Who Was R. A. Torrey? Evangelist, Bible Teacher, Author of How to Pray

Biography Prayer Evangelism Revival

Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928) was an American evangelist, pastor and Bible teacher. He was D. L. Moody's choice to lead the Bible institute in Chicago that now bears Moody's name. In the early 1900s he preached to large crowds on several continents. Later he led the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, now Biola University, and helped edit The Fundamentals, the set of essays that gave fundamentalism its name. He wrote dozens of books, and How to Pray is still among the most read.

TheWay Library has many of his books free to read on his author page.

Early life and Yale

Torrey was born on January 28, 1856, in Hoboken, New Jersey. His father was a banker, and the family was well off. He went to Yale, graduating from Yale College in 1875 and from Yale Divinity School in 1878.

His conversion came while he was a student at Yale, and he tells the story himself in chapter I of How to Pray. It came suddenly, in the night, with no sermon or conversation to prompt it:

I was awakened in the middle of the night and converted. As far as I can remember I had not the slightest thought of being converted, or of anything of that character, when I went to bed and fell asleep …
How to Pray, chapter I

He goes on to say how close he had come to ruin, and that he later learned his mother had been praying for him, and so had a college classmate who had picked him out to pray for until he was saved. That experience shaped the whole book. When Torrey writes that "there are few converted in this world unless in connection with some one's prayers," he is speaking about himself.

Pastor and student

After seminary he was ordained in the Congregational church and took a pastorate in Garrettsville, Ohio. He married Clara Smith in 1879, and they had five children. In the early 1880s he went to Germany to study at the universities of Leipzig and Erlangen. He came home settled in his confidence in the whole Bible as the Word of God, a conviction you can hear in nearly everything he later wrote.

Through most of the 1880s he worked in Minneapolis as a pastor and in city mission work, and founded a new church there.

Moody Bible Institute

In 1889 D. L. Moody asked Torrey to come to Chicago and lead the new training school of the Chicago Evangelization Society, which became Moody Bible Institute. Torrey served as its superintendent for many years and built its course of Bible study. In 1894 he also became pastor of the Chicago Avenue Church, the church Moody had founded, now the Moody Church.

How to Pray, published in 1900, comes from this period. Torrey mentions an early morning in "the Chicago Avenue Church prayer room" when several hundred people had been praying for hours and the Holy Spirit came so plainly that no one could speak. His books from these years, such as How to Study the Bible for Greatest Profit, What the Bible Teaches and How to Bring Men to Christ, read like the classroom: numbered points, every claim tied to a verse.

After Moody's death in 1899, Torrey wrote Lessons from the Life and Death of D. L. Moody, and years later Why God Used D. L. Moody, naming prayer as one of the reasons.

World evangelistic tours

Beginning in 1902, Torrey set out on a preaching tour that took him around much of the world. With the song leader Charles M. Alexander, he held meetings in Australia and New Zealand, visited Asia, including India, China and Japan, and then spent long campaigns in Great Britain and Ireland, including several months in London. Large numbers professed faith in Christ. Through 1906 and 1907 he held similar campaigns in cities in the United States and Canada.

Sermons from these years were printed in books like Revival Addresses, and his practical guide How to Promote and Conduct a Successful Revival came out of the same work. In How to Pray he had already written that every true revival "has had its earthly origin in prayer," and on the tours he put that belief into practice by asking churches to pray before and during the meetings.

In 1908 he founded the Montrose Bible Conference in Montrose, Pennsylvania, which he led for the rest of his life.

Los Angeles and Biola

In 1912 Torrey became dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, now Biola University, and served there until 1924. He was also the first pastor of the Church of the Open Door in Los Angeles. Many of his later books on the Holy Spirit and prayer come from these years, among them The Power of Prayer and the Prayer of Power and The Holy Spirit: Who He Is and What He Does. His earlier The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit and The Baptism with the Holy Spirit are also in the library.

The Fundamentals

Between 1910 and 1915 a series of booklets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth was printed and sent free to pastors, missionaries and Christian workers, paid for by Christian businessmen in California. Torrey was one of its editors. The essays, by many writers from America and Britain, defended the inspiration of Scripture, the deity of Christ, His virgin birth, atonement and resurrection, and answered the critical theories then spreading in the colleges and seminaries. The people who stood for these truths came to be called fundamentalists.

A later four-volume edition was published with Torrey credited as editor. You can read it free, starting with The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, then Vol. 2, Vol. 3 and Vol. 4.

Last years

Torrey kept preaching and holding conferences through the 1920s, until failing health stopped him. He died at his home in Asheville, North Carolina, on October 26, 1928, at age 72, and was buried at the Montrose Bible Conference grounds.

What he taught about prayer

For all his work as a scholar, an organizer and an evangelist, Torrey kept coming back to prayer. In How to Pray he wrote that he had asked God to make him, whatever else, an intercessor:

I want to have fellowship with Him, and to that end I have asked the Father that whatever else He may make me, to make me at all events an intercessor, to make me a man who knows how to pray, and who spends much time in prayer.
How to Pray, chapter I

That book is the best place to start with Torrey. Read the chapter-by-chapter summary of How to Pray, browse his quotes on prayer, or see what he says gets in the way of answered prayer in Torrey's hindrances to prayer. Then read How to Pray free.