Joel Rufus Moseley was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1870 and passed into the Lord’s presence in 1954. His home base for many, many years was the city of Macon Georgia. E. Stanley Jones described Moseley as “the most Jesus centered man I know.” He attended Peabody College in Nashville Tennessee, continued in the University of Chicago where he majored in political science and philosophy, from there he went to the University of Heidelberg and then to Harvard, for a while he served as a university professor at Mercer University in Georgia before leaving the teaching profession to follow the Lord in those ways which he felt he was being led by the Holy Spirit. He traveled and ministered in many parts of the USA and his life is full of stories of God’s grace and the teaching the Lord gave to him as he traveled somewhat of an unusual Christian pilgrimage path. Before the word ‘charismatic’ was being used to describe a certain kind of Christian Believer this man was a pioneer minister, lecturer and writer in those realms now known by that name. Moseley had a distinctly mystic bent, his pathway, experience and teaching has elements that are far from accepted as orthodox evangelical/Pentecostal. He believed that “Protestantism has gone far afield in the substitution of a doctrine about the cross, and in the substitution of a theory of a justification by faith for faith, the faith that works by love, as Catholicism in substitution of ritualism for a new life in Christ.” He was a man who was somewhat ‘outside the box.’ However, here are several more commendations of his life, “He was easily one of the happiest men I ever met.’ The well-known Pioneer Pentecostal evangelist Tommy Tyson said, “ I know the message of Rufus Moseley is eternal and will forever speak to those who are hungering and thirsting and asking,” I want to mention a book published by Macalester Park Publishing Company called ‘A Heavenly View.’ This is a compendium of some of Moseley’s writings; mostly these are taken from editorial articles he regularly wrote for the newspaper of his home city The Macon Telegraph. Another book, only obtainable second hand is called ‘Perfect Everything.’ He dictated this book as indeed he did the book Manifest Victory also. “Perfect Everything” was published in England by the Arthur James Publishers and this will immediately suggest an author who is somewhat on the fringe of mainstream evangelical and Pentecostal teachings. These books reveal the thoughts of one of the best-educated and profoundly spiritual men of his time, the overall message it that Life is in Christ Jesus alone. There is much wisdom to be found in these books, that the author was a man of great simplicity of life, childlike in his ways and greatly loved by many is the testimony of those who knew him. Just to mention that he had a pecan nut grove in Georgia and the pleasure of working in that grove and the monies that accrued from the produce of the trees was sufficient to furnish him for his modest daily needs.
