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I just read an online article by a young man (by his own description) who
went out of his way to criticize most gospel preaching and singing for the last
two or three hundred years. He believes that once preaching and singing left
the Puritan and/or Reformation tradition, it was down hill from there.
Interestingly, this was all to criticize contemporary Christian music to any who
use it today. His point was that CCM is totally pragmatic and shallow, but
that we should not be surprised because the precursors of this have been evident
for hundreds of years in popular preaching and gospel singing. His specific
targets were D. L. Moody and his song leader Ira Sankey, Billy Sunday and his
song leader Homer Rodeheaver, and especially the revivalist Charles Finney. The
writer’s own Baptist background was also roundly criticized as being
non-theological, shallow, and entertainment based.
Interestingly, proponents of CCM heartily agreed with his assessment of the
history and only disagreed that CCM is a direct result of it. Both sides did
the typical venting about growing up in dead, cold fundamental churches. But, of
course, they have moved away from those things now that they’ve seen the error
of the entire fundamental (especially Baptist), gospel preaching, and gospel
singing history.
One
hardly knows where to begin to reply to these kinds of charges. I also grew up
in fundamental Baptist churches in the last half of the twentieth century and
was not bored at all! I was saved during a church invitation at eleven
years old in a fundamental, gospel preaching and singing Baptist church. After I
learned some things, I was baptized there when I was sixteen. God called me to
preach and I started my ministry education directly out of high school. I have
had my disagreements even with my home church in which I was converted
because of its contemporary changes, but I have grown to love and appreciate my
fundamental and Baptist heritage more and more over the years. I believe
that the very history that the aforementioned writer described, has been the
greatest force for the gospel of Christ in the last two to three hundred years.
Take away the souls saved, the churches built, the schools started, the
missionaries sent, the revivals experienced by “gospel” preaching and singing
over this period of time (in England and America alone), and it would be hard to
estimate the spiritual carnage that would have resulted!
For
many of this generation (who call themselves “young” fundamentalists), there
seems to be no place for the fundamentalism of the last couple of centuries
even though it is their own history. Apparently, the only two options are to go
back to a High Calvinistic, Reformed model of preaching and singing, or to go
the other direction, totally beyond any historical roots to the current malaise
of contemporary churches. But one sure thing keeps coming back from these
discussions; there is no love lost on the church that most of us have known and
loved and in which we’ve served Christ.
This
article is a result of my own reflection (after reading the online article) of
things I have read and places I have visited as I have learned about my
fundamental and Baptist history. In England, especially, I have seen the truly
dead liturgical Protestantism, as well as the cold history of High Calvinism.
But I have also experienced the worldliness and irreverence of the contemporary
churches on both sides of the Atlantic. Neither of these, in my opinion, is a
viable alternative for gospel preaching and singing.
John Bunyan (1628-1688)
Best
known for his classic book, The Pilgrim’s
Progress, John Bunyan was also a powerful Baptist preacher in a time when
nonconformists were persecuted by the Protestant Church of England. Knowing
God’s call upon him to preach, he refused to use the Book of Common Prayer
instead of the Bible and for this he spent over 18 years in prison. Born in
poverty, Bunyan’s lowly job was that of a tinker, mending metal pots and
utensils for whatever people could pay.
Despite misfortunes in life, and perhaps because of them, Bunyan knew his Bible
well. One historian says, “As in his Pilgrim he embodies more of the Bible than
does Milton in his Paradise Lost, so in
his sermons we find more true human nature than in Shakespeare.”1 On
one of his preaching trips to London the learned Puritan John Owen heard him
preach. “When King Charles expressed wonder that a man of his learning could
bear to listen to the ‘prate’ of a tinker, he answered, that he would gladly
give all his learning for this tinker’s power.”2 God’s continued
use of Bunyan’s preaching and writing is a fact of history.
Robert and James Haldane (1760s-1850s)
With
John Knox long since dead and the Presbyterian Church long since established as
the Church of Scotland, Baptists began to grow in small groups but with various
forms of church order. The Haldane brothers became Baptist by conviction
regarding believer’s immersion and simple congregational church government.
Robert was the theologian and James, the pastor. In their desire to reach the
masses in central Scotland, especially Edinburgh, they established Baptist
Tabernacles for preaching. Some of these preaching centers were in a building
called the “Circus.” In his biography, son Alexander describes their services:
The Circus first, and then the Tabernacle, were crowded by thronging multitudes,
hanging upon the preacher’s lips, joining with earnestness in the prayers,
singing the praises of the Lord with their whole hearts, remaining during long
services without wearying, and retiring in solemn silence, afraid, as it were to
desecrate the place where the Lord himself was present, and that presence was
felt.3
Their
church, the Charlotte Baptist Chapel, is still a large gospel preaching church
and has been pastored by such preachers as Graham Scroggie and J. Sidlow Baxter
and Alister Begg.
D. L. Moody (1837-1899)
More
people are familiar with this American evangelist than almost any other American
religious figure. He is well-known for his humble beginnings, that he was
converted when he was just a shoe-shine boy, and that his mother was of New
England Puritan stock. Because of his zeal for soul-winning and direct style of
preaching, hundreds of thousands of souls are in heaven today. It is almost
strange to hear of Moody’s motives and manners being questioned by young men
desiring to preach the gospel.
Moody
met Ira Sankey in a most unique way.4 In 1870 Moody was in
Indianapolis to speak at a local church. At the same time, Sankey was in
Indianapolis to attend a pastors’ conference on evangelism which was being held
nightly at 7:00pm at the Academy of Music. Sankey wanted to hear Moody while he
was in town, so one night he went to that church service and the two met
for the first time. Moody asked Sankey to meet him downtown the next
afternoon. When they met, Moody placed a large box on the street corner and
asked Sankey to sing a song, to which Sankey obliged. Then Moody stepped on the
box and began to preach to the multitude of factory workers leaving the
factories. The crowd was so large that they had to move into the Academy of
Music. Thousands heard Sankey sing and Moody preach and many were converted. A
humorous anecdote is that Moody’s “congregation” was forced to leave before
7:00pm so the ministers’ meeting on how to evangelize could begin on time!
When
Moody and Sankey traveled in Scotland, the reception was initially cold until
the people attended the services, then “his simple and scriptural style of
preaching soon won them.”5 Sankey, of Scotch-Irish stock himself and
born in Edinburgh, was allowed to use an organ with which to sing. He wrote
his “Ninety and Nine” just for the
Scottish meetings. When I preached in a Scottish Baptist church just outside
Edinburgh in the summer of 2004, the congregation was asked for favorites to
sing. Immediately, a woman said, “Sing our song, the ‘Ninety
and Nine.’” It is no wonder that when Moody died, Lord Overtoun sent a
telegraph to Chicago: “All Scotland mourns.”
John A. Broadus (1827-1894) and A. T. Robertson (1863-1934)
Broadus and Robertson were the two greatest American Greek Scholars of their
day. They were early Southern Baptists and largely responsible for starting
Southern Baptist Seminary. Robertson became Broadus’ son-in-law when he married
his youngest daughter, Ella.
Because of their well-known scholarship, their evangelistic desires are often
over-looked. Both men carried on extensive preaching ministries in
churches, meetings and, in Broadus’ case, to the troops during the
Civil War. Stonewall Jackson himself invited Broadus to come and preach among
the troops in the evening camps. Broadus described himself as “a missionary in
General Lee’s army.” In those evenings, Robert E. Lee and other dignitaries
often attended. And, of those meetings, a few letters have survived:
Many wept during the sermons, and not at allusions to home, but to their sins,
and God’s great mercy. . . . Gilmer is dreadfully opposed to inviting men
forward to prayer, etc., though Lacy, Hoge, and most of the Presbyterians, do it
just like the rest of us. . . . The songs, simple old hymns, containing the very
marrow of the gospel, were sung ‘with the spirit and the understanding,’ and
stirred every heart. . . At the close of the service they came by the hundreds
to ask an interest in the prayers of God’s people, or profess a new-found faith
in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I doubt not that our beloved brother has greeted
on the other shore not a few who heard him that day or at other points in the
army.6
Robertson, largely responsible for organizing the London Baptist World Congress
and other such preaching meetings, was himself a motivating speaker. By his
own testimony, “the greatest single evangelistic service” of his life was in
the First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City. His biographer describes it:
The soul of the great scholar was manifestly filled and swept along by the
Spirit of God. He was telling the story of the life of Christ. At length he
left the pulpit. He walked the aisles. He lifted his face and voice to the
galleries. Back and forth he went pleading with his hearers to come to Christ.
The result was that about ninety young people and others gave their hearts and
lives to the Lord that day. . . . When asked by a friend what his text was, Dr.
Robertson replied simply: ‘I had no text. I told them the story of Jesus.’
That day was reward enough for a life-time’s labor.7
And So . . . .
I
would not propose for a minute that any of us would agree with everything any
of these preachers and singers did or said. I myself would have to separate
from many of their associations. I was prepared also to tell similar true
stories of Billy Sunday, C. H. Spurgeon, George Whitfield, and even John and
Charles Wesley. If one wants to find points of disagreement with these men, he
will not need to look far. Almost all of them were considered unpolished and
unorthodox in their day. But for young men today, sitting behind their computer
screens, to write them off as uneducated, shallow, and simply entertaining is
to shut themselves off from the history of the Gospel itself. While reading
these histories and biographies, I have often thought that these styles and
methods would not be unusual in today’s world at all. What would be unusual
is the great outpouring of the Holy Spirit’s power and moving upon sinners, and
the earnest, direct singing of the church’s (not the world’s and not the
priest’s) music. God help us to find our own path back to true gospel preaching
and singing.
Notes:
1. Thomas Armitage, A
History of the Baptists (Minneapolis: Klock & Klock, 1976) 476.
2. Ibid. This story appears in most Bunyan biographies.
3. Alexander Haldane, The
Lives of Robert & James Haldane (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust,
1990) 244.
4. A.P. Fitt, The Life of
D.L. Moody (Chicago: Moody Press, nd) 71.
5. Ibid
6. A.T. Robertson, The
Life and Letters of John A. Broadus (Philadelphia: American Baptist Pub.
Soc., 1910) 208-209.
7. Everett Gill, A.T.
Robertson, A Biography (New York: MacMillan, 1943) 104-105.
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