of the Pentecostal Herald, he took the initiative to help form Holiness Unions that would provide a more solidified voice for the recovery of the forgotten theme of full salvation. The community emerging from this fellowship was a large part of the incentive to envision a seminary to train preachers for such a mission.

Second, he had also conducted a yearlong evangelistic tour of the world from July 1909 to mid-1910, as an outreach endeavor of the newly formed Southern Holiness Association, which he had helped establish. He took Asbury College ministerial student J. L. Piercy as his traveling companion. Piercy had received the baptism in the Holy Spirit with full salvation at the Morrison Park Holiness Campground, which H. C. Morrison had founded in 1900 near the site of his boyhood home on his grandfather’s farm in Barren County, Kentucky.⁸⁶ They traveled by ship and land via Montreal, Glasgow, London, Paris, and Rome, and on to Port Said, Egypt, via a German steamer. From there they ventured to Jerusalem, where Morrison preached in a small church built by the Christian and Missionary Alliance.⁸⁷ As they visited the holy sites of the faith, he prayed for the future when this city will become again a kingdom of righteousness and peace.⁸⁸ They visited the Methodist church in Lucknow, India, where E. Stanley Jones was pastor, and Morrison preached in multiple revival services in India. Converts were reported among many, including British soldiers. He also preached in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, with many converts reported, and described the journey as entering into family circles with indigenous peoples and devout missionaries, for bright conversions, powerful sanctifications, and gracious hours of Christian fellowship where the Divine Presence was felt.⁸⁹

This venture implanted in Morrison a deeper sense of the world to which the mission of the seminary was to become focused. It was also on the heels of his return from his world tour in 1910 that Morrison published what may be regarded as his master sermon, setting forth the redemptive purpose of God. Titled the Pearl of Greatest Price, the sermon’s focus is set upon the highest point in the proclamation of the gospel of full salvation in Jesus Christ, and the text is 1 Corinthians, chapter 13.⁹⁰ The features of this sermon summarize the thrust of his argument, with commentary and implications for his tenure as first president of the seminary. It is viewed here as a primary specimen of Morrison’s preaching, demonstrating why Morrison was regarded by even William Jennings Bryan, perhaps the most influential political leader of that day, as the greatest pulpit orator on the American continent.⁹¹

First, his theme is broached by introducing a collage of metaphors inciting the imagination and the spiritual yearning of the hearer. The first is the metaphor of the title, which links the appeal of perfect love in Jesus Christ to our Lord’s metaphor comparing His kingdom to the merchant who seeks fine pearls (Matt. 13:45). There is also Bunyan’s epic Pilgrim’s Progress, where Christian and Hopeful approach the end of their tortuous journey, with the radiant Celestial City before them, and yet they are separated from it by a broad, deep river. In appealing to this epic tale, Morrison may be recalling his own dangerous swim across the high-current, mile-wide Ohio River, on whose Kentucky bank stood one of the first Methodist churches to which he was assigned as a young man. And so, this thirteenth chapter is described as a broad, deep river, sweeping between us and our desired city.⁹²

In this homily, Morrison envisions what would become implemented in a theological curriculum, a logo having three prongs representing a trinity of truths: doctrine, experience, and practice, each requiring the other.⁹³ Its only foundation is the Word of God, but its efficacy depends on our tarrying at Jerusalem, in our place of prayer, until our day of Pentecost has come.⁹⁴ Only then can the truth become known by its fruits, in our practice of this faith. This fruit of the Spirit is found in those listed by the apostle Paul in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians.

Finally, the divine love, which would also empower and direct a seminary’s curriculum linked to this mission, is kindled in our souls, according to Morrison, when we locate the source of that power. That font is the awakening which had ignited the kindled zeal of John Wesley’s soul and then broke into a conflagration of revival fire, and swept over land and sea, until it has touched every shore beneath the sun, and today burns on in the great revival of full salvation.⁹⁵

Before the next phase of Morrison’s participation in the missio Dei could be implemented, there were immediate matters to be addressed as the new president of the financially challenged Asbury College. Toward the close of his life, H. C. Morrison’s memoir would recall how, amid opposition from friends, ridicule from enemies, slow growth, and limited funds, he preached revivals for the college, recruited students, and prayed continually with the hope that blessings would come—and they came.⁹⁶ He would note that there were thirty thousand subscribers to the Pentecostal Herald, which from the first was the advocate, defender, advertiser, and earnest pleader for the school.⁹⁷ The enrollment grew and buildings were constructed as financial appeals were issued through the Herald. Within five years of his presidency, beginning in 1910, Asbury College had come through its first financial crisis of the early twentieth century.

Morrison’s success as president of the college was closely tied to his commanding and consecrated persona, also reflecting his unflinching consecration to his Christ and to the leading of the Holy Spirit, with whom he was sealed. Among the many tributes of his ministry from students was one who recalled how, when he returned from ministry trips, everyone would know Morrison was back because the entire atmosphere would suddenly and wonderfully be charged with the presence and power of God.⁹⁸

In time, with his speaking and fundraising as president, Asbury College returned to strength with a rejuvenated campus; it would be acclaimed as a leading college in the nation in terms of the wide distribution of its students, representing a large number of American states and nations abroad.⁹⁹ Its students came mainly from the Southern and Northern branches of American Methodism, plus other Wesleyan holiness bodies, Evangelicals, and the Salvation Army.¹⁰⁰

A Self-Standing Holiness Seminary

By 1915, only one year after the first theological course was introduced into the college curriculum, the intention to launch a seminary was first announced.¹⁰¹ This initiative was the result of a deep concern about the prevalence of skeptical, modernist thought in the official schools of Methodism, which undermined the personal faith of students coming from local churches. Morrison began to envision a theological seminary independent of the college.¹⁰² The content