Just Wait, Brother

Twenty-three years ago this month, a youthful-looking Seventh-Day Adventist preacher stood up before his small and struggling congregation in South Los Angeles to appeal for funds. "Now, brethren," he said, "I've been telling you for some time that God wants me on radio . . . I want you to prove that I'm not lying and that I do know what God wants." A collection of rings, watches and old jewelry netted just enough to put the Rev. Harold M. S. Richards on the air the next week. He has been broadcasting steadily ever since.

By now, Evangelist Richards' Voice of Prophecy program has become an international production, broadcast in eleven languages over 845 stations. There is a no-man staff at work in the Voice's Glendale headquarters, and one of Richards' weekly sermons draws an average 14,000 letters from his world audience. After the Lutheran Hour (carried by more than 1,000 stations), the Adventists' program is the most widely heard religious broadcast in the world.

"Man Alive . . ." Broadcaster Richards, 58, is a friendly, hard-working man with a habit of calling everybody "brother." His father was also an Adventist evangelist, and Harold got his start at 17, preaching at Adventist "campaigns," i.e., revival meetings, in the U.S. and Canada. His first parish was a tiny, tar-papered church in Ottawa, where he boosted the congregation from 8 to 120.

Back in the U.S., he took his wife on the road with him, through long preaching campaigns, mostly in California. In 1928, at Fresno, he campaigned for nine months straight. He preached for 45 minutes seven nights a week, for the whole time. ("Man alive, we had a number of big baptisms out of that one.")

Adventist authorities took a dim view of Richards' radio program at first. But by 1937 it was going so well that Pacific Coast officials of the church urged him to put the Voice on a coast network. In 1942, with the whole church behind him, Richards began preaching on a national hookup (Mutual), and the next year began to line up foreign stations.

Noah Was Warned. Through the years, the formula for Voice of Prophecy has changed very little. Evangelist Richards steers clear of specific Adventist dogma,* concentrates instead on basic talks about the Bible, interspersed with oldtime hymns sung by the King's Heralds, a male quartet. He knows his Bible well--he has read it cover to cover 31 times--and his sermons are highly concrete discussions of the Bible's application to daily life. Says he: "We believe that there are things in the Bible that prophesy what is happening today and that tell of the coming of the Kingdom of God . . . God doesn't let the world get caught napping, brother. Look how he warned Noah. He has warned us and it's in the Bible."

To encourage Bible study by his listeners, Richards runs three free correspondence courses in religion, one for children and two for adults. Students take a test at the end of each lesson, which is then sent in for grading.

The Bible course is now printed in 46 languages, and the number of students offers some testimony to the size of Richards' radio audience. Currently, 1,500,000 are enrolled--500,000 more than the Adventists' total world membership. Still, Evangelist Richards and his staff are not content. He and the King's Heralds plan a round-the-world campaign this summer, with the emphasis on Africa. A fortnight ago, the Voice hooked up with seven radio stations in Japan. Says Adventist Richards, who cheerfully runs his $1,000,000 operation on a salary of $65 a week: "Brother, you just wait. We'll keep on growing & growing until we've reached everyone."

* E.g., that Saturday, the Old Testament Sabbath, rather than Sunday, is the proper day of rest and worship, and (as Baptists also hold) that baptism must be by immersion.

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