Out of nowhere, as far as I knew, Harold appeared. For two years my congregation had tried calling one “star” after another. None were interested in our small planet. So, Broomall RP Church called Harold. He was installed as pastor on June 19, 1968.

I immediately skipped town for a summer in Europe—which Harold had once toured on his motorcycle after studying theology in Edinburgh—and then went to the Reformed Presbyterian seminary in Pittsburgh, Pa. The next spring, I asked Harold to solemnize a marriage between Gretchen DeLamater, whom he had recently baptized into Christ, and me. He asked, “When and where?” Premarital counseling? He never proposed it, nor did we think of it. Was a wedding date during Synod okay? “Fine, more than fine,” said Harold. On June 14, 1969, Harold performed an outdoor ceremony in Maryland.

I got to know Harold five years later, after we returned from Cyprus. He had a loud preacher voice, “booming” one would say. He also sang loudly. His sermons were meaty, and he explained what the Bible taught without big Latinate words. As John Mitchell, later an elder with Harold on the Rose Point session, wrote, “I remember Harold’s sermons and how closely he stayed with Scripture, telling it as it is candidly and forthright, and not withholding Scripture’s truths and applications.”

Around 1975, Harold’s preaching caught the attention of Richard and Nancy Ganz. Rich was studying at nearby Westminster Seminary. Every Lord’s Day after church he and Nancy walked from Broomall, Pa., RPC to its parsonage next door and stayed and stayed and stayed while Rich talked intensely with Harold. It was a weekly seminar in theology.

What Eldon Hay, historian of the Covenanter Church in Canada, called the “Ganz revival” came from those one-student seminars. When Ganz went to Ottawa in 1980, he came with Harold’s education. In 1982, Ganz recruited Harold to be the professor of systematic theology at the new Ottawa Theological Hall, a job he kept until 2004.

On hearing of Harold’s death, Matt Dyck, pastor of Hillside (Almonte, Ont.) RPC, wrote that Harold quickly became “an honorary Canadian…with that Canuck beard and his ‘pirate-like’ boisterous laughter.” When Matt and other Canadian men feel the stress of ministry, they reminisce about Harold’s classes: “He was father to us all. He was notorious for cracking the odd joke during apologetics class as he would expose the ‘foolish’ thinking of some worldview.” They continued, “But in and through it all was always the love of Christ and a big pastor’s heart. He taught us to be more than good theologians.” Theology “was to help us love and shepherd God’s people.”

Matt Kingswood, pastor of Russell, Ont., RPC, wrote, “His gospel humility tempered his great knowledge and maturity so that he was never intimidating or distant. I respected him highly and loved him dearly.” Many in Ontario loved Harold, even when he said at one convivial meal that he hoped one day there would be no border between Canada and the United States.

Not everyone in the Covenanter Church loved Harold. He spoke his mind. For a time in the early 1970s, he sent “The Covenanter Pastor” to other Covenanter pastors. He wrote it. I would occasionally be asked in a tone of incredulity, “Did you read what Harold wrote?” I hadn’t, because I was not then a pastor. Harold’s straightforward and unafraid opinions were one reason he did not become the new editor of the Covenanter Witness when the job opened in 1985. As the pastor of Rose Point (New Castle, Pa.) RPC from 1983–93, he had made enemies in “them thar hills” of western Pennsylvania, although not in Rose Point. They were sorry when he retired. He told me at the time, “Bill, I just can’t do it anymore.” He was tired.

Where did Harold come from? A year before his death he wrote to me, “Been feeling a bit better the past week. Hope it continues. I have installed some speech-to-text software.” He continued, “I have been thinking about my early youth and how much I really understood about the Covenanter Church and its leaders in those days. Although a ‘cradle Cove­nanter’ born in 1927 and baptized in the Heth­erton congregation, my family saw little contact with Covenanter society over the next two decades due to the Depression and politics.” How so? Harold’s father, Hugh, was a schoolteacher who would not swear an oath of loyalty to America’s godless constitution, so he ended up far out in rural upper Michigan. They had to move more than once. Hugh and his wife raised a family of seven children. Harold was the oldest.

Harold remained a backwoodsman all his life. He resigned his Broomall pastorate in 1980 in order to build his retirement home in the mountains of northeast Pennsylvania while he still had the energy to do so. He collected Corvair automobiles, stigmatized by Ralph Nader in his career-making book, Unsafe at Any Speed. Harold thought for himself and was sure the Corvairs would someday become collector’s items. When his second daughter Ann’s children came to visit, Harold knew how to keep them busy and happy: hand them a dull axe and a saw needing to be sharpened and tell them to take out another tree stump.

In his letter to me Harold continued, “Our family travels did not prevent me nor my brothers and sisters from receiving an RP/Calvinistic, Covenanter education. Mother and Father were steadfastly faithful to RPC doctrine and life.…Dad was a scholar, and no matter what else he might be doing that was there.…Wherever we were, the Sabbaths were filled with Psalm singing, Bible verse recitations, catechism, and studies in the Westminster Confession and RP Testimony.” John Mitchell remembers being in a cabin with Harold, then at Geneva College, at a Pittsburgh Presbytery summer camp: Harold’s “wise and helpful comments in devotional time…impressed me.”

A minority of men who begin as pastors finish their working lives in the pulpit. Some never belonged there in the first place or their wives said, “Enough!” Some career-ending sin ends others’ service. In recent years, some men have just quit, citing burnout. Harold left the pastorate twice, once to build his retirement home. Earlier, because of low pay, he had resigned his charge in New Castle, Pa., writing a fiery letter to the Covenanter Witness about it. Harold never mastered the art of understatement.

He took a job with the Security Commission of Arizona in 1961, retaining his love for the American Southwest the rest of his days. But in 1964, he returned to preaching, first in Lake Reno, Minn., then in New Castle, and then in Broomall in 1968.

A tragedy that would send most men out of the pastorate, at least for a time, saw Harold resolutely where he belonged, preaching salvation through Christ. In summer 1975, on her way up a well-traveled road to Bible school at the nearby Christian Reformed Church, eight-year-old Gretchen Harrington disappeared. Someone had abducted her and driven her to nearby Ridley Creek State Park. Several months later, searchers found her body.

The Lord’s Day after Gretchen disappeared, Harold preached to a congregation that sang Psalms to God with tears streaming down their faces. He never hid how he missed his daughter, and we were welcome to talk about Gretchen.

Compounding Harold’s sorrows that fall, a young family joined Broomall RPC. After some months, the father wrote to Harold. “I came here a hungry man, and you have not fed me,” he began. Harold gave me the letter. I could not finish it. Like all pastors, Harold endured his share of anger and rejection from his flock. Harold continued to preach.

Before he left Broomall RPC, Harold helped usher another man into the church. Phil Pockras joined the Broomall congregation in the fall of 1979. He said, “Harold…was quite fatherly toward me.…Harold, and the session at that time were welcoming and easily accessible by phone throughout the week and on Sabbath.”

When did I get to know Harold? In 1975, he took part in ordaining me as an elder, and I joined the Broomall session. What did I learn from him besides things already noted? First, he distrusted all centralized schemes of improvement anywhere. Central planning in state or church will fail. Second, he had no use for new fads. When he attended seminary after the U.S. Navy (1945–46), the once magnetic R. J. G. McKnight, old and suffering from yellowed notes syndrome, was the main instructor. Many of his unimpressed students turned to the Navigators for inspiration. Harold declined to join, convinced that one can’t borrow the techniques of Arminians without imbibing their theology. He later rejected Robert Schuller’s psychologized gospel of self-esteem and learning to love oneself. The church growth movement’s applied sociology was not for Harold. No, thank you, Harold would preach.

Even after he resigned from Rose Point RPC, where membership grew from 87 to 112 in his years there, Harold still preached as needed at Broomall, Elkins Park, and Hazleton in the Atlantic Presbytery. In 2011, at age 84, he concluded his ministry after years as the teaching elder at Crown and Covenant (Binghamton, N.Y.) RPC. For some years, he and his wife, Ena, lived with eldest daughter Zoe in the mountains. Finally, they moved in with their youngest daughter, Jessica, outside Philadelphia.

Harold went to be with the Lord at age 94. For me and mine, for Matt Dyck, for Matt Kingswood, for Rich and Nancy Ganz and many others in Canada, for Phil Pockras, for John Mitchell, for Harold’s children and grandchildren, life will be paler and thinner without Harold. But we will see him again. As Johnny Cash, a favorite of Harold’s, sang, “There ain’t no grave can hold my body down. When I hear the trumpet sound, I’m gonna rise right out of the ground. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down.” No grave will hold Harold down. He belongs to Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.