Samuel Walker Strickland
SAMUEL WALKER STRICKLAND
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One of the revivals conducted by Bro. McClurkan on his long tour back to Tennessee was
held in Meridian, Mississippi. In this revival, a South Alabama orphan boy, the Rev. R. M. Guy, then pastor of the First Baptist Church in Meridian, was sanctified. Under the influence of Rev. R. M. Guy’s preaching I was converted one day while plowing and praying between the plow handles in 1905; and at a brush arbor meeting altar I was sanctified in 1906 in Northwest Florida, near Atmore, Alabama, between Mobile and Pensacola. Bro. Guy had formerly taught school and preached as a Missionary Baptist minister in the previously mentioned section of the country. Our family owned and lived on Brother and Sister Guy’s old homestead across the Florida line, seven miles south of Atmore, Alabama. After many years of a very fruitful holiness ministry in different parts of the South, Brother and Sister Guy went to be with their Lord, and their bodies were laid to rest in Jasper, Alabama.
When Bro. McClurkan got sanctified he withdrew from the Presbyterian Church rather than
engage in a controversy over sanctification. He was never lettered out of the Presbyterian Church.
Getting back to Middle Tennessee in 1897, Bro. McClurkan pioneered with the old-new
message of the Holiness Movement. He preached at first in all kinds of churches, under tents, brush arbors, in deserted stores and sheds. While engaged in this last lap of his long evangelistic tour from California to Middle Tennessee, and when hundreds were accepting Christ as their Savior and Sanctifier, his ministry was interrupted by the sudden illness of his only son, Emmett. This illness was so critical that the advice of specialists was needed. Bro. McClurkan came to Nashville at once and established temporary residence, little dreaming that he and Nashville had a work to do that would take a quarter of a century. On arriving in Nashville he continued his evangelistic work. Some of his most successful revivals, during the early days in Nashville, were held in a few Methodist churches whose ministers were sympathetic to the doctrine of Sanctification or enjoyed the experience themselves. Their congenial fellowship and loyal
cooperation helped Bro. McClurkan to lay more strongly and permanently the foundation of the modern Holiness Movement in Nashville and surrounding country.
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Source: “A New Look At J. O. McClurkan” by S. W. Strickland
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THE END
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HOW THEY ENTERED CANAAN (A Collection of Holiness Experience Accounts) Compiled by Duane V. Maxey
Vol. I — Named Accounts