(RNS) — Decades before church leaders became as famous for their sneakers and aircraft use as for their preaching and ministry, Paul A. Rader, the first American-born general of the Salvation Army, showed a different, unassuming and kinder approach.
A tall man whose military bearing befit his position, Rader — who died Jan. 18 at age 90 — could be soft-spoken and contemplative. He was approachable and always had a good word for those he met. For five years, Rader was leader of the Salvation Army, an international, evangelical Christian movement. He came to the job suddenly — his predecessor, Bramwell Tillsley, resigned due to health issues, and a council of Salvationist leaders unanimously voted Rader in to succeed him.
Asbury University, where Rader earned an undergraduate degree and met his wife, Kay Fuller, recruited him as president after his term of leading the Salvation Army expired. He served six years as the school’s head before retiring in Lexington, Kentucky, and attending a Salvation Army church — called a “corps,” borrowing from military lingo — whenever he was in town.
Salvation Army Maj. Thomas Hinzman, who along with his wife, Maj. Susan Hinzman, pastored the corps that Rader attended, said clients of the group’s women’s and children’s center would amble into a worship service and sit near the Raders, not knowing who the couple were. All would worship together “as if they’d been friends for years,” Hinzman said. The leader who’d sat with presidents, prime ministers and global religious figures was just as much at home with people who had just fled abuse and poverty.
Rader was born to Salvation Army officer parents in 1934 and later followed them into the evangelical movement’s clerical ranks. While the church part of the Army isn’t as widely known by the public as its rehabilitation and social service efforts, evangelical worship is at the heart of everything the Army does. The Army is evangelical, grounded in the Wesleyan-Arminian holiness tradition.
Rader, who held two doctorates and, like his wife, became fluent in Korean during 22 years of missionary work in South Korea, was a practical leader anchored in his faith.
At Asbury, Rader spurred the development of an online learning program for the school, essentially opening the campus to the world. He also spearheaded the university’s first graduate degree program in education and paved the way for other postbaccalaureate programs.
Sandra Gray, one of his successors as Asbury president and a longtime business management professor at the school, said Rader made diversity one of his initial goals. “He was very supportive of and, in fact, was just very adamant that Asbury must increase the level of diversity,” Gray said.
Gray added that Rader was determined to bring diversity to the school’s faculty “because a diversity of faculty is important to attract a diversity of students. It was a big task for him, but it was a high priority.”
While Asbury was well-known in Wesleyan circles, the school exploded into global fame in 2023 when a chapel service turned into a nonstop prayer meeting that went viral on social media and drew tens of thousands of visitors to the small Kentucky town of Wilmore, population 6,000, where the school is based.
Gray said that revival heartened Rader, who, as a Salvationist, preached revival worldwide. In retirement, Rader and his wife would travel to Salvation Army conferences to share their experience and always exhort listeners to trust in Christ for their eternal destiny, heaven, and the personal holiness John Wesley and others said was possible for believers.
Gen. Paul A. Rader address a Salvation Army seminar in 2016. (Video screen grab)
Gen. Lyndon Buckingham, the movement’s current world leader, said he would remember Rader as a man of “vision, integrity, passion, commitment,” adding that he had “a deep desire that people would know Christ and that the Army would stay true to its mission.”
Buckingham said Rader and his wife “served with absolute energy, and how they maintained that energy, I think, speaks to their spiritual maturity and their personal discipline, because it is a rigorous appointment.”
“But whenever you saw them, they were on form, they were calm, they were poised, and they were ready to go,” Buckingham said.
Poised and ready to go recalls the Gen. Paul Rader I knew. His quiet, effective leadership kept a global Christian movement advancing, helped a university grow and flourish, and brought hope to those in despair.
I came to know the Raders in the 1980s when they were appointed to the Army’s training college in Suffern, New York. My wife and I had felt a call to officership, and while that did not come to pass, the Raders were always kind and helpful. In 1994, I wrote about his election to the Army’s top spot; three years later, he wrote a gracious foreword to my book, “God on the Internet,” published by IDG Books.
In 2023, the same year Asbury University had that multiweek revival meeting, the school dedicated a student center in the names of Paul and Kay Rader, who survives along with three children, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
The building is a tribute to two Christian lives “sold out” to their Lord and to serving others. Still, I suspect the more living memorial to Gen. Rader will be in the hearts and lives of the tens of thousands of Salvationists his ministry touched, and the thousands of Asbury alumni he influenced. Not to mention the ones who quietly slipped into a church pew to worship alongside a genuine disciple.
Personally, I’ll always remember Rader as a man who lived what he preached, specifically the need for a personal, continuing relationship with Jesus. At the end of our in-person 1994 interview, the then-general said we should pray, and he knelt to ask God for guidance and blessing. In that moment, Paul Rader never stood taller.
(Mark A. Kellner was a Salvation Army church member for 17 years and is a journalist based near Las Vegas. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)