Written by:  Warren Cole Smith

Michael Tait. Robert Morris. Mark Driscoll. Ravi Zacharias. Are you tired of celebrity preachers?

I am, and I think that’s why the story of John Dyer fascinates me. My guess is that you’ve never heard of him. I had not either until I came across his biography in a used bookstore in Colorado a few years ago. But I have come to learn that he played a significant role in the spread of the Gospel in Colorado and throughout the Mountain West, and his life has some lessons for us today, especially in this age of celebrity.

When Dyer was born, in 1812, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were still alive. The vast lands of the Louisiana Purchase were not fully mapped. The country was still abuzz with the heroism of Lewis & Clark’s Voyage of Discovery. Denver and the other great cities of the American West were not yet even imagined, much less settled.

But when Dyer died near Denver, in 1901, the state’s leading citizens traveled to the funeral of this itinerant preacher in shiny, new-fangled automobiles, and the service took place under the glow of electric lights. John Dyer had lived through one of the most remarkable centuries in human history, and he had helped shape it.

He was born in Ohio, moved to Illinois with his family as a boy, and then relocated again to Wisconsin as a young man. All three states were essentially frontier states when he lived there. He converted to Christianity as an 18-year-old, married, and started raising a family by working in the lead mines that supplied America’s growing industrial base.

But when his wife died giving birth to their fifth child, Dyer had a crisis of faith, and then a re-dedication of his life to Christ. He became a circuit riding preacher to the miners and settlers of Wisconsin and Minnesota. But the years in the mines, and his own advancing age – by 1861 he was 49 years old, an old man for the era – took a toll on his health. His eyesight, in particular, was failing. His children were now mostly grown. Indeed, one of his sons had already moved to the West. So, John Dyer got it in his mind that he wanted to see the Rocky Mountains, Pikes Peak in particular, before he died. He attached himself to a wagon train and started west.

He made it to Omaha before his horse could no longer carry him, so John Dyer walked the remaining 600 miles to Denver. During the trip, a near-miraculous thing happened. The fresh air, physical activity, and the increasingly dry climate worked wonders on Dyer’s health. He arrived in Denver, reunited with his son, and was restored to health. His zeal for preaching returned, and the wild mining camps of the Colorado High Country provided an available – if not always receptive – congregation. So, he went from the mining towns of the upper Midwest to the mining towns of Colorado, preaching the Gospel. The Methodist Church continued to sponsor him, but the pay was so poor that Dyer carried the mail from town to town – making his arrival a welcome presence.

Of course, the Gospel was not welcome by everyone in these rough towns. Dyer sometimes had to clear out bars and brothels in order to get an hour or two to preach. His pulpit was sometimes a table that had just moments earlier been used for gambling. From a memoir Dyer himself wrote about this period we find scores of gripping stories. In one of them, Dyer recalls getting caught at timberline in a snowstorm:

I started alone for Buckskin Joe [a mining town], by the Weston Pass. At timber height I was met by a severe snowstorm. I prayed and dedicated myself to God. I never saw death and eternity so near as then. I resolved to keep moving, and when I could go no more, would hang up my carpet-sack, and write on a smooth pine-tree my own epitaph – LOOK FOR ME IN HEAVEN.”

When he walked into Buckskin Joe following the blizzard, the townspeople were amazed, and by such adventures – called miracles by many — Dyer’s fame and reputation grew. Though a deeply committed Methodist, people came to call him Father Dyer because of his age and because of the strong Catholic influence of the region. Dyer helped establish churches throughout Colorado and northern New Mexico. He also brought from Wisconsin and Minnesota an innovation he first saw used by the Norwegian neighbors of his youth: cross-country skis. Indeed, for popularizing the use of the skis in Colorado he was posthumously inducted into the first class of the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, when that organization began in 1977.

And the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame is not the only place Dyer left his mark. Colorado became a state in 1876, the 100th anniversary of the United States, and thereby earned the nickname The Centennial State. By then, Dyer had remarried and was widely recognized as one of the most important religious leaders in Colorado. It was therefore only natural that Dyer became the first chaplain of the Colorado State Senate, and he is recognized in the stained glass of the Colorado State Capitol as one of the “founding fathers” of the state.

Churches John Dyer planted or preached in during the late 1800s are still operating today, including one in the ski town of Breckenridge. The original building for that church was built on land Dyer purchased with his own money. It is thought to be the first permanent church built on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies.

The pastor (or, to use Methodist terminology: minister) of that church wrote a biography of Dyer in the 1970s. A 13,000-foot peak near Leadville is named for him, and a campground. But for the most part, his name is lost to history.

Father Dyer’s stories of rough life in the high country of Colorado were so remarkable that his family and friends asked him to write the memoir I mentioned earlier. That book, The Snowshoe Itinerent, published just before his death in Castle Rock, Colorado, at age 89. He closes the book this way:

I have saluted by threescore and ten. The lengthening shadows proclaim a setting sun. But, glory be to God, my sky is cloudless and, with faith’s undimmed vision, I can see the land of rest, the saint’s delight, the heaven prepared for me. My prayer is that the next hundred years of the Church’s history may be even fuller of spiritual power and victory than the century past.

He then quoted the then-new hymn, “Hasten, Lord, The Glorious Time”:

Hasten, Lord, the glorious time,

When beneath Messiah’s sway,

Every nation, every clime,

Shall the gospel call obey!

In an age of celebrity preachers, especially an age of fallen celebrity preachers, it is good to remember such men as John Dyer. He bears witness to the value for the Kingdom of God of doing one’s work in obscurity and finishing one’s race faithfully and well. Such examples have much to offer the church today.



 

Look For Me In Heaven

The remarkable story of Methodist circuit rider John Dyer