Messages by Tommy Tyson

Tommy Tyson was born on a North Carolina farm and grew up in a large family of ten boys. His father, Jack Tyson, was the son of a tenant farmer who became a country Methodist preacher. All ten of Jack Tyson’s sons eventually entered the ministry. Tommy’s brothers Earl, Virgil, and Bobby are also represented in this library.

Tommy attended Campbell University briefly, enlisted in the Coast Guard, and married his high school sweetheart, Zella Frances Brewer. After returning home to Snow Hill, North Carolina, he went into the wholesale meat business. He later described those years honestly: “It wasn’t personality. It was a racket with me.”

In 1947, Pete Spitzkite came to Snow Hill as an interim pastor. Pete never tried to convert Tommy, but his life had a profound effect on him. Tommy later said that when Pete left Snow Hill that August, “my life was miserable because I saw myself in contrast to his life.” His conversion came while he was alone in his 1941 Chevrolet on the road into town. He prayed, “Lord, if you can, do anything with me.” The call to preach came later while he was at Guilford College, and his first reaction was to laugh. “I would have never chosen myself to preach.”

Tommy graduated from Guilford in 1951 and received his Master of Divinity degree from Duke University in 1953.

“I Had to Resign as Bishop”

In 1952, on Pentecost Sunday, Tommy was teaching an adult men’s Bible class at the church he was pastoring in eastern North Carolina. The lesson was from Acts 2. When he was asked to close the meeting, he sensed that he was to be honest with the men about his own spiritual need. The men in the room included members of the church’s official board, and Tommy was afraid that if they knew about his fears and inadequacy, he would lose their respect.

There was also something deeper that he had to surrender. Tommy openly acknowledged that he had great ambitions for himself. “I knew God was going to make me the greatest preacher the United Methodist Church had ever seen,” he said, and he expected that he would someday become a bishop. That was why his surrender took such an unusual form. “I knew I had to resign as bishop.” That morning, he surrendered his ambition and was baptized with the Holy Spirit in front of the men in his Bible class. “I was making a little god out of a ministry,” he later explained.

Within about ten days, the members of the group told him they had noticed a change in him. “Tommy, the change is in you, not in us. You’ve gone Pentecostal on us.” In that part of North Carolina at the time, that was not a compliment. Tommy’s reputation suffered, and he eventually took his credentials to Bishop Garber with the intention of resigning. The bishop would not accept his resignation. In 1954, Tommy left the pastorate and entered evangelistic ministry. He took what he described as the only appointment in the church “with no salary, no parsonage, no pension, no nothing.”

He also made a personal commitment that he would never make his financial needs known to another person. “I never made a single need known to a person. And every need was met.” Tommy and Frances had three children. He acknowledged the cost his ministry placed on his family, particularly when he said of his youngest son, “He grew up with his mother.”

“Jesus Is Your Redeemed Self”

Tommy Tyson’s understanding of Christ and the Christian life was deeply influenced by E. Stanley Jones. He frequently repeated Jones’s statement, “Jesus is not man reaching toward God. Jesus is God coming to man.” Tommy went further in describing what the life of Christ meant for the believer. “Jesus is redeemed humanity. The human side of you is redeemed. Not just the Christly part. The manly part.” He knew that his next statement would challenge people: “Jesus is your redeemed self. Now you can chew on that one. Jesus, the resurrected Lord, is your redeemed self. He’s your new life.”

Tommy understood the work of Christ as something that included the believer completely. He had heard throughout his life that Jesus died for him, but he came to understand something deeper: “I didn’t know he died as me.” He took seriously the biblical description of believers as new creatures in Christ.

Tommy also taught extensively about the Holy Spirit, including in mainline Christian settings where Pentecostal teaching was often viewed with suspicion. He described baptism with the Holy Spirit as “living in a fixed awareness of the person and power of the resurrected Lord, Jesus Christ.” He compared the experience to marriage: “Marriage fulfills engagement, baptism fulfills birth.” Although Tommy spoke openly about the baptism with the Holy Spirit, he did not make speaking in tongues a requirement for others. “I never find any scriptural basis for trying to teach somebody else to talk in tongues.”

Healing and the Steel Brace

Tommy’s teaching about healing was rooted in the ministry of Jesus. He believed that the clearest evidence of God’s will concerning healing was found in what Jesus actually did. “If no one was ever healed, I’d have to believe it’s God’s will to heal. Because I see it in Jesus.” He also said, “At no point does Jesus honor sickness as a gift from God.” When praying for a sick person, Tommy’s first question was not whether the person had enough faith. Instead, he asked, “Is there anything that you know about that would block the flow of God’s healing love for you?”

One healing that had a lasting influence on Tommy involved his neighbor, Mae Hollowell, of Goldsboro, North Carolina. She had a serious deterioration of the bones for which there was no medical hope. She asked Tommy to confirm a healing that she had already claimed, and he did. But nothing appeared to happen immediately. “Her back hurt just as much afterwards as it did before.”

Mae continued to testify about her healing for years, even though people thought she had become a religious fanatic. Then, while attending a luncheon in Washington, she heard a speaker call out a specific bone condition and mention someone wearing a steel brace. Mae left the table without saying anything. She returned carrying a newspaper with her steel brace wrapped inside it. “And the minute she took the brace off, the pain left.”

That experience became connected with Tommy’s teaching about what came to be known as soaking prayer. He used the illustration of an old wash pot from eastern North Carolina: “Some things aren’t ready for scrubbing. They need to soak a while.”

The idea was to allow God’s life to be ministered to the body over a period of time rather than expecting every healing to happen instantly. Tommy later shared this teaching with Francis MacNutt and Catherine Marshall, making clear that the idea did not belong to him.

Tommy also experienced the limits of his own understanding of healing. In 1983, doctors at Duke discovered a malignancy. At first, Tommy refused surgery, recognizing that his refusal was rooted in spiritual pride. Eventually he knelt in his surgeon’s office and repented. He underwent the surgery. “I woke up from that surgery and there wasn’t an angel in sight. And I hurt like a pagan.”

But Tommy did not see the medical treatment as somehow inferior to miraculous prayer. Looking back, he said, “It doesn’t seem as spiritual, but looking back on it, I want you to know it was as much God as the miraculous prayer.” He believed his body belonged to Christ completely—“bought, locked, stock and barrel.”

Camps Farthest Out and Aqueduct

Tommy first heard Glenn Clark speak in Raleigh in 1949. He later recalled, “As the man spoke, the room was filled with light.” In the early 1950s, Tommy attended his first Camp Farthest Out because he wanted to be near Rufus Moseley. The Camps Farthest Out became an important part of his spiritual life, and Tommy later said simply, “I’m a product of CFO.” From 1965 to 1968, he served as the first Director of Spiritual Life at Oral Roberts University.

After returning to North Carolina, Tommy developed a conference center called Aqueduct. He had seen the property from a hillside before he actually owned the land. He chose the name Aqueduct because an aqueduct carries water from its source to where it is needed. Tommy wanted Aqueduct to be a place where people could come freely. His rule was simple: “No one has ever been denied an access if they wanted to come.” Those who knew Tommy often spoke about the love they experienced from him. Starr Daily said, “I like Tommy Tyson. He has all these gifts. Plus an indescribable love.”

John Hobbs remembered Tommy as the first person who really took him under his wing and loved him “with a father’s love.” Ruth Carter Stapleton’s healing ministry was also influenced by Tommy. During a prayer group, Tommy turned to her and asked, “Ruth, would you pray for her to be healed?” Thelma Lee expressed something Tommy himself would have wanted people to remember: “Tommy would be the first to tell you, don’t follow Tommy Tyson. Follow Jesus.” Tommy’s wife, Frances, died before him. Tommy Tyson died on December 5, 2002, at the age of eighty.

Matt W. Leach of The CFO Classics Library later wrote that “identification and union with Jesus were Tommy’s theme songs and his life’s goal.”