Francisco Olazábal (1886—1937)
Country of Origin
-
Mexico
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- United States
- Mexico
Traditions
- Pentecostal
Ministries
- evangelist
- church planter
Francisco Olazábal was only sixteen years old when he set out, alone, to make the 1,500-mile trek through the mountain ranges and deserts from the Mexican state of Sinaloa to San Francisco, California. He was to stay with relatives there and join a ship’s crew to sail the world. His father had abandoned the family after Francisco’s mother had left the traditional church to become a fervent evangélica. Their son was now on his own in a strange land.
Soon, however, the boy met a successful businessman named George Montgomery, whose various ventures included several Mexican mine operations. George's wife, Carrie Judd Montgomery, was a notable author and minister of healing. The couple led young Francisco to focus his life and future plans on Christ and taught him basic Christian doctrine before he returned to Mexico at age twenty-two for training at the Wesleyan School of Theology in San Luís Potosí. While there, he married Macrina Orozco in 1914, who would stay by his side as they raised nine children. His first Methodist pastorate was a Spanish-speaking congregation in El Paso, Texas. A Methodist bishop, A. W. Leonard, ordained him in 1916.
Around this time, Olazábal reconnected with the Montgomerys, who surprised him with the news that they were now Pentecostals and spoke in tongues. He attended a prayer meeting in their home, where he was baptized in the Spirit. He soon began to preach the fullness of the Spirit’s work to all who would listen. A host sponsor in Los Angeles reported, “God has used Olazábal’s faithful message to bring the light on Pentecost to many, especially to those who had known him here before in the Methodist Episcopal Church when he used to criticize and persecute ‘this way.’”
His ministry widened on both sides of the border. At Los Angeles' 4,000-seat Church of the Open Door, Reuben A. Torrey invited him to evangelize Spanish-speakers across the region. He pioneered new churches farther north in California as well as across Texas. He became known in Mexico as El Azteca (“the Aztec”) for his distinctive facial features. Large crowds came to his meetings; one of his accounts of them reads:
It was odd the way it started. While [I was] resting in Mexico City, a native minister came to me. He said he had a church large enough to hold four thousand people, and he had a lot of empty pews. He said he could get together fifteen hundred people if I’d come and preach. I couldn’t turn him away; who could?
We had fifteen hundred the first night. I preached Christ to them, Christ the Healer and Christ the Savior. They were hungry for it! Two hundred of them came to the altar that night. They just wouldn’t listen to me when I told them I wasn’t coming back the next night. They said they’d fill the place if I stayed a week.
I didn’t believe that, for, you know, it was against the law [at that point in time] to advertise a religious meeting in Mexico. You can’t put up posters or throw out circulars or put notices in the papers; all you can do is to pass it on by word of mouth. That’s all they did; by the end of that week, they had forty-five hundred jammed into that church every night. Today, those same people have the largest church in Mexico.
Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, Olazábal’s revival campaigns took him as far as New York City and Puerto Rico. He founded a Bible college in Texas and some eighty churches in that state. His campaign in Spanish Harlem, NY drew more than 100,000 people with meetings eventually being held in Brooklyn’s Calvary Baptist Church.
For a season Olazábal affiliated with Henry Ball and the Assemblies of God. He led a group of Hispanic pastors to form the mission-minded Latin American Council of Christian Churches—the first such independent body in the United States. This drew the attention of Foursquare founder Aimee Semple McPherson, who coaxed Olazábal and his group to merge with her denomination, but they declined. For a time, he also considered affiliating with the Church of God.
In 1937, he was planning to conduct evangelistic campaigns in South America when tragedy struck. A devastating car crash in south Texas, on his way to Mexico City, caused major damage and internal bleeding. He died in a hospital, eight days later, at age 51. Approximately 50,000 people attended memorial services in several cities to honor him. His body was returned for burial at Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles.
We will never know how much more Kingdom work Francisco Olazábal could have accomplished, but he had brought divine healing and Spirit empowerment into entirely new contexts. The boy from Mexico had blossomed into an apostolic leader in whose footsteps many others would follow.
Further Reading
- Gastón Espinosa and Mario T. García, eds., "Brown Moses: Francisco Olazabal and Mexican American Pentecostal Healing in the Borderlands," in Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), ch. 11: 263-295.