Harvie M. Conn, 1933-1999

Harvie M. Conn, the professor of missions, emeritus, at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, and author of several books on global missions, passed away on August 28, 1999 in Wyndmoor, PA after a long battle with cancer. He was born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1933 and became an American citizen in 1957. Dr Conn received an A.B. from Calvin College in 1954. He earned a B.D. in 1957 and a Th.M. in 1958 from Westminster Theological Seminary and was awarded a Litt.D. from Geneva College in 1976.

Beginning in 1957 he was a church planter in New Jersey and later served as a missionary in Korea, where he had an itinerant ministry of preaching in churches in the countryside and city. He also taught New Testament for ten years at the General Assembly Theological Seminary in Seoul and carried on a ministry of evangelism among prostitutes and pimps, receiving a few beatings for his troubles.

When he came to Westminster in 1972, he taught both apologetics and missions. An expert in interpreting popular culture through comment on films, he applied Cornelius Van Til's apologetic in new ways. He took Westminster students on field trips to India and Uganda. One outcome of his interdisciplinary teaching was a new approach to urban evangelism and missions, leading to one of Westminster's recent emphases - urban missions programmes at all degree levels. From 1989-1999 Conn was editor of "Urban Mission," a journal for urban ministry practitioners begun by former Westminster professor Roger Greenway in 1983.

As a result of requests from urban pastors in Philadelphia, the Westminster Ministerial Institute was begun in 1973 under Conn's direction. Saturday classes at Westminster later led to the formation of the Center for Urban Theological Studies in the Hunting Park section of Philadelphia.

Harvie Conn also wrote and edited a number of books on preaching, evangelism and missions.

My personal contacts with him were not strong. He was the editor of a festchrift in honouring Edmund P. Clowney and I must have been the very last contributor to send in my essay. He was patient and helpful but did not possess the same view of the ministry as myself. I felt he was a man whose sympathies were more with the anabaptists and men like Ronald Sider than any Presbyterian I knew in the USA. That was good for me as it indicated that radicalism had nothing to do with the subjects of baptism or any form of church government.

Geoffrey Thomas