Why you’d want James Robison in your foxhole: A tribute to a courageous evangelist

A couple of weeks ago, one of our Savior’s most courageous warriors for the Gospel went home to be with his Savior. His name was James Robison.

I had the privilege of knowing James for over 60 years. He was born in 1943 and grew up in Pasadena, a suburb in the Greater Houston area. I was born in Houston in 1946. I surrendered to full-time Christian ministry in a Baptist church when I was 16. By that time, James was already very well known in Houston and across the state of Texas as a very successful youth evangelist who was also having a big impact on adult audiences.

James was 19 when I was 16, and so we met at a Greater Houston Area Youth for Christ event where we both were speaking. The only person I had ever heard from who was a more impactful preacher than James was Billy Graham. In fact, James soon had to labor under the burden of being called the “next Billy Graham.”

James had come out of a dramatically difficult personal background. He was conceived as the product of a rape. His mother, a nurse, put an advertisement in the newspaper seeking someone to care for her son, and the Rev. H. D. Hale, a local area pastor, and his wife answered the ad and took James into their home.

When James was 5, his mother took him back and married James’s biological father. Unfortunately, his father, an alcoholic, was physically abusive, and after a violent confrontation at age 15 with his father, his father was arrested, and James went once again to live with the Hales, where early spiritual seeds had been planted.

James’s remarkable preaching skills led to his becoming a nationally known figure by his early 20s. By the end of his life, James Robison had preached to over 20 million people and had conducted over 800 citywide evangelistic crusades.

He was identified and preached as an evangelical and Southern Baptist until the early 1980s, when he became more charismatic and pentecostal in his theology. I had much more frequent contact with James during the Southern Baptist period of his ministry, but maintained cordial fellowship with him up until his death.

In August 1980, he helped organize and spoke at the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas’s Reunion Arena, where he aroused a crowd of at least 10,000, with an eloquent call for evangelical Christians to get organized and get involved, and rescue the country from moral downfall. He declared, “I’m sick and tired of hearing about all the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the communists coming out of the closet. It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet, out of the churches, and change America.” 

I covered the National Affairs Briefing for KCBI radio in Dallas, and I can tell you the atmosphere was electric by the time James finished speaking. At that time, he introduced then Gov. Ronald Reagan, the Republican nominee for President against President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist.

Ronald Reagan brought down the house and won the hearts of the crowd when he said, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I am here to endorse you!” When he said that, I thought, “He might really win this thing!” In many ways, the National Affairs Briefing in 1980 was “the coming out party for the Religious Right.”

In the mid-1980s, James not only changed his theology to pentecostal, but he also changed his focus much more to applied missions around the world. Through his Water for Life outreach, he led mission efforts to drill over 7,500 wells delivering clean water to over 9.5 million people in 48 countries, and has helped feed 350,000 people on a daily basis.

Starting in 1989 through his Mission Feeding outreach, his ministry began feeding nearly 24 million children through medical clinics, orphanages, and fruit and vegetable farms. His Mission: Rescue Life ministry has helped reach, rescue, and restore girls and young children from the scourge of human trafficking (over 20 million at-risk children have been impacted to date).

James always retained a great burden for his own country—America. He was very much involved behind the scenes, for instance, in garnering support for Donald Trump in 2015, when the overwhelming majority of Evangelicals were very dubious about Mr. Trump.

As one of the very dubious, I was invited, along with several others, to meet with James at his headquarters in the Metroplex, where the Holy Spirit moved in some mysterious ways to change the hearts and minds of several key evangelical leaders and as we all know, the rest is history.

As a consequence of James’s theological shift to pentecostalism in the 1980s, my working with James lessened in subsequent years, although we remained friends. One thing I always admired about him was his fearless courage. The man had the courage of his convictions, and you knew that if you were ever in a foxhole with him, he would never abandon you.