Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Tom Jacobs.
Tom Jacobs is an Assemblies of God pastor from Oakland, Nebraska. He came to his first Camps Farthest Out camp in 1973, when he was about fourteen, and it was at a Nebraska CFO camp that he first acknowledged a call to the ministry. After Oral Roberts University he became a youth pastor in Sioux City, Iowa, and in 1986 began pastoring a church in Omaha. He spoke at CFO camps in Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Colorado during the 1980s.
CFO was part of his life from the beginning. He grew up in a small Nebraska town, found Christ as a teenager, and then found a place where young people were taken seriously. Tom grew up in Oakland, Nebraska, a town of about thirteen hundred people. His family attended church in nearby Lyons. “I grew up in Oakland, Nebraska, and we went to the church in Lyons.”
He was raised Presbyterian by godly parents and baptized as an infant. The man who ran the corner café called him Jake because his last name was Jacobs. “I was saved about a month before my 14th birthday, and on my 14th birthday I was baptized in the Holy Spirit. The following summer I was introduced to CFO, 1973.”
A part-time youth leader began discipling Tom and the other teenagers. Before long, Tom and four friends were keeping the youth group going themselves. By the time he was a high school senior, about sixty young people from the surrounding communities had become part of it. “And CFO was a big part of that.”
Tom went to the Nebraska CFO camp every year he could, usually on scholarship. One year Dick and Judy French asked all the young people who felt called to the ministry to come forward. “The first time I ever acknowledged that was at CFO.” It was not simply a place where he listened to speakers. He was being formed there.
Agnes Sanford came and sat with the young people and talked about visions. Francis MacNutt and Evelyn Carter Spencer were among the speakers he heard. Later Tom served as a youth counselor at the Nebraska camp for two years. The boy who had been part of a youth group in a small Nebraska town was beginning to see that God might have something more for him.
Tom spent a year on a secular college campus before going to Oral Roberts University. His first year there was spiritually dry. At twenty he was preparing for the Presbyterian ministry when he went to the church’s General Assembly. There he sensed God calling him in another direction. He married Lori the following year.
Tom graduated from Oral Roberts University in 1980 and remained there for two more years, working in the chaplain’s office and helping run a program that trained about a hundred student chaplains. He worked under Bob Stamps, whom he remembered as a hero of faith.
After college, Tom had an opportunity to work with about 160 young people at a fast-growing church in Washington, D.C. Instead, he went to Morningside Assembly of God in Sioux City, Iowa, where the youth group was about thirty. The decision exposed something in him. “My ego is much larger than my heart.”
He stayed in Sioux City for about four years as youth pastor. He led worship and headed the visitation teams. He was young when he began speaking at CFO, and he knew it. “I’m not over 40 years old, as you probably have noticed. I’m probably younger than the average CFO speaker.”
He spoke at the Kansas camp in 1983 with Thelma Lee and returned to the Nebraska camp as a speaker in 1985. Bill Godfrey spoke with him that year and remembered the young pastor warmly. “Tom Jacobs is possibly one of the richest young men that I’ve ever met in my life.” Then he clarified what kind of riches he meant. “And I’m talking about spiritual riches.”
Tom had felt drawn toward Omaha since he was a teenager. In 1986 he candidated at a church there that had recently gone through a painful split. After eight hours of interviews, the vote came up just short of the two-thirds majority required. Tom left the next morning to speak at a CFO camp in Wyoming.
Instead of fighting for the position, he told his supporters to back the other candidate. Then the church called him back. “We went back and were voted in unanimously. That was the first unanimous vote that church had ever had. But folks, when you get down to one, you just about have to have a unanimous vote.”
There were forty-eight people left in the congregation. Tom and Lori began there in September 1986. He knew their personalities were different. “Now my wife is the eternal optimist. I am the pessimist.” But the church that had looked like a dead end became the place where the next part of his ministry began.
Tom often preached about spiritual exile because he knew something about finding your way back. His text was Psalm 137, the psalm of the Israelites by the rivers of Babylon. His message was simple: don’t hang up your harp. “You cannot get exiled far enough that God can’t bring you back.” And when life becomes confusing: “When you don’t know what to do, do what you know to do.”
His life verse was Jeremiah 29:11–14. He loved C. S. Lewis and Polycarp, taught from Hebrews 12 about the cloud of witnesses, and liked to tell the story of an old woman named Miss Emma who stood beside the railroad tracks and shouted at a passing train, “Go on, boy.” For Tom, faith was not about having everything figured out. It was about continuing to walk when you could not see the whole road.
Tom taught that obedience keeps a Christian balanced. “You can’t obey God too much.” He was also cautious about supposed guidance that appeared from nowhere. “A word from God is always confirmational, not directional.” He taught the priesthood of believers through the imagery of the tabernacle, including the laver and the washing of feet. He preferred doing the washing himself. “I would much rather wash your feet, than for you to wash my feet, because then you find out how much my feet stink.”
That was Tom’s humor, but it was also his theology. Ministry was not a platform for proving how important you were. It was service. “Ministry is a work that can’t be fulfilled in your own strength.” He had learned that personally. “Tom, I haven’t blessed your ministry because of you. I’ve blessed your ministry in spite of you.”
And he imagined Jesus in heaven not merely enthroned in glory, but still doing what He had done on earth. “I wonder if when we finally get to heaven, if we won’t be looking for God in all of his glory, trying to find Christ seated at the right hand of the throne of God, and if we won’t find him washing somebody’s feet.”
Tom continued speaking at CFO camps, including Arkansas in 1988 and the Colorado summer camp in 1990. He later became superintendent of the Iowa Ministry Network of the Assemblies of God. His final lesson was one he could have learned at fourteen in Nebraska and kept learning for the rest of his life: “Folks, it is not how high you jump, it’s what direction you walk once you hit the ground.”
*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.