15. Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910)
Years ago, every Scottish father wanted a son in the ministry.
David Maclaren was no exception. A gifted lay preacher and dedicated Christian businessman in Glasgow, Maclaren did all he could to encourage his son. One day he took him to see the Reverend Charles Stovel, a pastor friend.
“Do you think the lad would make a minister?” Maclaren asked.
The pastor thought for a while, then replied, “Well, perhaps he might.”
It was a historic ecclesiastical understatement, for Alexander Maclaren became one of the greatest preachers of the nineteenth century—an era that gave us Charles H. Spurgeon, R. W. Dale, Joseph Parker, and Henry Liddon. His printed sermons are models of scholarly, yet practical, exposition. His monumental Expositions of Holy Scripture is an excellent homiletical tool that has continually proved its worth ever since the first volume on Genesis was published in 1904. “A man who reads one of Maclaren’s sermons,” said W. Robertson Nicoll, “must either take his outhne—or take another text.” One listener said, “This man is a prophet, and you must either listen and swallow, or flee.” Parker said there was “no greater preacher than Alexander Maclaren in the English-speaking pulpit.”
How did he do it? The answer is simple: through hard work, disciplined study, and concentration on the one important thing— preaching the Word. He turned down most speaking and social invitations. He stayed home, did his work, and built a great church. “I began my ministry,” he told a group of young preachers, “with the determination of concentrating all my available strength on the work, the proper work of the Christian ministry, the pulpit. . . . I have tried to make my ministry a ministry of exposition of Scripture.” Maclaren would weep if he saw how some pastors today rarely if ever preach; they prefer bringing in guest luminaries to disciplining themselves to study and preach the Word of God. Maclaren was known to devote sixty hours to the preparation of a single message.
He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1826. His father was recognized as a capable expositor of the Word; even though his business often took him away from home for long periods of time, David Maclaren had a godly influence on his son. (By the way, the family name was originally spelled “McLaren,” but during his student days Alexander changed it. “I do not like the Highland way of spelling the name,” he wrote to his family. You will see both spellings in homiletical literature.) After wresthng with the doctrine of election, young Alexander finally yielded to Christ and in 1840 was baptized into the fellowship of the Hope Street Baptist Church. (Some books, including the biography by Carlile, incorrectly give the year as 1838.)
The family moved to London, and Maclaren enrolled in Stepney College in 1842. He immediately proved to be a leading student. He loved Hebrew and Greek and graduated with honors in both. All his life, Maclaren read two chapters a day in the original, one from the Old Testament and one from the New. He did his sermonic work directly from the Hebrew and Greek.
In 1845 he was sent to preach at a run-down church in Southampton; the people were so impressed they called him to be their pastor. After graduation the following year he began his ministry at Portland Chapel, a church that had suffered greatly under an incompetent pastor who had plunged them into debt and given the church a bad reputation in the community. The building needed repair, and the church was not even sure it could pay the new pastor’s salary. “If the worst comes to worst,” Maclaren wrote home, “I shall at all events not have to reflect that I have killed a flourishing plant, but only assisted at the funeral of a withered one. . . . The difficulties will keep me busy and prevent my relapsing into idleness.”
Years later he told ministerial students:
I thank God that I was stuck down in a quiet, little, obscure place to begin my ministry; for that is what spoils half of you young fellows. You get pitchforked into prominent positions at once, and then fritter yourselves away in all manner of little engagements that you call duties . . . instead of stopping at home and reading your Bibles, and getting near to God. I thank God for the early years of struggle and obscurity.1
It is worth noting that Joseph Parker, G. Campbell Morgan, and Charles H. Spurgeon all began their ministries in small places, and during those “hidden years” laid the foundations for their future works.
The work at Portland Chapel prospered. Debts were paid, the building repaired, and the district awakened to the young preacher. His hard work and godly life were paying spiritual dividends. In 1856 Maclaren married his cousin, Marion Maclaren; he claimed later that his ministry would have been impossible without her. Two years later he was called to preach at Union Chapel, Manchester. He accepted and there began an amazing forty-five-year term that gave him the name “Maclaren of Manchester.”
He loved nature, and yet he was placed in the midst of an ugly manufacturing city. He was shy and retiring, yet surrounded by thousands of people. He was a student of the Word, and yet the cosmopolitan population that would attend his church would expect a “message for the times.” The demands would be heavy, and yet he must find time to study, meditate, and pray.
History repeated itself: the church grew and had to move into a new edifice that seated nearly two thousand. Maclaren had changed his location, but not his disciplines. He still refused most invitations and concentrated on studying the Word and feeding his people. He was not a visiting pastor, and he repeatedly challenged the adage that “a home-going pastor makes a church-going people.” He reminded ministerial students that the adage is true only if, when the people come to church, they hear something worth coming for.
Maclaren’s natural shyness led many to think he was proud and aloof. He rarely gave interviews to the press. His first was to Arthur Porritt, the noted Christian journalist, who tells about it in his charming book The Best I Remember:
Dr. Maclaren was rather an exasperating subject for an interviewer. He said the most interesting things, downright indiscreet things (which of course, make the best “copy”), but having said them he would purse his lips in a roguish way and say, “I’m thinking that that will not have to go into the interview; you’ll leave it out, won’t you?”2
One vacation he had his picture taken by a local photographer who did not know how famous his customer was. The photographer put the portrait in his window and was amazed at the number of people who wanted to purchase copies—but he had destroyed the negative! “That man might have told me he was famous,” he complained, “but he didn’t look like it!” Maclaren was simply obeying his own admonition: “To efface one’s self is one of a preacher’s first duties. The herald should be lost in his message.”
It was probably fear of becoming a popular idol that motivated him to refuse an invitation many wish he had accepted—the opportunity to deliver the Yale lectures on preaching. He was begged to accept, but to this too he said no.
Surprisingly, Maclaren was haunted all his life by a sense of failure. Often he suffered “stage fright” before a service, but in the pulpit he was perfectly controlled. He sometimes spoke of each Sunday’s demands as “a woe,” and he was certain that his sermon was not good enough and that the meeting would be a failure. After accepting an invitation to preach at some special occasion, he would fret about it and wonder if there were any way to escape. After the meeting he would lament that he had done poorly. Sometimes he became depressed, but then he would say, “Well, I can’t help it, I did my best, and there I leave it.”
Maclaren was a perfectionist and an idealist. Hence he was never satisfied with his own work. Perhaps that is how the Lord keeps gifted people humble, and Maclaren was both. Maybe there is a warning here for preachers: let God evaluate your ministry, for often when we think we are doing our poorest, we are really doing our best. Woe to the man who becomes satisfied with his ministry!
To Maclaren, preparing messages was hard work. He often said he could never prepare sermons while wearing slippers: he always wore his outdoor boots. Studying was work, and he took it seriously. When you read his sermons, you can quickly tell that they were not “manufactured” between conferences and committee meetings. Maclaren was an expositor; he let the Bible do its own preaching. He studied a passage in the original language, meditated on it, sought its divine truth, and then “opened it up” in such a way that we wonder why we didn’t see it before. No artificial divisions, no forced alliteration, nothing sensational; just divine truth presented so simply that any listener (or reader) could understand and apply it.
If you have not read Maclaren, start with The Best of Alexander Maclaren, edited by Gaius Glenn Atkins and published by Harper in 1949. Here are twenty of Maclaren’s choice messages, a homiletical “sampler” that will whet your appetite for more. Then get the three-volume series Sermons Preached in Manchester. Week-day Evening Addresses, The Secret of Power, A Year’s Ministry, The Wearied Christ, Triumphant Certainties, and The God of the Amen are other titles to watch for, and there are many more. His greatest literary achievement is the Expositions of Holy Scripture.
The standard biographies are: Alexander Maclaren, D.D.: The Man and His Message by John Charles Carlile; Dr. McLaren of Manchester: A Sketch by his cousin and sister-in-law, E. T. McLaren, who explains the spelling of the last name; and The Life of Alexander Maclaren by David Williamson. There is also an article on him in Princes of the Church by W. Robertson Nicoll.
What was the “secret” of Maclaren’s ministry? It could be summarized in two words: devotion and discipline. He was devoted to the Lord, and he walked with the Lord.
“Power for service is second,” he told the Baptist World Congress in 1905. “Power for holiness and character is first.” He said to a group of ministers, “The first, second, and third requisite for our work is personal godliness; without that, though I have the tongues of men and angels, I am harsh and discordant as sounding brass, monstrous and unmusical as a tinkling cymbal.”
He fed on God’s Word—not as a book for sermons, but as the source of his spiritual life and power. He meditated long hours and sought to understand the heart and mind of God. When he discovered a truth, he first applied it to himself and then sought the best way to share it with his people. But devotion without discipline can become shallow mysticism, and this pitfall Maclaren avoided. He scheduled his time and saw to it that none of it was wasted. He knew how to enjoy a vacation or an evening of relaxation, but even those times were opportunities for meditation and preparation. He did more by doing less. He knew how to say no. He did not feel obliged to attend every meeting, sit at every table, or grace every platform.
“This one thing I do” characterized his life as it ought to characterize our lives today. We may not have Maclaren’s gifts, but certainly we can seek to follow his example.