Every Christian carries the memory of someone who, without knowing it, helped open the way to faith: a teacher, a preacher heard by chance, a voice that struck deep on some ordinary night. For the young Billy Graham, that voice belonged to Mordecai Ham.
Mordecai Fowler Ham Jr. was born on April 2, 1877, on a farm in Allen County, Kentucky. He came from eight generations of Baptist preachers, and at age 24 he left the family business to enter the ministry.
Over more than six decades, he led hundreds of revival campaigns in tents and temporary tabernacles across some twenty states in the American South, preaching forcefully against alcohol, theological modernism, and unbelief.
In November 1934, his eleven week campaign in Charlotte, North Carolina, drew crowds to a makeshift, sawdust covered tabernacle. Among the curious listeners was a teenager named Billy Graham.
Hearing Ham preach on Romans 5:8, Graham knelt alone for the first time to pray, seeking God on his own. Decades later, he would describe that night as the beginning of everything his life and ministry would become.
Ham’s biography, however, cannot be told in tones of glory alone. From the mid-1920s onward, he also spread antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories in his sermons and radio broadcasts, a serious stain that evangelical historians acknowledge and lament to this day.
Beginning in 1936, Ham took his preaching regularly to the radio, reaching listeners far beyond the revival tents pitched across the American countryside. He kept preaching almost until the end of his life, dying on November 1, 1961, in Louisville, Kentucky, at the age of 84.
His story is a reminder that God can use even imperfect preaching, delivered by a preacher with real flaws, to plant a seed that flourishes in another life, without that erasing or justifying the evil Ham also preached.
