by Homer Martin
Homer Martin explores First John as an introduction to Jesus and encourages addressing discord promptly so relationships do not remain strained.
Camp & Year: Kentucky Lake CFO 1988
Homer Martin was a West Texas farm boy who was called to preach when he was sixteen and spent the next twenty-three years telling God no. He finally gave in at thirty-nine, with a wife and family, thirty-five college hours and no degree. A Methodist church was waiting for him in a town of 713 people. He went on to serve churches in Hydro, Oklahoma, Bowie and Marshall, Texas, and eventually left the pastorate to become an evangelist.
About Homer Martin
Homer Martin was a West Texas farm boy who was called to preach when he was sixteen and spent the next twenty-three years telling God no. He finally gave in at thirty-nine, with a wife and family, thirty-five college hours and no degree. A Methodist church was waiting for him in a town of 713 people. He went on to serve churches in Hydro, Oklahoma, Bowie and Marshall, Texas, and eventually left the pastorate to become an evangelist.
Much of what shaped Martin’s ministry happened at Camps Farthest Out. He and Evelyn found CFO the same year he entered the ministry, and the camps became a place where he wrestled with the Holy Spirit, learned to minister outside the walls of his own denomination, and eventually became one of the familiar voices on the CFO platform. He had one way of describing Christian growth that he returned to again and again: “Growth is really more revelation of the Master.” It wasn’t more of Homer. It was more of Jesus Christ coming into view.
Martin was born again at twelve at the altar of First United Methodist Church in Wichita Falls, Texas. He was careful to say that nobody forced him. “I lived 12 years before I had salvation. … But Jesus never forced himself upon me. He waited until Homer was saying, I want that experience.”
He later went into business in Paducah, a West Texas town of fewer than three thousand people. During World War II he served as an Army Air Corps gunner. After the war he came home and bought a photographic studio with four thousand dollars of debt on it. He proposed to Evelyn in the car on the way there. They had known each other since they were children. “We were about 11 years old,” he said, “and we sang a duet in the Methodist Church in Wichita Falls, Texas.” They married in November 1946. Martin went into life insurance and eventually became a vice president. But the call to preach had not gone away.
What he was afraid of was not complicated. “I do not want to take my family to some rat infested parsonage.” He kept saying no. Eventually he became miserable enough that he could no longer keep doing it. “I finally got so stinking miserable, that I had to do something.” A district superintendent finally said what Martin already knew. Homer, you have been called to preach. He surrendered at midnight, in bed, beside his wife. “God let me know ever so clearly that he wanted me to be a preacher. And I began at that moment and continued for 23 years to let him know ever so clearly, I did not intend to be.”
That was the end of the twenty-three-year argument. He was sent to First Methodist Church in Hydro, Oklahoma, where there were about 118 members. He went back to school, eventually attended seminary, and entered the ministry. He and Evelyn found Camps Farthest Out that same year. They began serving as youth counselors at the Texas camp in Palestine, and CFO soon became an important part of their life and ministry.
Martin’s struggle with the Holy Spirit took several attempts, and much of it happened at CFO camps. At a camp in Ardmore, Oklahoma, someone took him into a room where a woman was praying for people. “I was in a corner and trapped.” He knew what God was offering. “God was offering me his Holy Spirit. And I didn’t want it.” At another camp, he allowed a doctor to pray for him. “You know what happened? Nothing. You know what was wrong? Homer.” Then came September 1962 at Ardmore. On Saturday night, Evelyn received the Holy Spirit and began speaking in a language she had never learned. Martin started packing the car.
He intended to go home early. Six friends came to the cabin and would not let him leave. Then Loretta Morgan prayed something that got past all his arguments: “Lord, help Homer not to care what his congregation will think.” That was the thing. “That’s when it broke the dam in me, broke the barrier, fear.” The fear had not been imaginary. Martin paid a price for what happened.
Colleagues reported him to the district superintendent and to the bishop. His next appointment was to a church of about eight hundred instead of the roughly eleven hundred members he had been serving. At annual conference, other pastors stopped drinking coffee with him. “But we learned what persecution was at the hands of our peers.” He was ordained elder by Bishop Angie Smith and later pastored Trinity Methodist in Muskogee. Eventually he left the pastorate for evangelism. “When I left the pastorate, it was not in anger. It was because God called me to go and be an evangelist. And so I went.”
Evelyn went with him. She served as the treasurer and could write him a check when there was money in the account to cover it. But the CFO camps remained part of their ministry. Martin continued to return to them, and his messages became part of the stream of teaching that made Camps Farthest Out more than a series of meetings for him. They were places where he could preach what he had learned in the middle of ordinary life and where he continued to learn himself.
Martin kept coming back to the same idea. “Growth is really more revelation of the Master.” He connected it with Paul’s words in Philippians 3 and with the Greeks who came to Philip in John 12 and said, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” That was what Martin wanted too. “I’m wanting to grasp this Jesus as I am grasped by him.” He called it intimacy.
That emphasis ran through his CFO preaching. Even when he talked about the Holy Spirit, he kept bringing the subject back to Christ. The gifts belonged to the Holy Spirit, he said, and they were tools to live by, not trophies to collect. He also emphasized that the invitation had to be given. “The Holy Spirit is such a gentleman, He won’t come into your life in this Holy Spirit experience unless you invite Him.”
The camps gave Martin room to talk about these things with people from many different church backgrounds. He had come out of Methodism, but CFO was not confined to one denomination, and he became comfortable speaking about the things he had learned without trying to turn them into a denominational program.
One of Martin’s most personal stories involved his daughter. She was a small child who kept passing out and turning blue with fevers. One day, Martin and Evelyn each came to the same realization without having talked to each other about it. They were holding on to the child as though she belonged to them rather than to God. They knelt beside her bed. “Lord, we thank you for this child. … She’s yours. If you want her now, she’s yours.” Martin was blunt about what that prayer cost him. “That’s one of the toughest I ever prayed.” The child was never that ill again.
Martin preached from Luke 4 about deliverance to the captives, and he came to see that the captives in this case had been the parents. He returned to the story at CFO camps for years. It was the kind of testimony that fit naturally into his ministry: something that had happened in his own family, something he had wrestled through personally, and something he could then hand to people sitting in front of him. He also knew something about healing personally. A malignant growth was removed from his thigh, and he refused to make healing mean that surgery had somehow disqualified it.
“All healing is not miraculous to the extent that it’s done without surgery. … Today there’s no cancer in my left thigh. I’m healed.”
Martin could be direct enough to make a room uncomfortable. He did it when he preached about the woman who was brought to Jesus and forgiven. “When Jesus forgave her and she rose, she rose as a virgin. Can you handle that? I fully believe it.” He knew exactly what people would object to. His answer was to ask two questions: “When God forgives, is it not gone? … When he forgives, is it not forgotten?” At CFO, Martin could take a passage that people thought they understood and push it until they had to deal with what he thought Jesus was actually saying.
A Baptist realtor who had never attended one of Martin’s meetings gave the ministry twenty-five and a half acres at Bowie, Texas. The property was platted as a Christian Center subdivision, and Martin and Evelyn eventually lived in a mobile home beside the chapel they built there. They had a son, Mike, and two adopted daughters. One came to them at two days old and the other at a day and a half. Martin loved the language of adoption. He preached about being adopted into the family of God and becoming “kinfolks in the kingdom.” By blood, he liked to point out, the only person related to him was his son.
Another message he returned to came from the potter at Marshall, Texas. Martin had watched clay that would not hold its shape be set aside as ditch material. He saw himself in it. “I’m still clay,” he said. “But praise God, I’m not dirt.” He could preach in plain West Texas language and make his point with a fifteen-dollar guitar. He had little patience for Christianity that was merely observed from a seat. “There are no spectator relationships in Christianity.” He credited Rosalind Rinker with a phrase that fit the way he saw the Christian life: Christianity lived out daily is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.
Evelyn was with him on the platform much of the time, praying while he spoke and singing. Together they became a familiar husband-and-wife team in CFO ministry. He also had a way of putting Texas in its proper place. “Evelyn and I don’t take being Texans too seriously. What we take seriously is being a child of the king.” After twenty-three years of saying no, Homer Martin spent the rest of his ministry saying yes—to the call to preach, to the Holy Spirit, to evangelism, and to the ministry God gave him among the people of Camps Farthest Out. And he never got over Jesus.
“It just thrills me again and again and again and again to find out that Jesus is even more than I thought he was.”
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.
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by Homer Martin
Homer Martin explores First John as an introduction to Jesus and encourages addressing discord promptly so relationships do not remain strained.
Camp & Year: Kentucky Lake CFO 1988