Harry Denman
Harry Denman (1893 - 1976)
You can hear an audio recording of this post on episode 35 of the Methodical Methodist Podcast!
Harry Denman – the man with only one suit – was a Methodist lay leader and evangelist whose life exemplified Jesus’ teachings from his Sermon on the Mount. He usually only had one pair of shoes, and he had no watch – because he liked to ask people for the time as a way of starting a conversation with folks. When people would gift Harry clothes, he would often turn around and give them to the needy. He served as the secretary for the Department of Evangelism in the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. He was the General Secretary of the Commission on Evangelism. He was responsibile for the publication of the devotional resource The Upper Room. He played a part in incorporating The Foundation for Evangelism. He was also instrumental in establishing the International Prayer Fellowship which is an organization that was headquartered at Lake Junaluska. In addition, he served as a member of several Jurisdictional Conferences. Billy Graham once called Denman, “one of the great mentors for evangelism.”
Harry Denman was born on September 26, 1893 to Hattie Leonard and William Henry Denman. His parents immigrated from Gloucestershire, England. to Birmingham, Alabama before Harry was born. His father worked as a molder in a foundry, but when Harry was only nine years old, his father “just up and left.”
Later, as an adult, Harry learned that his father had gone to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and worked as a foundry worker. He had pretty much just abandoned his family and never returned to Birmingham.
We don’t know a lot about Harry Denman’s early years. He was very private, and he often diverted attention away from himself and on to others instead. We do know that he left school at the age of ten to support himself and his mother.
In an article he wrote, “I remember when I was a boy in Smithfield, every Saturday afternoon my responsibility was to go to St. Paul’s Church with old newspaper and clean the oil lamps. I was the maintenance man. I rang the bell on Sunday and Wednesday night. The big old bell would lift me from the floor, but I always came back down.”
His Sunday school teacher, Miss Minnie E. Kennedy encouraged him along with his pastor the Reverand L. C. Branscomb to go back to school and finish his education. He had gone to work for the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, and then he worked as the secretary of the Birmingham Sunday School Council for a whopping thirty dollars a month. He worked there util 1919 when he became the business manager for the First Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Birmingham where he stayed until 1938 (almost 20 years). At that time, he was elected secretary for the Department of Evangelism in the Board of Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Harry had a late start with his education due to his family situation. He started preparatory school at the age of 22, and he went on to Birmingham Southern College where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1921, and then a Masters’ degree in 1930. Harry talks about the struggle of his education by writing:
“I entered first year preparatory school in Birmingham college in September 1915. I wanted an education, so I quit my job for a part-time job which paid one third of what I had been making. The slow pace of college discouraged me. I wanted to go back to the business world. One morning I stood in the Chapel looking out the window trying to decide what to do. An upperclassman came and stood by my side. ‘Harry, we are glad you have entered school. We are going to stay by you. You have our prayers and help.’ He walked away. I decided to stay.”
That upperclassman was Bachman G. Hodge who would later become a bishop in the Methodist Church. Because of Bishop Hodge, Harry Denman kept at it. He wrote once later in life that he worked incredibly hard for six long years to get his education. He stayed extremely busy – so much so that when he was forty-five, after he moved to Nashville, a woman wrote that she was worried that he had not yet married. He replied, “I think I am a little bit old and have lost my nerve.” Then he added that the well-known evangelist “Gypsy Smith” had finally got married. So perhaps he wasn’t old enough!
As the business manager of a large metropolitan church, he organized an older boy’s council, a girl’s class, recreational activities for young person, and he worked for the establishment of Camp Winnataska.
He was very well known for his hard work and dedication. In fact, he was awarded two honorary doctorates – one from Athens College in Athens, Alabama. And another from Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, Korea.
He was well known by many in the church. He served as a delegate to the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference in 1940, 1944, and 1952, and to the General Conference in 1934 and 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1952. He served in so many positions and roles in the life of the church. He served as the secretary for the Department of Evangelism in the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. He was named the secretary of the Commission on Evangelism in 1939. He was named general secretary of the General Board of Evangelism of the Methodist Church. He was a very organized and structured leader.
He almost singlehandedly grew the General Board of Evangelism from one man and a secretary working in a tiny little office – to an organization of 250 people with building headquarters worth more than 2 million dollars. This building also housed the publishing company, The Upper Room.
He brought missionaries from Argentina, Peru, Africa, India, Burma, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and England. He also supported evangelistic missions to Cuba, South America, Asia, India, and Africa. It’s amazing because despite his high positions in the church, he never let it go to his head. He was always known as simply “Harry.” He was quick to accept preaching engagements in churches of all sizes.
Harry Denman was like a machine. He worked all the time. When people asked him why he never took a vacation he always replied: “I have a vacation all the time. I am enjoying what I am doing so I have a vacation three hundred sixty-five days a year. I am trying to do what I believe the Lord wants me to do.”
Harry Denman loved his job, and he traveled around and preached all the time. Apparently in one 48-hour period he spoke in five states: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Indiana. Then, two months later, between Monday and Friday noon he spoke in Texas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and Pennsylvania.” The guy was always on the move.
He carried his wardrobe and all of his office supplies in his briefcase when he traveled. He was always ready for work at any moments notice. He was notorious for working crazy hours. He would stay up miss entire nights of sleep. He would would sometimes go to bed at 6pm – sleep til midnight – then resume working. Six hours is enough sleep for anyone, he often declared…. Here I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with Harry Denman. I definitely need more than 6 hours.
He was just full of energy. Biographer Harold Rogers said it best: “There was only one Harry Denman though sometimes it appeared that he was quadruplets.”
One thing that is synonymous with Harry Denman is the term Evangelism. My annual conference gives out the Denman Evangelism Award every year. Denman was primarily known for his work as an evangelizer. In his report to the annual meeting of the General Board of Evangelism in 1949, he wrote:
“Today the only way one can see love is to see it wrapped up in a person. This is true of faith. The only way we can see Christ is to see him wrapped in a person. Evangelism can only be seen in a person. We need to become a package of love, a package of faith, a package of Christ; then we will be a package of evangelism.”
He would constantly emphasize the importance of reaching out to people. He would often say, “If the church is to survive, the church must want people. It must make people welcome. It must love people.” Denman would evangelize to everyone. He would share with bartenders, airline pilots, housewives, taxi drivers. He talked to the about their personal relationships with God. He was a master at connection with people, getting to know people, building relationships with people, and praying with people.
One bishop remarked, “Harry Denman can ask a waitress in a restraint about her spiritual life more easily than many preachers can raise the question in the privacy of a member’s home.”
One time when Harry was in Illinois, he was eating breakfast at a local diner. He asked the waitress about her wedding band and inquired about her family. When she told him that she had a husband and a baby daughter, he asked where they went to church. She gave the name of the church, but she added that she didn’t have a lot of opportunities to go on Sunday mornings because of her job. Harry asked, “Have you had your daughter baptized?” “We want to,” she replied, “but we haven’t been able to make those arrangements because of my work.” Before he left the restaurant that morning, he had talked with the owner of the diner and arranged for the waitress to have the next Sunday off so that she could have her baby baptized.
There are dozens of stories like this. Harry Denman had a heart for all people, and he had an incredible ability to love and never judge people as bad. He would often say… “So often we church people look down our noses when someone does something of which we disapprove. We just hug ourselves a little tighter and think how wonderful we are. Of course there are many things which we cannot approve, but if we are true to Jesus’ command we still must love the person.”
Denman was concerned about the future of the church. He saw membership dipping. When he was eighty years old, he was speaking in Dallas, Texas and he said: “We can study more books and do less than any crowd I know. Our trouble is we don’t believe people need Jesus Christ. But I still look to him for the answer. The great thing about Jesus is that he didn’t have any committee. He didn’t have any organization. He had time to visit.”
Harry Denman was never ordained or licensed as a minister. He always remained a lay person. But nevertheless, a group of bishops asked him to leave his job as business manager of a church in Birmingham and take a place in the General church. Denman said, “I told them I was not an ordained man, that I did not even have a license to preach; but Bishop Paul Kern spoke up and said, ‘Harry; you can make a little talk.” With a smile Harry Denman added, “That’s what I’ve been doing ever since, just making little talks.”
Harry Denman lived to preach. He made several major addresses to general conferences, jurisdictional conferences, annual conferences, and convocations. He loved preaching, and he was good at it. One long-time friend of Denman said, “If Harry could drop dead in the pulpit, he would die happy.”
But Harry didn’t just preach in the pulpit. He preached everywhere he went. He would share the word in his letters, staff meetings, in articles and meditations he wrote. He could even find ways of preaching the word in casual conversation.
In one sermon from 1938, he preached a message urging the importance of unity, saying: “I stand here today to plead for union because in the name of our Christ and our church we can go into every American city, into every American village, into every American town, out onto the roadside and preach the gospel to thousands who need the gospel today. I do not want a united church that is going to be institutionalized, but I want a church that is going to be on fire for Jesus Christ.”
It’s interesting to see how the church in 1938 was dealing with issues of disunity from a split that occurred years earlier (in 1844) over slavery. This is the year before the church – south and north joined back together and formed the Methodist Church. And this is thirty years before the Uniting Conference which formed the new United Methodist Church.
Harry Denman had a great heart, and he cared about the church and he cared about people. He didn’t hold a lot of value in materialism. He didn’t much care about earthly wealth. In fact, some believe that Harry Denman was the inspiration for the song, “I’ve got only one suit, that’s all I can wear.”
Sometimes when he would invite people on the street to go to church, they would reply, “I’m not dressed good enough to go to church.” Harry would always answer, “Look at me. You’re dressed as good as I am.”
Apparantly, one time he was returning from a trip where he traveled around the world, and he confused custom inspectors when he only had one briefcase and no luggage. “Where’s the rest of your baggage?” they asked. “That’s it,” Denman replied. The inspector persisted, “But I mean the things you checked, those you took with you and what you bought while you were gone.” “That’s all I took, and I didn’t buy anything,” Harry replied.
When talked about that incident, he later remarked, “I guess the inspector thought I should travel like the couple I saw in a hotel in Baltimore. They had ten suitcases, and two bellboys were trying to load them on the elevator. I asked the bellboy who was carrying my briefcase if they were going to live there. He informed me they were just going to spend the night. Then he looked at me and asked if that one briefcase was all I had. When I told him it was, he wanted to know how long I was staying. When I told him a week he said, ‘A week! Then you have more coming?’ I said I didn’t know where it would come from. I didn’t leave anything behind.”
Harry was known for wearing only one suit, owning only one overcoat, and only having one pair of shoes. When he would wear holes in the soles, he would fold up newspaper to keep his feet off the group until someone badgered him long enough for him to go to the shoe store and buy a new pair.
He didn’t like to carry watches, because he traveled so much, and the time was always changing. He would just look for clocks on the wall. He said, “You can’t concentrate when you’re worrying about the time. Besides, it’s bad for the health to be so impatient.”
One of the defining characteristics of Denman – other than his avoidance of materialism – was his heart for social justice. Harry preached in his home state of Alabama and he pointed out some of the injustice that he witnessed saying, “I can speak here but Martin Luther King cannot. Why? Because his skin is dark. Jesus could not speak here. His skin was dark.”
Some of his friends believe that it was these kind of remarks that cost him election as a delegate to the upcoming Jurisdictional and General Conferences – an honor that he had received numerous times before.
But Denman didn’t care. On January 19, 1974, he gave an interview for The United Methodist Reporter about his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama where he said: “I was on the board of education of the county. I saw the sins we committed, how we took money from blacks and spent it on white children, how we paid black teachers, low salaries. Their buildings were awful; it was almost nauseating… I lived with the Ku Klux Klan. They ran the state – elected our governors and senators. I lived with that. I saw it.”
Denman also spoke against anti-Semitism saying, “I think we must remember Jesus was a Jew. It is strange how much prejudice we can have against Jews, but at the same time say we love Christ. He followed all the Jewish practices and customs, and he knew the law. In fact, he was a son of the law. Jesus was a Jew. We sing, ‘O, how I love Jesus,’ but do we mean it? Do we love a Jew?”
Harry Denman actually became pen pals with Martin Luther King, Jr. He never back down from speaking of the importance of social justice. He once said, “We want the church in the community, but we do not want Christ in the community. I say all of this from the pulpit and people do not like for me to say it; yet I am going to continue to say it.”
Harry Denman lived out his faith, did what he believed was right, and worked constantly. When he reached his mandatory retirement at the age of 72 in April 1965, he was preaching halfway around the world in India. He often remarked that his home address was in Nashville, but he was never there. He was always out in the world – preaching and teaching. He said, “I do not have a home. I do not have any relatives. I do not have an office. I go from place to place, from city to city, from motel to motel, from person to person, witnessing for our Lord Jesus Christ.”
In August 1967, Harry developed a blood cut on his brain, and he underwent surgery for its removal. Then, he was back out on the road. Even through other complications that developed, he continued to push himself and work. He died November 8, 1976 in Birmingham, Alabama at the age of 83.
Harry Denman was a saint of the church. He saw the importance of loving people the way Jesus called us to love them. And he showed his faith through the way he lived his life.
