06/22/2023
TRIBUTE TO RICK HOWARD
Yesterday I received word that one of the most gifted Bible teachers I have ever heard, Rick Howard, was promoted to heaven. He was not only a mesmerizing teacher but a foundational mentor that bobbed in and out of my life for almost 60 years.
I was a boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, growing up in my dad’s church in Glendora, California, when I first heard Rick teach. He and my father, Jerry Fry, had been fast friends – innovators, sometimes mavericks together in youth ministry – and dad would bring Rick in to preach from time to time.
I remember him preaching with passion and a sense of urgency… Like a lawyer pleading God’s case before people, pleading with people to understand who God was. Like a commander rallying his troops for battle.
I was spellbound. I was to sit spellbound for the next several decades. During my high school years, Rick and my dad found themselves taking small established churches in the Bay Area. There were many similarities between their assignments, and Rick would often come to our San Jose church, Calvary Community, and teach.
Rick probably more than anybody else taught me grace. He taught me grace like my dad taught me worship. Rick’s insights on the grace of God chiseled unforgettable truths of God’s unconditional acceptance in my stony heart of legalism. Yet his call to unconditional surrender to this great God of grace was equally compelling. I sat spellbound many times.
He was my favorite professor at Bible college. I took a class he taught on the book of Hebrews and not only was I spellbound again but he took the time to encourage me in my budding attempts at writing and teaching.
One of the most significant developments in those early years of the 1970s was the birth of what was called the Mount Hermon Spiritual Leadership Conference, pioneered by Joy Dawson. Cradled in a conference center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, this gathering became the template for hundreds of leadership conferences over the next two decades.
Within a few years of the birth of that conference, an apostolic team began to form, comprised of Rick, my father, Campbell McAlpine, and David Rees-Thomas. For years I was able to observe these four men confer together, wait on God together, and then assemble hundreds of leaders every year, proclaiming the messages of glorifying Christ, of doing God’s work God’s way, of alignment to His character and patterns… echoes of the prophetic sound of the old Keswick conferences over a hundred years ago.
Rick was the teacher of the bunch, and I remember Campbell McAlpine – who was one of my most significant mentors and the first genuine prophet I ever met – saying, “I would like to just follow Rick around with a small whiskbroom and dustpan sweeping up all the little gems that fall from his mouth after day after day.“
When I was released in a global traveling ministry for many years, I didn’t see Rick that much. But when Nancy and I started our church, The Gate, in 2007 I reconnected with Rick in the years following and had him come and speak to our church on two of his incredible life messages: The Judgment Seat of Christ and The Foundation of Koinonia (which means ‘fellowship’).
I was spellbound yet again.
Even in his later years, whether teaching at a Bible college in Mongolia for weeks or fathering pastors around the nation, the fire, the passion, the incredible insights that always characterized Rick were still on full display!
At the beginning of 2023 Nancy and I felt extremely spent. Sort of ‘life-weary.’ The fall of 2022 marked the 50th year of full-time ministry for me. And while we found ourselves rejoicing in God's faithfulness on one hand, Nancy and I were about as burnt out as we’d ever been on the other.
So in January we got away for a few days. I knew that both of us needed restoring at some very deep levels. I knew we needed something very nourishing to feed on. Something through which the fingers of our Great Shepherd, Jesus, would be able to run through the tangled wool of our hearts, minister to our wounds and find the thorns and thistles embedded in our emotions.
I went to an old well. Rick Howard once again. His book Restoring Restorers was a familiar read. The account of that first band of captives under Zerubbabel, who returned to the land full of vigor and vision to rebuild the temple… only to collapse under the weight of accumulated disappointments and discouragements. Using the visions of the prophet Zechariah as his guide, Rick unwrapped the wonderful ways God restores ‘restorers’ – those who once had a vision to see The Church become all that Christ meant her to be… but find themselves sidelined through weariness and failure.
In those opening days of January I once again heard Rick’s fire and passion, urging me to see what God was doing even in my weariness… To not give up, but to endure and to see God in new ways in spite of the lassitude and lethargy in which I found myself. Nancy and I read it chapter by chapter, underlined it, prayed it into our hearts.
Rick rocked me when I was a young lad. And now 60 years later he was doing it again… and again I was spellbound.
