38. J. D. Jones (1865–1942)
He could have been F. B. Meyer’s successor at Christ Church in Westminster, or John Henry Jowett’s successor when Jowett went to Fifth Avenue Presbyterian in New York City. In fact, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian approached him after Jowett had first turned them down. He was offered the principalship of Lancashire College and was even encouraged to run for office by members of Parliament. But none of these things moved him, and J. D. Jones remained for thirty-nine years as the beloved pastor of Richmond Hill Congregational Church in Bournemouth, retiring on June 6, 1937.
John Daniel Jones was almost “Lincoln Jones.” When he was born in the little Welsh town of Ruthin on April 13, 1865, his father wanted to call him Lincoln in honor of the American president whom he greatly admired (interestingly enough, Lincoln was assassinated the next day). But one of the grandmothers was opposed to “such fancy names in the family,” and so Joseph David Jones called his third son John Daniel and saved Lincoln for his fourth son, born two years later. However, Grandmother may have been right, because the name Lincoln created some complications in later years when J. D. was pastoring Newland Congregational Church in Lincoln. People were constantly confusing “Lincoln Jones” with “Jones of Lincoln.” But when J. D. Jones began his long ministry at Richmond Hill on June 5, 1898, people forgot about Lincoln and knew him simply as “Jones of Bournemouth.”
Jones did his undergraduate work at Owens College, which he entered in 1882, and his graduate work at Lancashire College, receiving his degree in 1889. It was unusual for a new theological graduate to go directly into the pulpit of an important church, but that is just what happened. On January 2, 1889, before Jones completed his work, the Newland Church in Lincoln called him to be their pastor. In July of that same year, he was married. In his delightful autobiography, Three Score Years and Ten, Jones said this about his experiences as a young pastor in a leading church:
Of course I blundered. At the very first Church meeting after my settlement my Church Secretary brought in a resolution to embody a certain liturgical element in our worship, and I backed him up. My Church—Puritan by tradition—would have none of it. It was a bit of a rebuff for a young minister. I remember visiting an old lady named Cropper shortly after and she said to me: “Don’t take it too hard, laddie. We’re a lot of stiffnecked ’uns down here.”1
He remained almost ten years at Lincoln and then accepted the call to Richmond Hill in Bournemouth. The church sanctuary held over a thousand people and was ideally situated in the city. His predecessor was a fiery Welshman named Ossian Davies, whose intense personality had attracted great crowds; and Jones wondered if his own quiet preaching would really do the job. It did. The people came and kept coming, and for thirty-nine years benefited from his simple presentation of the Word of God. Bournemouth was a popular resort and retirement city, and many well-to-do people came to hear him preach, but J. D. Jones never tried to build a “rich man’s church.” The common people heard him gladly.
Peter Marshall once said that the first essential for success in the ministry is to be born in Scotland. But others would prefer Wales, that land of eloquent preachers and seers. Jones was a Welshman, and according to Ernest H. Jeffs “he spoke as if words were notes of music.”2 Oddly enough, he read his sermons from a manuscript, but his listeners could scarcely detect it. What they did detect was witness: here was a preacher whose life was controlled by the message he delivered. Jones himself once defined preaching as “a man—a real man—speaking real things out of a real experience.” Even a manuscript could not stand between Jones and his hearers, for they always got the message.
He was a biblical preacher, but he was not an expositor of the same type as Alexander Maclaren or the gifted Welshman D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. In the biography J. D. Jones of Bournemouth, Arthur Porritt remarked: “All his sermons were on a very high level. He was always on a plateau, but—as a friendly critic figuratively said— there were no mountains and no valleys—just a uniform level of excellence.”3 He was not one to “preach to the times” and announce sensational topics about current events. There are men who can do this well, but if a man cannot, he had better know it! Jones liked to refer to a story about Archbishop Leighton. Criticized for not “preaching to the times,” the archbishop said, “While so many are preaching to the times, may not one poor brother preach for eternity?”
Jones’s was a positive ministry, and a ministry of encouragement and comfort. He did not preach “easy Christianity”; he identified with his people in their needs and tried to make their pilgrim journey a bit more triumphant. In a remarkable sermon on “softness,” with 1 Corinthians 6:9 as his text, Jones challenged his hearers to a courageous Christian faith. “All the calls of the gospel are calls to hardship, to sacrifice, to battle,” he stated. “Christ would have no man follow him under the delusion that he was going to have an easy time of it.” To him the word comfort carried the original Latin meaning, “with strength,” and he sought to comfort his people by showing them the strength that is in Christ. Jones knew what it was to go through the valley himself. In July 1917, while he was preaching at Torquay, his wife became seriously ill and passed away before he had time to reach home. Six years later, his only son died in the Gold Coast of Africa, where he had been serving in the administration of a plantation. In September 1933 Jones remarried and had the joy of traveling and ministering with his wife and his daughter.
His very popular volume If a Man Die was published the same year his first wife died, and this was followed in 1919 by The Lord of Life and Death, a volume of sermons based on John 11. This book was reissued by Baker Books and should be on your shelf, particularly if you plan to preach from John 11. (Be sure to secure as well Idylls of Bethany by W. M. Clow and Mary of Bethany by Marcus L. Loane.) While on the subject of books, let me suggest that you secure Richmond Hill Sermons, The Way into the Kingdom (on the beatitudes), The Model Prayer, The Glorious Company of the Apostles, and The Greatest of These (on 1 Cor. 13). I wish some publisher would reprint Jones’s commentary on the Gospel of Mark, which was originally written for the Devotional Commentary. When he first went to Bournemouth, Jones conducted a Tuesday morning ministry during the winter months, and his first series was on the Gospel of Mark. His commentary is homiletical rather than explanatory or doctrinal, but I still think it is one of the best.
J. D. Jones was a great denominational leader, although he tried not to let his outside ministry interfere with his pastoral duties. Congregational churches in his day were somewhat isolated from each other, and many of them were in deep financial straits. He accepted and defended the principle of local independence, but he was mature enough to see its dangers. He felt that among the free churches in general there was “a good deal of foolish rivalry, of needless competition and of consequent waste.” Jeffs remarked, “Congregationalism was a good system for the strong man and the strong church. The price of the principle had to be paid by the weaker men and the little churches.” But Jones did not use his position at Richmond Hill to build himself a kingdom: he used it to help others. He spearheaded programs that brought over two million dollars into the denominational coffers to increase the salaries of rural preachers and to provide for decent allotments at retirement. He and his people helped to establish thirty other churches, and he was always available to assist and encourage pastors in difficult places.
He was a great traveler, and often he was a representative to the Congregational International Council. He first visited the United States in 1899, and on Sunday, September 10, he heard D. L. Moody preach at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, where Henry Ward Beecher had ministered for almost forty years. Jones wrote that Moody looked “for all the world like a prosperous, countrified farmer.” The evangelist spoke on the atonement and took the congregation literally from Genesis to Revelation, as only Moody could do. “He got down to the quick of things,” wrote Jones, “and we felt the power of his speech.” After the service, Jones and the other delegates met Moody in the vestry and enjoyed a pleasant talk about everything from Sunday newspapers to higher criticism! Moody told them that he felt that the bicycle, because of its popularity, was the greatest enemy of the Sabbath.
“I am glad, as I look back,” wrote Jones, “that I had the chance of thus hearing and meeting D. L. Moody. I am glad I got a grip of his hand. Moody seemed to me a man of sterling common sense.” Apparently Moody heard Jones speak at the Boston conference, because he invited him to speak at Northfield. Not until 1913 was Jones able to get to Northfield, and by that time Moody was dead and his son Will Moody was managing the schools and the conference. “I think Will Moody was dwarfed by the fact that he was D. L. Moody’s son,” Jones wrote in his autobiography. “Without doubt D. L. Moody was a very great man. W. R. Moody was not that . . . but he was an able man. . . . He had great organizing and administrative abilities.” Jones told how Will Moody kept “a firm hand upon all the Conference speakers. After an address by an English speaker who had let off a lot of ‘hot air’ but had not managed to say much that was worth saying, Will Moody said to me: ‘We’ll have no more of that. We have plenty of men on this side who can pour out that kind of stuff. I shall tell him he need not trouble to stay.’” Jones added, “It took me all my time to persuade Moody to let him finish.”
It is worth noting that, while Jones had a keen interest in British politics, he did not get as carried away with it as did R. W. Dale. During the 1906 election, Jones campaigned for several candidates of the Liberal Party, and every one of them lost in spite of the fact that the Liberals swept the country! When asked to run for office, Jones replied with the words of Nehemiah 6:3—“I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down.”
No doubt one of the secrets of his success was his concentration. Being a pastor was to him the highest calling possible, and it deserved the best that he had. When he rejected the principalship of Lancashire College, Jones received the following message from his friend W. Robertson Nicoll: “I have always held that the pastorate is the highest office open to a minister.” The man who believes in the dignity of the pastorate and who has this sense of calling will accomplish far more in his ministry than the man who flits from ministry to ministry, always looking for some better opportunity.
Another strength of J. D. Jones was his faith in the preaching of the Word. No man could stay in one church nearly forty years if he were depending on his own resources. “When J. D. Jones took a text,” wrote one religious editor, “it was the text that mattered, not the preacher’s commentary upon it. The preacher’s commentary had but one aim—to recall its hearers to the richness and wonder of the truth which the text enshrined. He never searched for excitingly unusual texts, nor did he strive to find starthngly unusual interpretations of his texts.” The pastor who stops growing usually starts going. There is no substitute for a deepening knowledge of the Word of God.
A third factor in his ministry was his love for his people. His constant desire was to encourage them along the way. When you read The Lord of Life and Death, you will discover that these messages were written not from an ivory tower but from that difficult place “where cross the crowded ways of life.” Because he knew and loved his people, he was able to make the Word meaningful to them from week to week.
We must not minimize the character of the man himself. When giving the “charge to the minister” at an ordination, Jones said:
The one indispensable condition of our usefulness and success in the work of the ministry is that we should be good men—men of pure and holy life—men of God. . . . We may be good ministers without being either learned or eloquent, but we cannot be good ministers without being good men. . . . The effect of our words on the Sabbath will really depend on our lives during the week, for it is always the man behind the speech which wields the power.
Finally, Jones realized that there was something more than the ministry of his own local church. He knew that he was a part of something much bigger than Richmond Hill, or even the Congregational Union. Without sacrificing his own convictions, he sought to build and encourage God’s work everywhere. When the Episcopal and Free Church leaders met in their “conversations on reunion,” Jones, giving the opening statement, made it quite clear that the Free Churches were not going to abandon their heritage. “There are certain principles—ecclesiastical and religious—which we hold dear. There are certain truths which—as we believe—have been committed to our trust. . . . We do not want our history and traditions to become a snare, but neither can we be expected lightly to flout and discard them.” The largeness of his vision no doubt contributed to the greatness of his ministry.
Dr. and Mrs. Jones retired to Wales in 1937, although Dr. Jones was still quite active in his preaching ministry. His health remained good until August 1941, when anemia began to sap his strength. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones visited him at Mrs. Jones’s request, to share the word that he could not get better, and Jones accepted the news with his usual poise and courage. On Sunday, April 19, 1942, he was called home. On his tombstone in the Bournemouth cemetery it says: “John Daniel Jones, Preacher of the gospel. ‘Simply to Thy cross I cling.’”