In the midst of the "fundamentalist-modernist controversy" facing Christianity in the 1920s, he and many conservative classmates followed those members of the faculty – such as J. Gresham Machen, Robert Dick Wilson and Cornelius Van Til – who withdrew from Princeton to establish the Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929.
In 1950, Park Street Church hosted Billy Graham's (first mid-century transcontinental) evangelistic crusade, which was regarded as highly successful.
In addition to his pastoral career and writings, Ockenga became a significant leader in a mid-twentieth-century reforming movement known as Neo-Evangelicalism or the New Evangelicalism.
The reaction of many Fundamentalists to the influence of liberal Protestant theology and modern secular beliefs led to a withdrawal from many of the mainline denominations and institutions.
In addition, the Fundamentalists believed that anyone, regardless of religious outlook, could be involved with social action and so they wanted to retreat to deal only with the "Spiritual Gospel."
[citation needed] However, Ockenga and some other younger and emerging figures inside those churches felt uncomfortable about the militant isolation from culture.
Alongside of Ockenga were figures such as Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, Wilbur M. Smith, and Edward John Carnell.
In an effort to redress these concerns Ockenga and J. Elwin Wright of the New England Fellowship planned the establishing of a new organisation known as the National Association of Evangelicals.
The seminary was initially conceived of as the Evangelical Caltech, where excellence in scholarship would dovetail with faithfulness to orthodox Protestant beliefs, and yield a renovation of western culture from secular unbelief.
This overall movement for reform in fundamentalism, as exemplified in the establishing of the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary and Christianity Today magazine came to be known as Neo-Evangelicalism.
For example, he was one of the thirty or so leaders who met for a strategy session with Billy Graham in mid-August 1960 in Montreaux, Switzerland, to plan how the movement could best oppose the candidacy of Senator John F. Kennedy for the presidency that year.
[2] The term may or may not have been originally coined by Ockenga, but in 1948 at the Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, California his speech gave birth to the movement.
It had a new emphasis upon the application of the gospel to the sociological, political, and economic areas of life.The first sixteen years of work at Fuller Theological Seminary witnessed the development of two outlooks among staff and students: conservative and progressive evangelicalism.
Among the conservatives, such as Ockenga, Henry, Lindsell and Smith, there was some concern that others such as David Hubbard, Paul Jewett and Daniel Fuller held to a different view of biblical inerrancy.
With Ockenga's final departure from the role of president in absentia, the seminary shifted into a different phase of growth under the direction of those identified with progressive thinking.