The Pursuit of God

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The Pursuit of God

in their place, he turned his gaze upward to what was enduring and eternal. Tozer was converted to Christ as a teenage factory worker in 1915. He soon joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Holiness denomination that became his lifelong church home. Near the end of World War I, he served for a brief stint in the United States Army. Early on in his Christian life, he had sensed a call to pastoral ministry. In 1919, despite a lack of theological training, he accepted his first pastoral appointment: a little congregation in Stonewood, West Virginia, near Nutter Fort. Other pastorates followed in Morgantown, West Virginia, and then in Indianapolis. These led him eventually to Chicago’s South Side (1928–1959), and finally to Toronto, Canada (1959–1963). He lived his entire life in this central region of North America, never residing more than six hundred miles from his rural birthplace. A. W. Tozer had only limited formal education. In fact, he quit school altogether at age fifteen to help his financially struggling family. 2 But he was gifted intellectually, and he developed these gifts through a lifetime of diligent reading and self-directed study. He never celebrated ignorance or disdained wisdom and expertise as ways of saving face. Years later, he would advise young people: “Get all the education you can—then forget you have it, and let God use you.” 3

2 Lyle Dorsett, A Passion for God: The Spiritual Journey of A. W. Tozer (Chicago: Moody, 2008), 15. 3 My late father James Taylor Scorgie, “Personal Memoir of A. W. Tozer” (unpublished paper, 2007).