37. John Henry Jowett (1864–1923)
37
John Henry Jowett
1864–1923
If someone should erect a Sunday school teachers’ hall of fame, he must enshrine J. W. T. Dewhirst of Halifax, Yorkshire. Dewhirst said to one of his pupils, “I had always hoped that you would go into the ministry.” The pupil did, and he became “the greatest preacher in the English-speaking world.” His name was John Henry Jowett.
Born on August 25, 1864, into a middle-class Christian home, Jowett planned to be a lawyer and perhaps enter politics. But two people strongly influenced him to enter the ministry: his mother and his pastor, Enoch Mellor. “At my mother’s knee,” he often said, “I gained my sweetest inspirations.”
Mellor had come to the Square Road Congregational Church, Halifax, in 1847. The membership grew so large that they had to erect a new building. From 1861 to 1867 Mellor ministered in Glasgow. But in 1867 he returned to Halifax and served another fourteen years. During that second term, young Jowett came under his godly influence. The lad never met the pastor personally, but he nevertheless idolized him and listened attentively to his preaching. In later years Jowett modeled his own preaching after that of his boyhood pastor. “He was the finest platform orator it was ever my fortune to hear,” he admitted. “Square Church was to me a very fountain of life, and I owe to its spiritual training more than I can ever express.”
Jowett concentrated on his education from 1882 to 1889. He attended Airedale College, of which A. M. Fairbairn was principal, and also Edinburgh University. At that time the city of Edinburgh was enjoying the ministries of some of the great preachers—Alexander Whyte, George Matheson, and Henry Drummond, to name but a few. What a place for study and for preaching!
Jowett’s first church was St. James’s Congregational at Newcastle-on-Tyne. He began his ministry in October 1889 and was ordained on November 19. The building seated more than a thousand. The young preacher responded to this challenge with faith and courage. During his six-year ministry there, he always preached to large crowds. In fact Jowett drew crowds throughout his lifetime. The great R. W. Dale died on March 13, 1895, leaving vacant the influential pulpit of Carr’s Lane Church, Birmingham. The church officers turned immediately to John Henry Jowett, and on October 6, 1895, he began his ministry there. Many had predicted that Carr’s Lane would die with Dale, but their predictions proved false. Not only did Jowett help save the church, but the church helped save Jowett.
The young pastor, overwhelmed by his new responsibilities, read everything Dale had written. Dale, a massive intellect, preached Bible doctrine with clarity and passion. His books are still worth reading: The Atonement, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels, Christian Doctrine, and The Jewish Temple and the Church, to name several. As Jowett assimilated these books, he confronted the great themes and texts of the Bible. In his first sermon as pastor of Carr’s Lane Church, Jowett said: “This pulpit has never been belittled by the petty treatment of small and vulgar themes.” He determined to preach the great truths of the Word (what he liked to call “the fat texts”). This determination motivated his ministry for the rest of his life. “The grace of God” became his central theme.
His church officers made it easy for their new pastor to preach well. They relieved him of the many details of church administration that can rob a pastor of precious hours needed for study and meditation. They were rewarded, for the church prospered in every way. A. T. Pierson once called Carr’s Lane Church “the greatest church in the world.” During his ministry at Carr’s Lane, Jowett was elected chairman of the Congregational Union and president of the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches. He was quite young, but he wore the honors with distinction. He received as many as thirty invitations a day to preach. But Jowett kept his life in balance and focused on building the church.
It was inevitable that calls would come from other churches. Late in 1909, Jowett received a call from the prestigious Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. He graciously refused, but they issued a second call in June 1910. Again he said no, but when the call was repeated at the end of the year, he felt led to accept, saying, “The scale of decision . . . turned by a hair.”
On April 2, 1911, Jowett opened his ministry in New York City. The American press made a great deal out of his arrival, headlining him as “the greatest preacher in the world!” Retiring by nature, Jowett despised anything that smacked of promotion; he never quite adjusted to the “American system of ballyhoo.” His preaching attracted great crowds, not only “up-and-outers” (for which Fifth Avenue was famous), but also common people who heard the gospel gladly. New York City was desperately in need of solid biblical preaching. “What a time this is for the preacher,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “Congregations tense, strained, burdened, wanting some glimpse of spiritual things amid this riot of material things, and yearning for a glimpse of the things which abide in all the fierce rush of things which are transient.”
The advent of the war created new problems for the Jowetts, who longed to be in England but knew they had been called to New York. One good byproduct of Jowett’s sojourn was the opportunity to give the Yale lectures on preaching in April 1912. If you had to name the six best volumes in this valuable series, surely you would include Jowett’s The Preacher: His Life and Work.
The lecturer himself did not enjoy the experience. “I am here for ten days delivering the Yale lectures on preaching,” he wrote to a friend. “The lectures have been a nightmare to me, and I am glad I am getting rid of them this week!” The theme of his seven lectures is summarized in one of Jowett’s favorite sayings: “Preaching that costs nothing accomplishes nothing.” “If they will only learn one thing,” he wrote in a letter, “that preaching is not easy and that it costs blood, and if they will only learn another thing—that no one can attend to the deep wants of a church if he is running all over the country, I shall have discharged a very real service.” I try to reread Jowett’s lectures annually, if only to catch his passion for preaching. Some books on preaching and pastoral work almost make you want to turn in your ordination certificate—this is not one of them. “I love my calling,” he said on the first page. “I have a glowing delight in its service. . . . I have had but one passion, and I have lived for it—the absorbingly arduous yet glorious work of proclaiming the grace and love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”1 This book gives good counsel not only on sermon preparation, but also on the making of the minister himself and the conducting of public worship. Jowett was known as much for his public prayers as for his sermons. That friend and student of great preaching, W. Robertson Nicoll, after visiting Carr’s Lane when Jowett was minister there, wrote: “The great simplicity, reality, sympathy, and tenderness of the prayers moved one strangely.” Jowett’s public worship, including the prayers, grew out of his private devotional life. “We cannot be strong leaders of intercession unless we have a deep and growing acquaintance with the secret ways of the soul,” Jowett told the Yale students. He never considered the exercises before the sermon as “mere preliminaries.” The hymns, the prayers, and even the offering were all part of worship and needed to be prepared with spiritual discernment. “If men are unmoved by our prayers,” he said, “they are not likely to be profoundly stirred by our preaching.”
He gave equal emphasis to the public reading of the Word of God. “It is a mighty experience when a lesson is so read that it becomes the sermon,” he stated, “and the living Word grips without an exposition!” It was said of G. Campbell Morgan that you learned more from his reading of the Word than from anyone else’s preaching of the Word. Jowett was almost as skilled as Morgan in this area.
If Jowett worshiped in some of our churches today, he would behold careless “preliminaries” hastily thrown together; he would hear prayers that sound tragically the same week after week; he would listen to the inspired Word of God being read without much feeling or understanding. He would miss that vital element he called “the strong gracious presence of reverence and order.” He would be appalled by seeing preachers threatened by “the peril of ostentatious display.” He warned his Yale listeners: “We never reach the innermost room in any man’s soul by the expediencies of the showman or the buffoon. The way of irreverence will never lead to the Holy Place.”
While ministering in New York, Jowett received calls to return to England. He was invited to succeed Whyte in Edinburgh and J. D. Jones in Bournemouth. Both calls he rejected. But on February 26, 1917, he received a call to succeed Morgan at Westminster Chapel, London; this call he accepted. He asked the church to wait one year while he fulfilled his commitments in America. On April 14, 1918, he said farewell to his church. On May 19 he preached his first sermon as pastor of Westminster Chapel. The next years should have been the most fruitful in his ministry, but Jowett was dying and did not realize it. Preaching in Westminster Chapel was taxing. More than one previous minister, including Morgan, had lost his health while preaching in the building. (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones always claimed that the building had “killed” Samuel Martin, the pastor who had built it.) Jowett had anemia, and his strength slowly ebbed. On December 17, 1922, he preached his last sermon in the chapel; a year later, on December 19, he was “called home.”
I urge you to secure every Jowett book you can find, not only his Yale lectures, but also his sermons. Begin with the volume in the Great Pulpit Masters series. This collection of twenty-seven sermons, which will introduce you to Jowett’s ministry, has been reprinted in recent years, as have The Eagle Life (Old Testament devotional studies), Life in the Heights (devotional studies in the Epistles), and Springs in the Desert (devotional messages from the Psalms). Other books by Jowett are The Passion for Souls (Christian discipleship), The Silver Lining, Things That Matter Most, Apostolic Optimism, and God—Our Contemporary. I enjoy his devotional book My Daily Meditation. While you are at it, get a copy of Arthur Porritt’s biography, John Henry Jowett. The foreword was written by Randall Davidson, archbishop of Canterbury. (Jowett once preached at an ecumenical service in Durham Cathedral and incurred the wrath of several Anglican divines; the archbishop was not one of them.)
The thing I appreciate most about Jowett is the dedication to preaching that he demonstrated. He constantly battled the subtle thieves that would steal his time. He arose early in the morning and devoted himself to study and prayer. He toiled over his messages. His hobby was words (he read the dictionary for a pastime), and he used them as an artist uses colors. He was a master of the perfect expression. He never used “almost the right word”; it was always exactly the right word. Perhaps his craftsmanship occasionally overshadowed his passion, so that the sermon was a sea of glass not “mingled with fire.” But before we criticize him, let us be sure that we use words as accurately as he did.
Jowett was a devotional preacher. His major theme was the grace of God. His purpose was to win the lost and encourage the saved. He followed Joseph Parker’s rule: “Preach to broken hearts.” But his ministry was not sentimental. It was solidly doctrinal and centered in the cross. Jones, who knew Jowett well, called him “the greatest preacher of his generation.” Jowett would blush to hear such a statement. But he was a great preacher, a homiletical craftsman with a compassionate heart.