A.W. Tozer: The Self-Taught Mystic of Clearfield County
Pennsylvania
Aiden Wilson Tozer never earned a college degree, yet he became one of the most widely read Christian theologians of the twentieth century. Born in eighteen ninety-seven a few miles south of here in the hamlet of LaJose, Tozer converted to Christianity as a teenager and taught himself theology through voracious reading. He became a pastor with the Christian and Missionary Alliance and eventually edited its flagship magazine for the last thirteen years of his life.
In the nineteen forties and fifties he returned to this area as a featured speaker at the Mahaffey Camp Summer Bible Conference, drawing audiences from across the region. His books, including The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy, have collectively sold more than three million copies and remain in print worldwide. He died in nineteen sixty-three, his influence still quietly spreading.