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About B. R. Lakin
- Bascom Ray Lakin (January 5, 1901 – March 15, 1984) was a Baptist preacher and evangelist. B.
- R.
- Lakin was born on a farm near Fort Gay, West Virginia, on the Kentucky border.
- His mother had prayed for a "preacher man" and had dedicated him to God even before he was born.
- Lakin attended a one-room schoolhouse in West Virginia through the 4th grade.
- Later, when he realized the need for more education, he attended Moody Bible Institute while pastoring several churches.
- Eventually Bob Jones University and (the now defunct) Kletzing College bestowed honorary doctorates. Lakin was converted to Christianity during a revival meeting when he was sixteen and baptized in Big Hurricane Creek.
- Within a week he had preached his first sermon.
- During the 1920s he served as circuit-riding preacher, riding a mule from church to church through the mountains and foothills of rural West Virginia and Kentucky.
- In 1939, he was called to assist E.
- Howard Cadle (1884-1942) at the Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis, Indiana, a church that seated ten thousand with an additional fourteen hundred seats for the choir.
- Cadle conducted a daily radio program, “Nation’s Family Prayer Period," on the 50,000-watt clear channel WLW in Cincinnati, and the program became the most listened to religious broadcast during the 1930s.
- Upon Cadle's death in 1942, Lakin became senior pastor and continued the broadcast.
- Although Lakin did not have Cadle's charisma, he was heard in thousands of homes across the United States and thereby became a nationally known Gospel preacher.In 1952, Lakin began a thirty-year evangelistic ministry, preaching in some of the largest evangelical churches in country.
- He is said to have seen a hundred thousand conversions to Christ through his ministry.
- Even shortly before his death in 1984, at age 83, Lakin still traveled extensively and was one of the most sought after fundamentalist preachers in America.
- Lakin's sermons were a combination of wit, Bible teaching, and a strong Gospel appeal.
- For instance, his advice about dealing with enemies was "Love them, pray for them, and outlive them."Lakin and his wife, Violet, had only one child, a son who was killed at an early age in an automobile accident.
- They "adopted" the young Jerry Falwell, and Lakin mentored and "poured himself" into Falwell's Lynchburg ministry.
- The department of religion at Falwell's Liberty University is named in honor of Lakin, who is interred on the campus.
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