Percy Crawford

Percy Bartimus Crawford (October 20, 1902 – October 31, 1960) was an evangelist and fundamentalist leader who especially emphasized youth ministry. During the late 1950s, he saw the potential of FM radio and UHF television and built the first successful Christian broadcasting network. He also founded The King's College and Pinebrook, a Bible conference in the Pocono Mountains.

Crawford was born in Minnedosa, Manitoba, Canada and was reared in Vancouver, British Columbia. He dropped out of school to help support the family after his father left his mother and their three children.

As a teenager, he left home and completed high school at the YMCA school in Portland, Oregon. Preparing to enter the University of California at Los Angeles, he was converted to Christianity on September 23, 1923, at Reuben Torrey’s Church of the Open Door, under the preaching of itinerant evangelist W. P. Nicholson.

In 1924 he enrolled at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) where he was mentored by Thomas Corwin Horton and Reuben Torrey. At BIOLA Crawford discovered his gift for evangelism and committed himself to full-time Christian service. After briefly studying at UCLA, Crawford earned a bachelor's degree at Wheaton College. During summer months of his student years, he made successful evangelistic tours with a gospel quartet, in one summer recording eight hundred professions of faith in Christ.

In 1931, while a seminarian at Westminster Theological Seminary he started his own youth-oriented radio program on a single station in Philadelphia, calling it the "Young People’s Church of the Air." Within a decade he had built a radio ministry that aired on over 400 stations and included evangelistic "fishing clubs," a bookstore, and book clubs. After being ordained by the Presbyterian church, he also briefly pastored the Rhawnhurst Presbyterian Church in northeast Philadelphia. Siding with J. Gresham Machen and the fundamentalists in the Presbyterian church, he resigned from the Presbytery of Philadelphia—but "without fanfare or publicity."

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