27. F. B. Meyer (1847–1929)
When Jack Johnson defeated James Jeffries for the 1911 world heavyweight championship, negotiations were begun to pit Johnson against the British champion, Bombardier Wells. But a well-known British Baptist preacher stepped into the ring and opposed the contest. So effectively did he protest from pulpit and platform, as well as in the press, that the fight was called off. The sporting public was enraged. F. B. Meyer hardly seemed the type to get involved in controversy. A harmless mystic with a saintly face, he was popular throughout the English-speaking world as a devotional preacher. Even today his devotional books and biblical biographies are on almost every pastor’s shelves.
But Frederick Brotherton Meyer was a militant mystic. He was, as Carl Sandburg described Abraham Lincoln, “velvet steel.” His gentleness was not weakness, but power under control. Once he determined that something was wrong, he fought it—even if he had to fight alone. Attacked in one church because of his strong evangelistic ministry, he resigned and built a church of his own. Hindered in his program of rehabilitating ex-convicts, he organized his own business and put the men on his payroll. There was no stopping F. B. Meyer.
Nothing in Meyer’s birth hinted that a spiritual soldier had come on the scene. In fact, he was born with the coveted silver spoon in his mouth. As they said in that Victorian era, the family had “good connections.” He was born on April 8, 1847, at Lavender Terrace, Wandsworth Road, London (even the address seems to glitter). Home life in Brighton was happy and comfortable, but also spiritual. His mother taught the children the Bible, and his father set the example as a dedicated Christian businessman. On Sunday mornings they attended the Bloomsbury Chapel, and in the evenings they held family services at home.
When Meyer was fifteen, business reverses forced the family to leave their lovely home in Brighton and return to London. His father tried to settle all the accounts honestly, which left little for the family. Meyer’s silver spoon was gone, but not his sterling Christian character. In later years Meyer gave thanks for the experience because it helped him discover the things that mattered most. In his itinerant ministry he was always sensitive about large offerings and honoraria. More than once he returned love offerings he thought were too large.
From his earliest years, Meyer felt called to the ministry. He had even preached during family devotions. When he was sixteen he told his father his decision to enter the ministry, and both went to see William Brock, pastor of Bloomsbury Chapel. The great preacher asked young Meyer to preach a trial sermon for him—hardly easy for a teenager. But he passed the test.
At this critical point Brock counseled Meyer to spend at least two years working in a London business office before entering college. So Meyer joined the tea firm of Allan Murray, working there for two years. He saw city life firsthand. He learned to keep accurate records, make sensible decisions, plan his day well, and use his time efficiently. Later he counseled theological students to get business experience. “By all means let them graduate in the college of city life,” he would say, “and study attentively the great books of human nature. It is impossible to preach to young men unless you know young men, and possess some knowledge of their peril and temptation.” Not surprisingly, Meyer’s Saturday afternoon meetings for young men were successful. In all his churches he attracted men from every level of life. The seed sown during those two years in the tea business bore fruit.
Meyer graduated from Regent’s Park College in 1869. While a student, he ministered for about a year at Duke Street Baptist Chapel, Richmond, Surrey, a church made famous in recent years by the ministries of Alan Redpath and Stephen Olford. Upon graduation he was appointed assistant to Charles M. Birrell at the Pembroke Baptist Chapel, Liverpool. A godly scholar, Birrell unconsciously overpowered his young assistant, who imitated him almost to the point of idolatry. “In preparing my sermons and addresses,” wrote Meyer, “I naturally followed the lines of the senior minister. This was a mistake, for Birrell’s habit was to write out and memorize. Such a method was totally unsuitable for me.”
Meyer was married in 1871. The next year he and his wife moved to York, where he pastored Priory Street Baptist Chapel. This move proved to be the turning point in his life and ministry, for two years later Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey ministered at Meyer’s chapel. Moody had a gift for “finding” men—and Meyer was one of his greatest discoveries.
The other side of the coin is this: humanly speaking, the Moody-Sankey ministry in Britain received a boost from Meyer. The meetings at the York Independent Chapel had not begun too successfully, and the noon prayer meeting at the Cooney Street “Y” were limping along. At one of the prayer meetings Meyer heard Moody preach on the Holy Spirit. So convicted was the young pastor that he spent the next two days wresthng with God. He returned to the prayer meeting on Saturday and testified that God had met him and given victory. For two years he had preached without any special blessing. “I was just beating the air,” he confessed. But now he had experienced a new touch from God. In spite of ministerial opposition, Meyer courageously opened his chapel to Moody and Sankey. For the first time in Meyer’s ministry there, he saw the place filled. People were converted; the inquiry rooms were busy. Meyer learned some of his greatest spiritual lessons from Moody.
Moody taught this “proper” Baptist minister to be himself and not imitate others. “What an inspiration when this great and noble soul first broke into my life!” wrote Meyer. “I was a young pastor then . . . and bound rather rigidly by the chains of conventionalism. Such had been my training, and such might have been my career. But here was a new ideal! Mr. Moody was absolutely unconventional and natural.”
Moody also taught Meyer the value of winning souls by every legitimate means. Those few days in York with Moody lit a fire in Meyer’s soul. He once told Moody, “I have not preached one sermon, since God gave me that anointing, that there have not been conversions.”
But Moody taught Meyer a third lesson: ministry is much larger than one church or denomination. In one of his autobiographical books, The Bells of Is, Meyer wrote: “I caught a glimpse of a wider, larger life, in which mere denominationalism could have no place, and in which there was but one standard by which to measure men, namely their devotion to, and knowledge of, the Son of God.”1 Meyer’s church became the base of his ministry, not its sphere.
Meyer accepted a call from the Victoria Road Baptist Church, Leicester, in 1874. This was a typical “wealthy and influential church,” and the young pastor gave himself sacrificially to his ministry. Had he still been a “proper pastor,” the church would have been happy. But his concern for the lost and his willingness to pioneer new trails irked the comfortable officers. The tension climaxed when a wealthy deacon burst in one Sunday evening and told the pastor: “We cannot have this sort of thing here. This is not a gospel shop!” A few years before, Meyer would have apologized and resumed business as usual. But he had been with Moody and had experienced the blessing of serving God in the Spirit, letting the wind blow where it would. Meyer promptly resigned the church and planned to leave Leicester. No doubt fault lay on both sides: Meyer’s enthusiasm had not yet caught fire in the congregation, and the comfortable officers felt threatened by his zeal.
When word got out that Meyer had resigned from Victoria Road, several other churches immediately issued him calls. Meyer wrote a letter of acceptance to the Glossop Road Church, Sheffield. On his way to mail the letter, he providentially met Arthur Rust (brother-in-law of W. Y. Fullerton, the evangelist who would later assist Charles H. Spurgeon). Meyer told Rust about the letter he was mailing, and Rust told Meyer about a group of earnest Christians in Leicester who wanted him to form a new church; fifteen young merchants would guarantee his salary. Meyer agreed, and the eventual result was the church at Melbourne Hall. At first the group met in one of the museum halls. (One lady arrived early each Lord’s Day to cover the statues and pictures!) In five months they were strong enough to organize into a church. On July 2, 1881, they held their first service in their own building, Melbourne Hall. The building was a combination local church, rescue mission, social center, Sunday school, and Bible institute.
At Melbourne Hall, Meyer practiced another lesson learned from Moody: organize your work and enlist the help of new converts. Before long, Meyer was ministering to a congregation of two thousand. They in turn were ministering to thousands outside the church. The congregation did not pay their pastor to do the work; they worked with him and relieved him of routine matters. They were willing for him to “leave the ninety-and-nine” and search for that one lost sheep.
The ministry at Melbourne Hall can be described by one word: miracles. Meyer carried on a great work among prisoners, a work that resulted from a young girl’s request of him: “My father is going to be released from jail tomorrow morning, and I’m afraid he will get into bad company. Could you meet him at the gate and try to keep him from his bad companions?” The successful pastor of a new church certainly did not need one more task. But how could he say no? He promised to be at the gate the next morning. When he arrived, he discovered that the prisoner had been transferred to another jail. Instead of hurrying home, Meyer waited across the street and watched the newly released prisoners. Almost to a man they headed for a nearby public house. “Is this what goes on here most mornings?” he asked some men lounging in the street.
“Yes, sir, mostly,” they replied.
“But if a man comes out at yonder jail door and goes into the door of the public house,” Meyer protested, “he appears to me to come out of the jail by the front door and go into it again by the back one! For I reckon that the public house is the back door to the jail.”
“Well, what’s a chap to do?” the men argued. “There’s nowhere else for him to go.”
Without replying, Meyer walked across the street to the jail and asked to see the governor, Miles Walker. Walker received him courteously, listened to his plea, and agreed to cooperate in every way. “All I want to do,” Meyer explained, “is meet these men and take them to a nearby coffee-house for some decent food and a word of encouragement.”
Little did Meyer know that this ministry would result in some of his greatest burdens, as well as his greatest blessings. In his delightful The Bells of Is, Meyer admitted that his second thoughts about the new ministry made him miserable.
I fear that I more than once repented of the promise I had given the Governor, and wished that I have never undertaken the cause of the discharged jail-birds. . . . Altogether, between my fear of what the discharged prisoners would do to me, and what my own people and towns-folk would think of me, I had an uncomfortable time of it. . . . I had not then learned what it is to be the slave of Jesus Christ—a condition of mind in which one becomes blessedly oblivious to what men may say or do, so long as the light of His approval shines warm and fresh upon the heart.2
That first morning the entire group of men agreed to go to breakfast with him. During his years at Melbourne Hall, Meyer gave breakfast to nearly five thousand men. Many were converted; some, in spite of the hard work of both pastor and people, fell back into their old ways. The ministry continued even after Meyer left. Since many of the men could not find work, Meyer organized a window-washing brigade. Then he got into the wood-cutting business. He established a savings bank for the men, and even founded Provident House to give them a place to live while getting back on their feet. The citizens of Leicester were never sure what the creative pastor of Melbourne Hall would think of next. They saw signs announcing “F. B. Meyer— Firewood Merchant” and “F. B. Meyer—Window-Washing.”
Meyer even bought a man a glass of ale to get him to stop drinking. “My friend, what do you say to signing the pledge this morning?” Meyer asked the former prisoner. “You know as well as I do that you have been falling under the power of drink.” The man hesitated, then explained he had vowed to drink a pint of ale when he got out of jail. He wanted to keep his vow. Meyer explained that the vow was a bad one, but the man insisted on a pint of ale. “If you have that pint of ale,” Meyer asked, “will you give me your solemn word and honor that you will sign the pledge immediately?” The man agreed, so Meyer went to the nearest public house to purchase the ale. The man greedily took a large swallow, then two more. “This is the miserablest pint of ale that I ever drank!” he exclaimed, putting down the mug. “Where is the card, sir? I may as well sign it as drink any more.” He gave up alcohol and later was converted.
Meyer became pastor of Regent’s Park Chapel in London early in 1888. The church was at low ebb when he arrived, but before long it was flooded with activity. Though this was one of London’s select congregations, Meyer was not happy serving a denominational church and limiting his sphere of ministry. He longed to reach the lost.
After four years Meyer resigned and started fifteen years of ministry at Christ Church, Westminster Bridge Road, London, which had been founded in 1873 by Rowland Hill. Nominally Anglican in its association, congregational in government, and operated on nondenominational lines, it was ideal for a man like Meyer. “I never was an ardent denominationalist,” Meyer confessed. But he did ask the trustees of Christ Church, which required no one form of baptism for membership, to install a baptistry.
Attendance averaged about one hundred when Meyer began, but within two years the 2,300-seat auditorium was filled. He organized fellowships for women, children, youth, and men. The Men’s Brotherhood became a great power in Christ Church. “No leader of men should ever ask another to do what he is not prepared to do himself,” Meyer affirmed. “On the other hand, never do work yourself that you can get another to do. To set one soul at work is to open stores of blessedness.”
Meyer expressed his view of the local church:
It is urgently needful that the Christian people of our charge should come to understand that they are not a company of invalids, to be wheeled about, or fed by hand, cosseted, nursed, and comforted, the minister being head-physician and nurse—but a garrison in an enemy’s country, every soul of which should have some post of duty, at which he should be prepared to make any sacrifice rather than quit it.3
Anyone pastoring a city church ought to read Meyer’s book Reveries and Realities, in which he gave some practical principles for a successful city ministry.
Meyer resigned Christ Church in 1907 for a two-year world tour, then returned to Regent’s Park Chapel. He resigned that work in 1915 and went back to Christ Church for five years. His remaining years were spent in an itinerant ministry. During his lifetime he made twelve trips to the United States and visited many other countries as well.
Meyer always claimed that he was “an ordinary man” and that God could do as much through anyone who has yielded to him. Perhaps so, but Meyer was unique. His close friend Fullerton listed seven factors that contributed to Meyer’s success: (1) Puritan heredity and training; (2) the spiritual influence of Birrell, Meyer’s senior minister in Liverpool; (3) an enthusiasm for the whole church without “artificial and narrow boundaries”; (4) a willingness to be himself and not copy others; (5) a practical mysticism, “that sense of the Unseen”; (6) a democratic sympathy that enabled him to touch people in every level of life; and (7) a fervent spiritual idealism, “devotion to great aims.”4
He may have been a mystic, but Meyer worked hard and never wasted time. His ability to concentrate on one task at a time enabled him to work his way through a long agenda without being distracted. Constantly on the go, he learned to use his hours of railway travel productively. “If he had a long journey before him,” one friend wrote, “he would settle himself in his corner of the railway carriage with a sigh of relief, open his dispatch case (which was fitted up as a sort of stationery cabinet), and set to work in supreme contentment on some abstruse article, quite oblivious of his surroundings.” He could also go to sleep almost at will and awaken himself at just the right time. “The Lord always wakes me up just when I ask Him,” Meyer once told a friend. To prove his point, he said he would take a nap for twenty minutes. He awoke on time, fresh and ready for the evening’s meeting.
In some respects Meyer had so much to do he had to keep going. Once he was browsing through W. Robertson Nicoll’s huge library, complaining because he did not have enough leisure to examine the books as he should. “Now you know, Meyer,” Nicoll replied, “you would not be here an hour before you would be asking for Bradshaw’s Railway Guide!”
Meyer said he had spent “many a holy hour . . . while rushing through the country at express speed” and had “felt the railway carriage to be the house of God and the gate of heaven.”
F. B. Meyer is known primarily as a devotional preacher and writer. Besides his two autobiographical volumes, he wrote ten books on great men of the Old Testament and three on those of the New Testament.5 He wrote expositions on such books as Exodus, Isaiah, John, Hebrews, and 1 Peter, and on such passages as the Sermon on the Mount. His more than twenty books of devotional messages still challenge believers who hunger for a deeper life. Light on Life’s Duties and Back to Bethel have always been favorites of mine, perhaps because they were put into my hands shortly after my conversion. Our Daily Homily is a priceless collection of expositions drawn from every chapter in the Bible, useful as both a daily devotional guide and a “pump primer” for the preacher.
Meyer majored in Bible exposition. He explained his approach in Expository Preaching. His early mentor, Birrell, pointed him in that direction. “That was quite a good sermon you gave this evening,” Birrell told Meyer as they walked home after the service, “but it was a topical sermon, and if you are going to make topical sermons your model, you will presently come to the end of your topics, and where will you be then? I advise you to do as I have done for the last thirty years—become an expositor of Scripture. You will always retain your freshness and will build up a strong and healthy church.” Meyer’s method was not unlike that of G. Campbell Morgan: he read a Bible book repeatedly until he grasped its central message, then divided the book into sections and related them to that central truth. In each section he located what he called a “pivot text.”
“Meyer preaches,” said Spurgeon, “as a man who has seen God face to face.” A printed sermon by Meyer transformed the ministry of J. Wilbur Chapman, who confessed, “I owe more to this man [Meyer] than to anyone in the world.”
Meyer preached his last sermon on February 10, 1929, in Wesley Chapel, City Road, London. Three days later he entered a nursing home where, in spite of loving care, his health failed rapidly. “Read me something from the Bible,” he whispered the day before he died, “something brave and triumphant!” He died on March 28.
The next time you read one of Meyer’s more than fifty books, remember him as much more than a devotional writer. He was an evangelist with a burden for the city; a pastor who loved the whole church; a crusader who hated social evils; a spiritual man who guided many believers into a closer fellowship with Christ; an ambassador whose calling carried him far beyond his own local church and denomination. Joseph Parker put it perfectly: “He never leaves me without the impression that I have been face to face with a man of God.”