From dance band leader to one o f America’s top five evangelists.
JACK WYRTZEN
& his
Word of Life Fellowship
£ uirnner B ible camps and conferences are booming all across America. And one of the guiding stars in this evangelical phenomenon is New Yorker Ja ck W y rtzen , 4 4 , who is also one o f the nation ’s top five evangelists. Th is summer some 14,000 people w ill register at one of his three camps at Schroon Lake, N .Y . Thou sands more w ill attend his mammoth Saturday night rallies in New York C ity and from coast-to-coast m illions w ill hear his youth-slanted radio broadcasts each Saturday night over 203 stations of the Mu tual network. Th is sounds like an ambitious program. And it is. Bu t the m an runn ing this far-flung program seems to be more than a m atch for it. W y rtz en was bom in Brooklyn and at 12 he re ceived an official commendation from the Queens Council of Boy Scouts for h is work in the rescue of a mother and her two sons from th eir gas-filled home. L a te r a t Jam a ica H igh School he earned the reputa tion for being a hot trombonist and soon was leading a 12-piece orchestra fo r school dances. A fte r finish ing high school he sold insurance by day and led his dance band by night. I t was a grinding schedule that would have qu ickly worn down the average man. Young W y rtz en loved it. And he found tim e to go to church. He made the rounds from the Un iversalist to the Methodist to the P resby terian to the Baptist. He found nothing to hold his interest. L a te r he stopped long enough in a R e formed church to fa ll in love w ith M arge Sm ith , the
adopted daughter of a noted Brooklyn surgeon. It was diming this period that Ja ck m et a Christian young m an in his National Guard unit. Th is friend dreamed up a scheme to get Ja c k to a gospel meeting by asking h im to p lay a solo. Ja ck was eager to play and th a t n igh t for the first tim e the message of the gospel took on m eaning for him . W h en he went home he knelt down by his bed and acknowledged his need fo r Christ as Saviour. Not long a fter Ja c k ’s decision, and completely in dependent of it, M arge w ired her boy friend from a summer B ib le conference to report th a t she had just accepted Christ as her Saviour. T h e y were married in the late th irties and now have five children ranging from four-year-old Ronald to 19-year-old M a ry Ann , a student a t W heaton College in Illinois. T h e organization W y rtz en heads today is known as W ord of L ife Fellowship. I t had its start shortly a fter his conversion when he formed an association of “young m en fo r Christ” to study the B ible and encourage group and individual evangelism. T h e ir motto was taken from Philippians 2 : 1 6 , “Holding forth the word of life . . . .” It started w ith fou r men. Th ey qu ickly outgrew the local homes they m et in and Ja ck rented an auditorium in a Long Island church. In three months over 600 were regu larly attending. In 1940 W y rtz en began to broadcast W ord of L ife over W BBC in Brooklyn and the n ex t y ear held his first mass Saturday night T im es Square ra lly . Since then the program has seemed to gather nothing but speed.
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