He did entreat us to look to Christ

Assuming you have heard of Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Junior, Charles Haddon Spurgeon is probably the most famous Baptist minister you have not heard of.  I read his ‘Lectures to my Students’ when I was at theological college, but his two volume (abridged) autobiography has remained closed despite staring at me from my dad’s shelves and then gathering dust on my own bookcase for the whole of my life.  I finally got round to reading them this year.

Spurgeon was small chap with a big voice.  He rose to prominence as a teenage preacher in Cambridgeshire in the late 1850s.   When he became the pastor of a down-at-heel London church, it quickly burst at the seams requiring it’s leaders to hire public venues like the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, capacity 10,000, which was still not big enough to accommodate everyone who wanted to hear him speak without amplification.  Eventually he settled down to ministry in the purpose built 5000 seat Metropolitan Tabernacle at Elephant and Castle.   He had a brilliant grasp of the bible and an ability to communicate its life-changing relevance with rustics and royals at the same time.  Spurgeon was equally praised and lambasted by the London and national press.  It’s hard to imagine a clergyman generating so many column inches in London in 2025 without committing some grossly immoral illegality. He developed a very thick skin.

Spurgeon’s Childcare charity, which stemmed from the orphanages and almshouses he founded and funded continues to this day.  It provided support to 30000 vulnerable children in 2024.  He also founded a pastors’ college in 1856, which by 1878 had trained over 500 students, who baptised 3600 people in 1878 and whose churches had grown by 33,000 members in the preceding 14 years.     Spurgeon’s College finally closed while I was reading volume 2, which feels like a crying shame to me.  I didn’t study there (ironically because last century I was not sure I was a Baptist or that I was called into Baptist ministry) but many friends and senior colleagues from whom I have learned were alumni.   Yesterday I visited Bristol Royal Infirmary and walked up two long flights of stairs to the oncology ward.   I always take the stairs on hospital visits – friends who studied at Spurgeons relayed to me years ago that this was good self-care practice for ministers.       

I knew Spurgeon was a staunch Calvinist & a controversial evangelical stickler among Baptists.  What I did not know was that he maintained good friendships with Christian leaders outside the denomination.  The autobiographies contain some fascinating anecdotes about encounters with William Booth, George Muller and other great Christian leaders of the Victorian era.  Spurgeon was willing to draw from a wide range of teachings and hymns; even those of folks who would not agree with his doctrinal strictures, or had gone on to become heretics in his view.  If the hymn or the teaching was sound, he would re-use it.  He was committed to sharing the good news about Jesus and making disciples and would walk with anyone headed in that direction as far as he could.  I also found it fascinating to read his own accounts of supernatural and specific revelation for individual hearers in his sermon preparation.  The kind of thing charismatics would call a ‘word of knowledge’ seemed to be reasonably commonplace in Spurgeon’s preaching.

The autobiography is not a recommended read – it’s a muddle of thematic and chronological reflections from friends and family (and selected foes) and from the pastor himself.  If you want a clear and concise account, you’d be better off with Arnold Dalimore’s 1985 paperback.  However, that fact that this rambling autobiography is still in print 125 years on from the publication of the (4 volume) original and 133 years after his death is a testament to Spurgeon’s ongoing influence and appeal.  He was a unique and gifted individual, but like Billy Graham, he preached a simple gospel message.  “When you see my coffin carried off to the silent grave, I should like every one of you, whether converted or not, to be constrained to say, ‘He did earnestly urge us, in plain and simple language, not to put off the consideration of eternal things.  He did entreat us to look to Christ’”