Guerdon Elmer Lowman, more familiarly G. E. Lowman (November 16, 1897 – January 18, 1965) was an American Christian clergyman and a pioneering international radio evangelist beginning in 1930, following a successful business career.
He was called by contemporary newspapers "a noted preacher", whose "forceful sermons" addressed "timely and interesting topics". His non-denominational radio ministry had a worldwide audience from the 1930s until 1965.
Early years
G. E. Lowman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where he worked in the local shipyards as a teenager, becoming a Christian at the age of 17. He married Minnie Wagner (1901–1988) on December 8, 1917, and they had six children.
In his early twenties, he began a commercial electrical contracting company. Later, he acquired a spinoff supermarket chain in the Baltimore region from Sanitary Grocery Stores, which he renamed "Twin Food".
Ministry
Baltimore Gospel Tabernacle
In the late 1920s, G. E. Lowman was ordained as a Methodist minister and began preaching at churches and missions in the Baltimore area. He also became a familiar sight in the city, using a specially equipped bus with a platform and loudspeakers to hold outdoor evangelistic rallies on Baltimore street corners.
So popular was his preaching that G. E. Lowman founded the Baltimore Gospel Tabernacle in 1930, building a large Romanesque Revival-style stone church at the corner of Federal and Wolfe Streets, in an east Baltimore neighborhood near Johns Hopkins Hospital. A Lutheran church and later a Mormon congregation had previously occupied a portion of the site since 1893, and the newly constructed Baltimore Gospel Tabernacle incorporated the former structure in its design, more than tripling the building's overall size. When completed, the building had a seating capacity of 500 persons at a cost of $45,000 (approximately $735,000 in 2021 dollars). Several large stained glass windows were installed in the new edifice, one of which was donated by a Titanic survivor. Atop the Tabernacle's west tower was an illuminated cross, which revolved when services were underway, one of four revolving crosses in existence in the U.S. at the time.
The newly completed church was dedicated on October 19, 1930, and Pastor Lowman began weekly live radio broadcasts of the services on Wednesdays and Sundays on WCAO and WCBM. On the church's first anniversary in October 1931, the Baltimore Post reported: "The Gospel Tabernacle is interdenominational in character and from 10 to 15 different denominations are represented at the services". In celebration of the anniversary, "jubilee services were held nightly for two weeks, with ministers from different churches conducting the services," the newspaper said. Further expansion of the church occurred in 1933 with the addition of a south transept and a second balcony to accommodate the overflow crowds. By the late-1930s, attendance at the Tabernacle was typically 1,500-1,800 persons at each service. Prominent Baltimore attorney Theodore R. McKeldin (and later Mayor of Baltimore and future Maryland Governor) was a frequent Tabernacle guest speaker.
The Tabernacle broadcasts eventually reached coast-to-coast in the U.S., including such high-powered, Class 1-A clear channel radio stations as WABC in New York City, WLS in Chicago, and WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina. Worldwide, the program was broadcast on major medium wave and shortwave stations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, originated by flagship station WBAL (AM). By the late 1930s, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said of Rev. Lowman, "the noted radio evangelist and founder of the Baltimore Gospel Tabernacle ... is well-known to Pittsburghers inasmuch as his forceful sermons are transmitted here from the Baltimore Tabernacle". In August 1941, WNOX (now WNML) in Knoxville, Tennessee, began carrying the broadcast, which it advertised as "inspiring and timely messages by one of America's religious leaders", but six months later a controversy ensued when the radio station refused to broadcast a sermon in which Rev. Lowman mentioned the word "fornication", prompting protests from disappointed listeners. When the program debuted on WELI in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1940, a radio columnist for the New Haven Register described the broadcasts as "one of America's most unique and varied religious programs, conducted by Rev. G. E. Lowman, a noted preacher who takes for his topics timely and interesting subjects that are up-to-the moment".