SPEER, ROBERT ELLIOTT

Presbyterian lay mission leader; b. Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, Sept. 10, 1897; d. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nov. 23, 1947. He was of Scotch-Irish background. Speer graduated from Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1889 and spent his entire career in the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (1891–1937). He was an accomplished administrator and scholar, whose efforts more than doubled the scale of Presbyterian mission work. He withstood the conservative attacks of J. G. Machen on Presbyterian missions and, from the opposite side, the critique of William E. Hocking and associates in Rethinking Missions (1933). With John R. mott, leader of the student volunteer movement, and in cooperation with the Young Men's Christian Association, Speer led his own denomination and Protestant mission work as a whole into the age of world mission, inspired by the slogan, "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation." In 1927, as moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., he played a reconciling role at the height of the Fundamentalist-Modernist dispute. He published a total of 66 books, as well as numerous articles.

Bibliography: w. r. wheeler, A Man Sent from God … Robert E. Speer (New York 1956), complete list of writings, 312. j. a. mackay "Robert Elliott Speer: A Man of Yesterday Today." Princeton Seminary Bulletin 60 (1967) 11–21. The Library of Princeton Theological Seminary contains a substantial collection of materials concerning Speer and his career.

[e. a. smith]