Anyone who has ever wondered whether prayer truly changes anything finds in Reuben Archer Torrey a plain-spoken conversation partner. He taught multitudes to pray with conviction, and his own life paid the price of carrying that conviction to its limit.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1856, the son of a banker, Torrey graduated from Yale in 1875 and from Yale Divinity School in 1878. He became a Congregational pastor in Garrettsville, Ohio, and later deepened his theological studies in Germany, at Leipzig and Erlangen, between 1882 and 1883.
In 1889, evangelist D.L. Moody called him to lead the new Chicago Bible institute, today the Moody Bible Institute. Torrey shaped the school’s curriculum, with a strong emphasis on practical training, and served as superintendent until 1908, while also pastoring the Chicago Avenue Church from 1894 onward.
His faith in prayer came at a painful cost. In 1898, convinced that prayer alone would heal his daughter of diphtheria, Torrey held off seeking medical help. When her condition worsened, he panicked and called a doctor, but it was too late: the girl died. Torrey dealt with the guilt by attributing the loss to his own lack of faith rather than to the delay in seeking treatment, and the episode fueled criticism within Chicago’s evangelical circles.
Between 1902 and 1906, Torrey traveled the world alongside singer Charles Alexander in revival campaigns across Australia, Asia, and the United Kingdom. The meetings drew great crowds and, according to accounts of the time, resulted in tens of thousands of conversions.
From 1912 to 1924, he was the first dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, today Biola University, and from 1915 also the first pastor of the Church of the Open Door. He edited the final volumes of The Fundamentals, the series that gave the fundamentalist movement its name, and became known as a forceful controversialist against theological opponents.
He wrote more than 40 books, among them How to Pray and How to Bring Men to Christ, manuals on prayer and personal evangelism still in print and translation today. He died in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1928, leaving behind a generation of workers trained by his direct method.
His life is a reminder that theological conviction and personal humility must walk together, something Torrey himself learned in the hardest possible way. The Bible institutes he helped shape continue training workers for the gospel around the world.
