42. Joseph W. Kemp (1872–1933)
God pity the man who comes here!” said Joseph W. Kemp at a committee meeting in the famous Charlotte Baptist Chapel, Edinburgh. The Baptist church in Hawick, of which Kemp was pastor, was enjoying remarkable blessing; Charlotte Chapel was in sad shape. Then Charlotte Chapel called Kemp. “Don’t go!” his friends warned. Why exchange a successful work for a derelict one? Kemp prayed, and then he accepted the call. His ministry in Edinburgh not only restored a great church, but also brought salvation and revival to thousands.
Joseph W. Kemp was born in 1872 in Hull, Yorkshire. He was only seven when his father died; two years later his mother died. The six little children were scattered. Joseph, with only eighteen months of schooling, had to go to work. When he was twelve, he went to Brid-lington to work as a pageboy, but he soon returned to Hull, where he lived with a devoted Christian named J. H. Russell. Russell helped train the lad and witnessed to him lovingly about Jesus Christ.
Kemp was converted in September 1886. He was chatting with an old sailor, who suddenly asked, “Lad, when are you going to accept Christ?” Kemp arose from his chair, walked across the room, took the sailor by the hand, and said: “I’ll do it now!” His own salvation experience no doubt contributed to his later boldness and decisiveness in evangelism. Two years later he was asked to lead a Bible-study class. About the same time he began attending meetings conducted by J. M. Scroggie, uncle of W. Graham Scroggie. These meetings revealed to him some of the wealth in the Word of God. He determined to study his Bible and appropriate its wealth for himself—and then share it. A generous friend sent Kemp to Glasgow Bible Training Institute, from which he graduated in 1894. While studying his Bible, he concluded that immersion was the scriptural form of baptism, a painful decision since he was at the Prospect Street Presbyterian Church. (The pastor was W. P. Mackay, author of the classic Grace and Truth.)
During his student days and for a year after graduation, Kemp conducted evangelistic meetings for the Ayrshire Christian Union. He could have become an itinerant soul-winner, but on April 4, 1897, he accepted a call from the Baptist church in Kelso. Horatius Bonar had ministered in that town for many years. Like Bonar, Kemp preached the doctrine of Christ’s second coming and he practiced evangelism.
The Baptist church in Hawick called him in July 1898; he ministered there until he moved to Edinburgh in February 1902. Before leaving Kelso, he married a daughter of a key church family. Kemp found a divided church at Hawick and left it united and growing. The young pastor spent his mornings in study and prayer. (As a student, he read every book he could find on prayer. After hearing an address by Andrew Murray, he determined to be a man of prayer.) He used afternoons for visitation and evenings for Bible classes and training sessions for church workers. Evangelism, Bible teaching, and prayer were the main elements in his ministry at Hawick, and they remained so throughout his life.
On Kemp’s first Sunday at Charlotte Chapel, only thirty-five members came. But he was not discouraged: God had called him, and God would honor his Word. Kemp began by cleaning and remodeling the chapel. “Worldly places are bright and attractive,” he said, alluding to the nineteen pubs in the neighborhood. “Why should God’s house be dingy and musty?” Church members removed from their building thirteen cartloads of rubbish. But the spiritual changes at Charlotte Chapel were the most important. The new pastor started two Sunday prayer meetings, one beginning at 7 a.m., the other at 10 a.m. At every public meeting he gave solid, biblical teaching with an evangelistic fervor that eventually caught fire in the church. Kemp and his congregation often “took to the streets” and conducted open-air meetings. Before long, the crowds were going to Charlotte Chapel and not the pubs!
Early in 1905 an evangelist held meetings in the church, but nothing exceptional happened. The officers wisely agreed to have the church continue in prayer until God sent the needed blessing. About this time the great Welsh revival broke out; Kemp went to seek some of the blessing for himself and his people. He urged the people to continue praying for revival. Night after night throughout 1905 multitudes met in different prayer meetings. The blessing came on January 22, 1906, at a special church conference. All that year attendance increased, souls were saved in unusual numbers, and the church felt the power of God. People confessed sin, and broken fellowship was restored. The blessing continued into 1907, when the pastor celebrated his fifth anniversary.
A new church building, designed to accommodate the congregation’s increased size, formally opened on October 6, 1912. During its construction the church met in the two-thousand-seat Synod Hall, with the blessing of God continuing unabated. During the dedication services Andrew Urquhart, secretary of Charlotte Chapel, explained the reasons for God’s blessing during Kemp’s ministry: first was “a firm and unchangeable belief in the power of prayer”; second, the preaching of the gospel; third, “hearty cooperation among as loyal and devoted a band of workers as ever any church possessed”; fourth was “an unfaltering faith in the promises of God.”
Kemp’s ministry in Edinburgh ended on September 5, 1915, when he left to pastor Calvary Baptist Church in New York City. During the farewell service, John Henry Jowett, then pastoring in New York, unexpectedly showed up. And when the Kemp family was sailing out of Liverpool, they heard a voice calling from another ship: “Goodbye, Kemp! Goodbye, Kemp!” They discovered it was A. C. Dixon, then pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. Calvary in New York resembled Charlotte Chapel in many respects when Joseph Kemp arrived. One of the first things he did was remove a thousand names from the church roll. He called it “ecclesiastical hypocrisy” to advertise inflated statistics. Unfortunately, Kemp’s health began to break, and he resigned from Calvary in February 1917. He ministered a short time at the new Metropolitan Tabernacle in New York City, but a complete breakdown forced him to leave the work in 1919.
In the spring of 1920, he accepted a call to the Baptist Tabernacle founded by Thomas Spurgeon in Auckland, New Zealand. God miraculously restored Kemp’s health, and he entered the new ministry with great expectations. So popular were his Bible classes that many of the bookstores ran out of Bibles. One byproduct of his ministry was the founding of the New Zealand Bible Training Institute. Again Kemp organized daily prayer meetings for revival, but he did not see the results he had seen in Edinburgh. He wrote a friend:
We often wonder why revival tarries. For over eighteen months a daily prayer meeting has been held in the Tabernacle, in addition to two or three prayer meetings of the regular order—the burden of all of which has been, “Wilt Thou not revive us again?” Still the revival tarries. People do not respond so readily now to the appeals as they did twenty-five years ago.
Kemp paid his last visit to Great Britain in 1926. He preached at Keswick, and ministered in the United States and Canada on the return trip. Back in Auckland he took up his work with characteristic zeal, but in 1932 his health again began to fail. He died on September 4, 1933, after seven months of serious illness. He was buried the next day in the Hillsborough Cemetery, with six thousand people lining the streets to pay tribute to a great preacher-evangelist who is almost forgotten today.
Joseph Kemp was a Spirit-taught man, spending hours searching the Bible. He did not borrow other men’s sermons; he got his messages from God and always preached the Word. He was a man of prayer. Bounds on Prayer (now in print as Power Through Prayer) by E. M. Bounds was one of his favorite books. Like the apostles of old, he gave himself to prayer and the ministry of the Word (Acts 6:4).
Kemp was not content to minister in a comfortable church; he went after lost souls and preached the gospel to them. He refused to be controlled by what he called “the tyranny of statistics.” He taught the Word of God. He saw that new Christians studied the Bible and served the Lord in the church. To Kemp the church was not a field to work in; it was a force to work with. He expected and received the cooperation of his church officers, and God blessed their work together.
His ministry at Charlotte Chapel was no passing thing. His successor, W. Graham Scroggie, ministered for seventeen years with great blessing. The work then prospered under Scroggie’s successor, J. Sidlow Baxter. When I visited Charlotte Chapel a few years ago, I gave thanks to God for the ministry of Joseph Kemp.
Kemp was influenced greatly by the life of George Whitefield and the sermons of Charles H. Spurgeon. Charles G. Finney’s Lectures on Revivals also made an impact on his life. “I have frequently been asked, ‘What is the secret of Mr. Kemp’s success?’” said one of his church officers. “It is this: he believes in the gospel which he preaches, because he knows what it has done for himself, and what he has seen it do for others. . . . He believes in prayer. In other words, he preaches the gospel in faith, and expects and waits for the results. God honors his faith, and he gets the answer he expects.” Prayer, Bible teaching, and evangelism—there is no reason why the formula should not work today.