It is most fitting that this issue of The Ministry be dedicated to H. M. S. Richards, dean of Seventh-day Adventist ministers, and for forty years a pioneer and peer among religious radio broadcasters. Dr. Richard's life has been totally committed to evangelism--the preaching of the good news of the gospel. His preaching ancestry reaches back through several generations.
One of his early progenitors was a lay preacher and traveling companion to John Wesley. His grandfather, William Jenkins Richards, was converted in evangelistic meetings conducted by General William Booth and became a lay preacher in Redruth, Cornwall, England. He served also as a Methodist Episcopal circuit preacher in America. His son, Halbert M. J. Richards (father of H. M. S. Richards), traveled extensively in gospel evangelism throughout Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, California, and other States.
In the late summer of 1894, H. M. J. Richards left his gospel tent in the Mid west, flagged a freight train bound for Davis City, Iowa. An understanding brakeman and engineer relaxed railroad regulations to permit the excited young preacher to rush home to see his firstborn and his wife. At home he found a son named Harold Marshall Sylvester Richards. His father said, "We'll have prayer and I'll put my hands on his head and he shall be the Lord's baby boy."
At age two, H. M. S. nearly died from eating green apples. The doctor gave little hope of his recovery. Mother Richards prayed for healing, promising to dedicate him to the service of God if he lived. The prayer was answered, and from that time on Richards was taught that he belonged to God. This influenced his later decision when he wanted to be a lawyer, but knew he belonged to the Lord.
Preacher at Four
Richards preached his first sermon at the age of four about the New Jerusalem, which would abound with fruit. This won for him all the delicious-looking oranges in the bowl over which he was preaching.
After that he preached often, mostly to a circle of empty chairs and his younger brother Kenneth. At the age of ten, H. M. S. and his brother played one day with gun powder, which was used by their father for blasting stumps and clearing land. A gun, misfiring, blew powder into his face. Grains of powder were embedded in his eyes, and for weeks after H. M. S. could see nothing but a little light. After the wounds were healed, a noticeable weakness and nearsightedness were apparent, necessitating the wearing of thick glasses from that time until the present.
H. M. S. recalls the lay elder of the Loveland, Colorado, Adventist church, an old rancher, as a great influence in his life: "I can see him now. He wouldn't think of going up there into the pulpit. That was too holy a place for him. Only the minister or conference president, when they came through, could go up there. No, sir, he stood down on the floor with Bible in hand. I remember his standing there with that big Bible, the tears running down his cheeks. I tell you, he did more for us boys than all the preachers in the country, be cause we knew he was a man of God. He was an old cowpuncher and talked just like one. He's the man who kept us in the straight and narrow."
Harold was very active in his local church as a boy, finally becoming a deacon, then elder of the church. He assisted his father in tent meetings during high school years. During the summer of 1912 at Fort Lupton, Colorado, his dad found an excuse to be gone on Saturday afternoon, telling Harold he would have to preach. Delighted yet fearful, he asked what subject he should take. His father said, "Well, you had better take angels."
Harold became even more anxious. "Is there enough in the Bible to preach on this subject?" he wanted to know.
"You look and see if there isn't," his dad said.
He found plenty; and a few days later, an old woman came to the tent and said, "Oh, you don't know what that sermon meant to me! I live over beyond the tracks all alone and have just a few chickens. I was afraid someone would kill me there. When you preached on the subject of an gels, I thought, Surely the angels are guarding me. And I want you to know I do not have any more fear."
The testimony greatly encouraged Richards. Recalling the incident, he says, "I don't know her name, but I hope the good Lord will reward her someday because she never knew what she meant to me. I was about to believe that I was a failure as a preacher."
With his close friend Kenneth Gant, Richards won his first convert. During an Ingathering campaign the boys found a woman seriously ill with tuberculosis. She was willing for them to study with her, so every Thursday night they walked three and one-half miles along the railroad tracks to conduct the study. They always stopped at the mailbox to pray before going into her home. Not knowing anything about giving Bible studies, one would talk for five minutes and run out of something to say, then the other would talk until he was speechless. When asked questions they could not answer, they would say, "We don't know. We'll try to tell you next week."
This went on for nearly three years. Not knowing how to bring the woman to a decision, they watched in amazement as she decided to accept on her own. "She pushed us aside and walked right past us into the church," he says. A few months later she died.
In the summer of 1914, the two young preachers felt they were ready to become great tent evangelists! The conference president loaned them a leaky tent, with which they carried on. The size of the congregation, nineteen to begin with, and the spirit of the young preachers shrank from night to night. Back at Campion Academy in the fall, Richards and Gant decided to keep very quiet about their summer's "preaching mission," which resulted in much experience but little fruit.
Harold Marshall Sylvester Richards was the one-member, first graduating class of Campion Academy. The underclassmen and faculty insisted on giving their sole senior a memorable graduation complete with all the trimmings. He sat through all the exercises alone.
Undecided whether to go to college or directly into the ministry after his graduation, Richards teamed up again with Kenneth Gant to hold meetings in Woodland Park, Colorado, a small town near Pike's Peak. An incident Richards has never for gotten stands out about the meetings there:
"We were awakened one morning by a general disturbance and learned that the villagers were dragging the lake for the body of a woman. Soon they found the body and laid it on the platform where Gant and I preached each night. This woman had been sitting before us every night. We had gone on Sunday to visit her. She had a lovely home, good husband, and beautiful children, and she seemed happy.
"There was a stranger visiting in the home when we called, and we thought it best not to talk about religion or to have prayer. We paid our respects and promised to return. That night she did not come to the meeting. Instead she went and jumped into the lake back of our tabernacle. She left a note asking me to preach her funeral sermon.
"The visitor had been an old sweetheart. When she saw him, she lost hold of herself, left her husband and children, and drowned herself. Imagine how Gant and I felt. The woman we should have talked with and prayed with, and didn't! We did a lot of heart searching then, I tell you, and a lot of weeping before the Lord."
Entering Washington Missionary College, Richards preached twice each week in the winter, every night during the summer. He went to hear the great preachers of the day, including Billy Sunday. As World War I came, Richards was careful not to say in his sermons, "This is the last war." But he felt at the time that the hour in which he was preaching could be earth's last one. In two summers he raised up two churches.
The church leaders, convinced that this young evangelist, although still in college, had been called of God, ordained him to the gospel ministry. At this sacred service on September 21, 1918, he took as a motto for his future preaching, the text found in 1 Corinthians 2:1, 2: "And I, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified."
While in full-time evangelism in Mont real, Canada, Richards received a call from Union College to teach evangelism. W. W. Prescott of the college made a trip to Montreal to make sure he would accept the call. Prescott, a man of commanding appearance and personality, urged Richards to accept the call as a mandate from God. In great anguish he struggled to make a decision. Remembering the struggle, he says, "The thing just bombarded me worse and worse. I couldn't do it. I didn't want to leave evangelism, and I couldn't get relief from anybody. My wife couldn't help me. I wrote my father, and he wrote back, 'Son, you'll have to decide. I'll pray for you.'
"For three or four days I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. It got worse and worse. Finally, up in the attic of the church there in Westmount, Montreal, I fought the thing out in prayer, and the decision was just as clear as it could be I couldn't do it. God had something else for me."
40-Year Radio Career Begins
None would then have known that this "something else" would include forty years of radio preaching. In 1926, the young evangelist and his wife came to California to conduct crusades in Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego, Bakersfield, and Fresno. It was during the stay in Bakersfield and Fresno that his radio career began with an experimental broadcast.
Back in Los Angeles these were followed with early-morning devotional programs over KNX, and a year later with the "Tabernacle of the Air," from KMPC, which usually consisted of a remote broadcast from one of Richards' Crusade meetings. Later broadcasts were aired regularly on KGER, Long Beach.
In 1937, joined by the Lone Star Four, a gospel quartet, Richards went on the air with a thirty-minute Sunday evening program on the seven California and two Arizona stations of the Don Lee System. The group would travel from town to town west of the Rockies appearing in their evangelistic crusades with their program originating live from the nearest Don Lee station.
The next major advance came in 1942. Fordyce Detamore, recently returned from Southeast Asia, joined the staff as associate director, bringing with him the novel concept of a Bible correspondence course. It was his lot also to open the Voice of Prophecy's first nationwide network broad cast over the Mutual System with the now-famous words, "Hello, America." Seven years later the station coverage was boosted to more than seven hundred stations when the way was opened to go on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). About that time the first thrusts were made into the international short-wave market with programs on Radio Luxembourg and Radio Ceylon. More recent years have seen the introduction of the daily broadcasts, the Nile Owl approach, and last year the Voice of Prophecy Evangelistic Association.
Through these many years of fruitful ministry, Pastor Richards has relied firmly upon the mighty arm of his personal Saviour, and has sought to reflect His goodness as revealed through His life on earth. The power of his own spiritual life has been the source of inspiration and encouragement to multiplied thousands. This may be due, at least in part, to an experience that came to him as a young man at the time of his grandfather Sylvester's death. He tells of the deep and lasting impression it made upon his soul:
"The night my grandfather Sylvester died I was alone with him. He was a very strong man, and in spite of everything I could do he got out of bed, went over to the sideboard, and got his Bible. 'Now, Harold,' he said, 'you're going to be a minister. I want to read something to you and leave this message with you.' Turning to the second chapter of 1 Corinthians, he read the entire chapter to me. He especially emphasized the last part, for spiritual things "are spiritually discerned."
"Then he said, 'If you're going to be a minister, you've got to be a spiritual man. You can never understand the Bible unless you're spiritual. You can study it all your life but you'll not understand it No man has the right to be a minister i he isn't spiritual.' He labored that point as he read those texts to me, and I never forgot them because of that. Then he died in my arms. His last words were, 'O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!' "
