TT Martin

T.T. Martin
1862-1939
American evangelist. T.T. Martin was born in Smith County, Mississippi, on April 28, 1862. Following a childhood and youth amid the extreme poverty of the post-war South, he was graduated from Mississippi College, where his father both preached and taught mathematics. While preparing for a career of law, he felt a growing impression that he must preach. And, after a period of intense and prayerful self-examination, he gave up his legal ambitions and devoted himself to preparing for the ministry, graduating from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1891.

While awaiting assignment for the foreign mission work, he was stricken with an almost fatal attack of food poisoning, and was advised by physicians to move to Colorado as his only chance of recovery. From 1897 to 1900, he was pastor in Cripple Creek. Preaching there and in nearby camps, often in the open air, he recovered his health and developed the unusual strength of voice that was to carry him through almost 40 years of exceptionally strenuous preaching.

Martin entered full-time evangelistic work in 1900, and his ministry soon became noted for its effectiveness in bringing conviction and acceptance of Christ as personal Saviour. In the early 1900s, he began to use large tents for his meetings, as most of the churches could not accommodate the crowds. Soon invitations began to come from all sections of the country. In order to fill the many requests that came, he gathered around him a group of evangelists and musicians, whose presentation of the way of salvation he knew to be clear and sound. He personally scheduled these men, organized in teams, throughout the country.

Active until the last few months of his life, he died May 23, 1939, and was buried at Glouster, Mississippi. On his gravestone are the dates of his birth and three Scripture texts, which were the core of his ministry: John 3:16, Acts 16:31, and John 5:24.