John Sherrill (1923—2017)
Country of Origin
-
United States
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- United States
Traditions
- Episcopalian
- Charismatic
Ministries
- Christian author
Christianity Today famously described John and Elizabeth Sherrill as “the most influential Christian authors you know nothing about.” When the two met in 1947, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic aboard the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner, romance made waves in their plans for upcoming study at the University of Geneva. Four months later, they were married and destined to become perhaps the most noted husband-wife writing duo in Christian publishing.
Interestingly, neither of them were especially religious at the start. They simply had a gift for finding and telling stories that grabbed attention. In 1951, when John had a chance interview in a New York City taxi cab with Norman Vincent Peale, founder of Guideposts magazine, he confessed he was not interested in religion. He just wanted to write. “That’s an interesting answer,” Peale had responded. “You’re exactly the kind of person I wanted to reach when I started Guideposts: people turned off by religious jargon. We want to provide glimpses of God in everyday life all around us.”
John got the job as Associate Editor, and a few months later, Elizabeth was hired as well. They were key players over the coming years in the surge of Guideposts to 2 million copies a month--the biggest paid-circulation Christian magazine in the US. While drafting stories, their own lives were spiritually rejuvenated through facing John’s cancer diagnosis in 1959. They then ventured into book creation, compiling The Cross and the Switchblade (1962) with David Wilkerson, the Assemblies of God minister who brought the gospel to gang members in New York City. The story was David’s, but the scintillating prose came from John and “Tib,” as Elizabeth was often called. It quickly became a mega-seller.
Wilkerson’s experience with the Holy Spirit encouraged the Sherrills down a new path, exporing glossolalia and Holy Spirit renewal. A few years ealier, Mrs. Peale had introduced John to Harald Bredesen, a revivalist who visited many college campuses. Bredesen had connected John with Henry Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary, where John’s father had taught. Van Dusen told about visiting a Carribbean Pentecostal church service that spurred an eye-opening realization for him: “I have come to feel that the Pentecostal movement with its emphasis upon the Holy Spirit is more than just another revival. It is a revolution in our day … comparable in importance with the establishment of the original Apostolic Church and with the Protestant Reformation.”
The series of events set John Sherrill on a course of researching the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement. When he sat down with a book publisher about a contract, he told the acquiring editor, Sam Peters:
“There’s one thing we’d better keep straight…. You keep saying, ‘these tongues of yours.’ They’re not my tongues, Peters, and won’t be either. I’m interested, I’m intrigued, but I’m certainly not buying. I’m an Episcopalian, you know, and I guess we’re a pretty stuffy lot.”
Peters smiled. “I know. No one’s asking you to get involved. Just do a good job reporting. That’s all we ask.”
“Good,” I said. “Then we understand each other. I’ve always said the best reporter, anyway, is the one who keeps his distance.”
Initially, John Sherrill kept his distance even through multiple visits to Pentecostal prayer meetings. He invited several who spoke in tongues to come to the Guideposts office to record their utterances and have them analyzed by professional linguists. He interviewed Charismatic leaders such as David du Plessis and Dennis Bennett. He investigated biblical references to the Spirit’s activity and dug through the history of glossolalia in centuries past. He managed to find a few elderly eyewitnesses from the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 and talked to denominational executives who were across the spectrum on the renewal.
Eventually, in 1964, he published the results in They Speak with Other Tongues. A chapter near the end recounts his own baptism in the Holy Spirit, prior to publishing, at a Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship convention in Atlantic City. Only five other people were in the fourth-floor hotel room that afternoon when it happened: a Presbyterian clergy couple, two Episcopalians, and a Methodist. After considerable sharing, they encircled him and began to pray in concert, some in English, some in tongues. Sherrill writes:
It was almost as if they were forming with their bodies a funnel through which was concentrated the flow of the Spirit that was pulsing through that room. It flowed into me as I sat there, listening to the Spirit-song around me. Now the tongues swelled to a crescendo, musical and lovely. I opened my mouth….
From deep inside me, deeper than I knew voice could go, came a torrent of joyful sound…. I prayed on, laughing and free, while the setting sun shone through the window, and the stars came out.
The book rocked presumptions all across the Christian world. Its thorough research and measured tone gave pause to many skeptics. It became a major catalyst for increasing openness to the Holy Spirit throughout the 1960s and beyond.
John and Elizabeth went on to pen other gripping stories of God’s grace and power in human lives. In 1971, they incorporated their own publishing house, Chosen Books, with close friends Leonard and Catherine Marshall LeSourd. The first release was incredibly successful: The Hiding Place, with World War II survivor, Corrie ten Boom. A few years later came Born Again about the conversion of Watergate “hatchet man,” Charles Colson.
John lived to the age of ninety-four—not quite long enough to be honored with Elizabeth by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) with a lifetime achievement award. “Their contributions…as writers, editors, and publishers to the world of books, and their impact on the Kingdom of God,” said the organization, “cannot be overstated. They wrote thousands of magazine articles; crafted more than thirty books (with sales in excess of 60 million); taught narrative technique to generations of new writers; and…gave hope to millions of people. The way they wrote set the gold standard for storytelling today.”
Further Reading
- They Speak with Other Tongues
- The Cross and the Switchblade