18. Joseph Parker (1830–1902)
If some homiletically inclined archangel were to permit me to select another time and place in which to live, I immediately would ask to be transported to Great Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria. What a paradise for preachers! On any given Lord’s Day you could hear Charles H. Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle or, at the other end of the spectrum, Canon Henry Liddon at St. Paul’s. Pick the right year and D. L. Moody might be in London or any one of a dozen other cities in Great Britain; F. B. Meyer would be leading people into a closer walk with Christ; William Booth would be thundering against the sins of the city; and Alexander Maclaren in Manchester, R. W. Dale in Birmingham, and Alexander Whyte in Edinburgh each would be opening the Word to crowded congregations. But if I were in London on a Lord’s Day and had already heard Spurgeon preach, I would hasten to the City Temple and there sit at the feet of Joseph Parker, whose congregations were second in size only to those of Spurgeon. That saintly friend of great preachers, W. Robertson Nicoll, said of Parker, “I have never heard him preach without saying, ‘I want to be a better man.’” The popular evangelist John McNeill called Parker “Matthew Henry up to date—the Glad-stone of the pulpit.” Without benefit of formal training, this son of a Northumbrian stonemason ministered the Word of God in power for more than fifty years, and his ministry continues today in the books that he has left us.
Joseph Parker was born on April 9, 1830, at Hexham-on-Tyne, Northumberland, and spent the first twenty-two years of his life in that town. While just a lad, he was led to faith in Christ by his father and his Sunday school teacher while the three of them were walking home from church one summer Sunday night. He soon began to teach a Sunday school class and to study the Bible diligently. In fact, he used to get up at 6:00 each morning in order to have time for reading, and he met with a local minister who tutored him in Greek. One June afternoon in 1848, he preached his first sermon. He stood at the sawpit on the village green and (as he described it) “broke like a sudden thunderstorm on that rural calm with the text: ‘It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment, than for you’ (Luke 10:14).” The assembled saints had already heard two speakers, but Parker was sure God wanted him to preach; so he borrowed a New Testament from the second speaker, opened his mouth, and preached! “In accompanying my friends to the place of meeting,” he wrote that same year, “the idea of preaching did not occur to my mind. I went out a hearer; I came back a preacher.”1
In 1851 he married Ann Nesbitt, and the next year he went to London as an assistant to John Campbell at Whitefield’s Tabernacle. Campbell recognized Parker’s gifts just as readily as he did his limitations and determined to assist the young man in his desire to preach the gospel. Nearly half a century later, Joseph Parker would lay the cornerstone for the new Whitefield’s Tabernacle, and he would be known as one of the preaching giants of his day.
He remained at the tabernacle until November 8, 1853, when he became the pastor of the Banbury Congregational Church in Oxfordshire. The place was run down, but before long it was throbbing with activity and a new and larger sanctuary had to be built. During his five years at Banbury, Parker took courses at the University College in London and also managed to publish four books that met with moderate success. He also had seven invitations to other churches, none of which he accepted. “All the Banbury days were happy so far as they could be made happy by friendship and love and sympathy,” he wrote in A Preacher’s Life. “A very happy life is the life of a country pastor.”
But he was not to remain a country pastor. In July 1858, he accepted a call to the Cavendish Street Congregational Church in Manchester. “I was never more coldly received in my life,” he said, describing the first Sunday he preached as a guest minister. He preached two Sundays and then was asked to preach a third Sunday inasmuch as the next man, Samuel Martin of Westminister Chapel, had been forced to cancel. It was a wealthy church, and the coldness of the people in “their Gothic sepulcher” irritated Parker. “Every man seemed to be looking at me over the top of a money-bag!” But the Lord conquered, and Parker accepted the call. That same year Alexander Maclaren came to the Union Baptist Chapel in Manchester, and the two men were to become close friends. In 1862, Parker was granted an honorary doctor of divinity degree by the University of Chicago. He published four more books during his eleven years in Manchester and shared in the wider work of the Congregational Union.
“It never entered my mind that I could leave Manchester,” he wrote. “What could any man desire more than some two thousand regular hearers, one of the finest buildings in Nonconformity, and one of the greatest cities in the country!” But on October 22, 1867, a deputation from the Poultry Chapel in London met with Parker and asked him to come and rescue their work. The church had an illustrious past. It had been founded in 1640 by that eminent divine Thomas Goodwin, meeting first in Anchor-Lane, Thames Street. It moved four times in the next two centuries, finally setthng at Poultry in Cheapside. But the area was changing, and the ministry had to find both a new location and a new lease on life.
The church issued a formal call to Parker on November 7, 1867, and on March 11, 1868, he declined the call. But they renewed the call on June 25, and Parker gave it serious consideration. The Poultry Chapel had been without a pastor for fifteen months, and the situation was desperate. Parker was very happy with his Manchester ministry and had no earthly reason to make a change. But there was a divine reason: the Head of the church wanted him to minister in London. On September 19, 1869, Joseph Parker began thirty-three phenomenal years as pastor of the City Temple. He preached for three years in the old Poultry Chapel, then sold it and built a new auditorium at the Holborn Viaduct in the City of London (London consists of twenty-eight boroughs, plus the City of London where the Lord Mayor and his council function). On May 19, 1874, the new City Temple was opened with Lindsay Alexander of Edinburgh bringing the message from John 1:16. From that pulpit Parker preached three times a week: twice on Sundays and at noon every Thursday. His Sunday congregations filled the auditorium, which seated three thousand; he would address a thousand or more at the noonday service.
What kind of a man was Joseph Parker? His close friend W. Robertson Nicoll warns us: “To estimate aright a personality so great, so complex, and so many-sided as that of Dr. Parker, is a task so difficult that I shrink from attempting it.”2 He then proceeds to give us the finest study on Parker that you will find anywhere!
Some called Parker an egotist. The famous theologian P. T. Forsythe remarked, “At one time I thought Dr. Parker was a good man touched with egotism; I have come to believe that he is an egotist touched with goodness.” In his chapter on Parker in The Best I Remember, Arthur Porritt commented: “The judgment was harsh; but Dr. Parker always drew the lightning. Men either believed in him implicitly or voted him a poseur and a charlatan.”3
To begin with, his was a strong personality. He was a law unto himself, and nobody inside or outside his church dared to annul that law. After the stewards took the collection, they handed it over to him. He managed all the financial affairs of the church— and gave an accounting to nobody. When they were designing his new church, the architects asked him what style of building he wanted, and he replied: “Any style! But build me such a church that when Queen Victoria drives into the city she will say, ‘Why, what place is that?’—and she will be told, ‘That is where Joseph Parker preaches!’”
An egotist? Perhaps not. A dramatist? In every fiber of his being! J. D. Jones put it this way in his delightful autobiography, Three Score Years and Ten: “He was boisterous, sometimes perhaps bombastic, but he had drama, he had passion, he had genius, he had great flashes of inspiration which made other preachers seem dull in comparison. When Parker died our greatest preacher passed. We never shall see his like again.”4
His physical appearance immediately attracted attention. “His massive figure, and his leonine head, with its shaggy locks, would have attracted attention anywhere,” Alexander Gammie wrote in Preachers I Have Heard. “The gleaming eyes, the sweeping gestures, the constantly changing inflection of his wonderful voice, at one moment like a roar of thunder and the next soft as a whisper, held any audience spellbound. And there was always the element of the unexpected in what he said and how he said it.”5
Yet beneath Parker’s rough exterior and dramatic pose was a feeling of inferiority that tortured him. He was not academically trained; he was a shy man who really had few close friends; he had a constant fear that the weather would rob him of his huge congregations; he feared criticism; he lived in perpetual fear that he would say or do something wrong. He did not believe that people really loved him or appreciated his ministry, and he had to be told over and over again that his congregation’s affections for him were real and lasting.
He lived for his wife, his preaching, and his writing; nothing else really mattered. Perhaps Parker himself has given us the best picture of the man. When a smaller congregation invited him to become their pastor, he replied: “An eagle does not roost in a sparrow’s nest!” That is what he was—an ecclesiastical eagle, living in solitude in the heights, surveying God’s revelation, and descending to deliver his oracles. But is there anything wrong with eagles?
In 1889, A. C. Dixon was in London for the International Sunday School Convention, and he visited the notable churches. He sent this impression back home:
Joseph Parker, at the City Temple, is said by some to be the personification of pomposity. He did not so impress us. He has a stately manner, but his thoughts are stately. Both of the sermons we heard were thoroughly evangelical, and Christ was held forth with a pathos and a power that melted many hearts. We thanked God for Joseph Parker. The one criticism that we could make is that he puts too much condensed thought into one sermon. It made my head ache to follow him for one hour.6
That criticism is not heard much today!
Joseph Parker was first and foremost a preacher, and he held the highest possible views of preaching. One Sunday evening, September 28, 1884, Parker announced to his congregation that he was planning to preach straight through the Bible and have the sermons stenographically recorded and then published in a twenty-five volume set to be called The People’s Bible (not The Speaker’s Bible, as stated in 20 Centuries of Great Preaching;7 The Speaker’s Bible was edited by James and Edward Hastings). For the next seven years, three times a week, he preached in this manner, with his publishers regularly issuing new volumes of the sermons. In May 1895, Parker wrote the final paragraphs for volume 25, completing what he considered to be his lifework. This set ought to be in the library of every serious preacher of the Word. It has been reprinted by Baker Books under the title Preaching Through the Bible.
This is a remarkable series of sermons. His stenographer—and one of his biographers—Albert Dawson tells us that Parker did not like to read what he had preached, so it was left to his secretary to read the proofs. The prayers and sermons in The People’s Bible are exactly what Parker spoke from his pulpit. “The language is the language of the moment,” he wrote in that final volume.8 “Every man can best follow his own method. I have followed mine.” You will find as much spiritual food in Parker’s prayers as in his sermons, so be sure to read them. In fact, reading a prayer daily, or at the beginning of each Lord’s Day, might be a profitable exercise for the pastor.
How was he able to accomplish so much? He tells us in a chapter entitled “Retrospective” in Studies in Texts: “I have lived for my work. That is all. If I had talked all the week, I could not have preached on Sunday. That is all. If I had attended committee meetings, immersed myself in politics and undertaken the general care of the Empire, my strength would have been consumed. That is all. Mystery there is none. I have made my preaching work my delight, the very festival of my soul. That is all. Young brother, go thou and do likewise, and God bless thee!”9 Parker was in his study every morning at 7:30. He would read the newspapers and answer correspondence and then devote himself to his studies or to writing. He would then take a long walk, usually on Hampstead Heath, during which he meditated on his texts, often talking to himself. He would put a few notes on paper and preach from that outhne. Early in his ministry he had written his sermons in full, but he later abandoned that practice. “When I stand up to preach,” he confessed, “I hardly ever know the sentence I am going to utter. The subject itself I endeavor to know well.”
His concern for young pastors led him to establish The Institute of Homiletics, which met Monday mornings at the City Temple, with Parker presiding. Some of his Institute addresses, and evaluations of sermons, are found in the helpful set Studies in Texts, originally published in six volumes but reissued by Baker Books in three volumes. While not as valuable as The People’s Bible, the set is still a treasury of homiletical gems that the hardworking preacher can mine for himself. Most of Parker’s other books (he wrote at least forty) have passed from the scene; but no matter. The valuable books he left behind will establish him as one of history’s greatest preachers.
As he grew older, Parker was concerned about the future of the City Temple. After all, “what can the man do that cometh after the king?” (Eccles. 2:12). It seems that Parker himself was confused: he told J. H. Jowett that he wanted him to be his successor, and apparently the City Temple officers agreed with this; but Parker also laid hands on R. J. Campbell, the popular pastor of Union Church in Brighton. Parker knew Campbell and felt the young man would carry on the kind of ministry to which Parker had given his life. But Parker was wrong.
Parker died on November 28, 1902, and Campbell was called. For the first two years Campbell’s ministry was exciting and successful; but then Campbell began preaching his “new theology,” and the bullets began to fly. (One theologian compared Campbell’s “new theology” to a bad photograph—under-developed and over-exposed!) Along with his liberal views of the Bible, Campbell had socialistic convictions that did not impress his congregation, and ultimately he had to leave the church. In 1916 he was ordained in the Church of England, an act that would have stunned Parker. For when Parker had stood in the pulpit reading his wife’s burial certificate, he burst into tears when he got to the part about her being buried in “unconsecrated ground.” Parker had said during his ministry, “Should a time ever come when any message other than the pure gospel of Christ should go forth from this pulpit, let ‘Ichabod’ be written across the portals!” During Campbell’s ministry, some brave soul did actually paint “Ichabod” in living color against the grey stone facade of the church!
“In my judgment,” wrote Parker seven years before he died, “the only preaching that can do profound and lasting good must be biblical. . . . Any pulpit that founds itself on personal invention, cleverness, ingenuity, audacity or affected originality will most surely cover itself with humiliation and pass into merited oblivion.” In his autobiography, A Preacher’s Life, he wrote, “I believe in the permanence of the institution of preaching.” For this reason, today’s preachers would do well to read Joseph Parker and get acquainted with preaching that not only meets the needs of the times, but stands above the times because it is founded on the Word of God.