Mordecai Ham

MORDECAI HAM
1878 - 1959

Mordecai Ham came from eight generations of Baptist preachers. He traced his ancestry to Roger Williams.

Mordecai was converted under Billy Sunday's Preaching Ministry. In 1901, Ham entered into the Baptist ministry. From the very beginning there was no middle ground in his preaching. He preached against vice and corruption; he rebuked "Modernist preachers". He exposed sin, warned of the judgment to come, implanted conviction, and called a wayward people back to the Bible they had forsaken. He hunted the lowest sinners in a community and would pray and witness to them until they trusted Christ as their personal Saviour.

The author of the amendment for Prohibition stated that Mordecai Ham and Billy Sunday had nearly put saloons out of business due to their hard preaching against the liquor crowd.

Ham considered himself a prophet/revivalist evangelist. He was a full-time evangelist from 1902 to 1927. He took two years off from evangelism to pastor the First Baptist Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. But, because his heart was still in full-time evangelism, he entered the field again in 1929 and stayed in it until shortly before his death.

Over 1,000,000 people were converted under his ministry and over 300,000 joined Baptist churches in the south. Billy Graham is his most famous convert.

His nephew, Edward Ham, summed up Mordecai Ham's ministry: "God raised up Evangelist Ham to do more than hold meetings in the great cities of the South. He ordained him a prophet to do more than lead great campaigns against liquor during the pre-Prohibition days. God raised him up to remind Christian America of the main spiritual issue that has been in existence since man's beginning on this earth; Christ versus the anti-Christ."