Chapter 2: A. B. Simpson: The Forgotten Man in Renewal
II
A. B. Simpson
THE FORGOTTEN MAN IN RENEWAL
Historical Background: The Third Great Awakening
The most important factors impacting the growth of the church during the Great Century were the Second and Third Great Awakenings, which began in the United States and spread worldwide.
A great majority of the nineteenth century was influenced by these two spiritual awakenings. William McLoughlin, a revivalist historian, states that the Second Great Awakening began in 1800 and lasted until 1830.101 The Second Great Awakening began simultaneously in the eastern and western United States. The revival in the west began at the Cane Ridge meetinghouse in central Kentucky and spread throughout the western frontier. Paul K. Conkin writes, “It arguably remains the most important religious gathering in all of American history, both for what it symbolized and for the effects that flowed from it.”102 Conkin may be exaggerating the importance of Cane Ridge, but the meeting undoubtedly played a very important part in America’s religious history, and its role as an impetus in the Second Great Awakening in the west cannot be ignored.
In the east, the revival broke out in New England at Yale University under the leadership of Timothy Dwight, who was then the president of the university. It was Dwight’s inspired preaching and ministry that spiritually awoke the student body at Yale University. It is interesting to note that Dwight was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, who had been an integral player at the start of the Great Awakening in North America that began in the eighteenth century. Keith Hardman writes, “Timothy Dwight was not only the central figure in the college revivals that radiated from Yale and other New England schools; but through his writings and his leadership, he established the desire for awakenings as a permanent feature of American Protestantism from 1800 until the beginning of the Civil War.”103
Revivals in both the eastern and western United States blended together to become the Second Great Awakening. It would then be Charles Finney, the evangelist from western New York, who would carry out the second phase of the Second Great Awakening and spread the revival throughout the United States.104 Gradually, the Awakening began to fade. By 1840, religious life in the United States was at low ebb. It would continue to decline until the Third Great Awakening began in 1857.105
Most church historians agree that the Third Great Awakening began in 1857. There is, however, debate on how long the Third Great Awakening lasted. Paulus Scharpft states, “The prayer movement of 1857–1859 began a worldwide revival that lasted more than fifty years and reached its climax in the work of Dwight L. Moody.”106 J. Edwin Orr calls this Third Great Awakening “The Second Evangelical Awakening” and traces its beginnings to 1857. Orr argues this nineteenth-century Evangelical Awakening lasted until World War I—a period covering roughly fifty years—and states that it was comparable to the Great Awakening in the eighteenth century.107
During the year of 1857, many factors contributed to the start of the Third Great Awakening. Hardman traces the beginning of the Third Great Awakening to the ministry of Dr. Walter Palmer and his wife Phoebe, both of whom were instrumental in the holiness movement in the United States. This was especially true of Mrs. Palmer, who was often the main speaker at their meetings. After 1850, the Palmers devoted about half of each year to revival and camp meetings in Canada and the eastern United States.108 As the Palmers were speaking at the McNabb Street Wesleyan Methodist Church in Hamilton, Ontario, in the fall of 1857, a revival broke out and more than six hundred people were converted. According to most revival historians, this was the beginning of the Third Great Awakening.109
In July of 1857, a quiet businessman by the name of Jeremiah Lanphier began work as an urban missionary for the North Dutch Reformed Church in New York City. At noon on September 23, 1857, Lanphier opened the church doors for a noonday prayer meeting.110 Two days after the prayer meeting began, the Bank of Pennsylvania failed in Philadelphia. This panicked the American business community.111 On October 10, the New York Stock Market crashed, putting many people out of business.112 Hardman writes, “The financial panic, it seems, was the catalyst that propelled the Awakening. Within six months, 10,000 people were gathering daily for prayer in numerous places throughout New York.”113 Other cities also developed prayer meetings, and these meetings were usually led by lay people. The revival then spread throughout the United States and Canada.114 In 1859, the revival spread across the Atlantic to Great Britain.
In the United States, the revival continued to impact both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Thousands of soldiers were converted during the war between the states. How many soldiers were converted? Gardiner Shattuck estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 men were converted in the Union Army, while in the Confederate Army, which was much smaller, almost 100,000 were converted.115 Shattuck states, “Since these numbers include only conversions and do not represent the number of soldiers actually swept up in the revivals—a yet more substantial figure—the impact of revivals during the Civil War surely was tremendous.”116 The Third Great Awakening would continue until World War I.
Orr divides the Third Great Awakening into three phases. The first phase was the initial outpouring of the Holy Spirit during the noonday prayer meetings. This outpouring spread out from New York City to cover much of the United States and Canada, then later spread to the United Kingdom and Europe. Orr writes,
The first phase began in the revival of religion which followed an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, first clearly manifested in the remarkable movement of prayer with its attendant conviction of sin. In the general sense, leaderless, this phase of the revival became the means of winning hundreds of thousands to the Christian way of life. Its peak passed, but the Christian communities were by then operating upon a higher level of spiritual effectiveness.117
Many historians label this final phase as the Third Great Awakening, although in fact it was merely the first of the three-part phase that, taken together, would become the Third Great Awakening.
Orr goes on to say that the second phase of the Awakening was the development of evangelism. He states,
Dwight L. Moody, whose Christian service actually began during the first phase of the Awakening, after 1873, became a force in Britain as well as America. Moody extended the scope and the methods of the same Awakening, for he introduced little that was new . . . Moody was without question the greatest single product of the revival. But he was not alone in his heyday of usefulness from 1873 to 1899. Those years were outstanding in the history of the expansion of English-speaking Christianity.118
This was the period in which a great many evangelists preached throughout the United States in both urban and rural areas. The focus during this period, however, became increasingly urban. The leaders in the urban evangelical outreach helped to keep the Third Great Awakening alive.
The third phase of the Great Awakening began around the turn of the twentieth century and coincided with the Welsh Revival in 1905. Orr comments,
The third phase of the Awakening began shortly after the turn of the century. Like the first, it manifested another outpouring of the Spirit of prayer with its accompanying conviction of sin. Its effects were seen in sharpest focus in the Welsh Revival of 1905 under hortatory preaching of evangelist Evan Roberts. It also had an evangelistic phase in the worldwide ministry of Reuben Torrey and Wilbur Chapman, who, with their team-mate, Charles M. Alexander, led great evangelistic campaigns in Australasia, Britain and North America. The third phase closed before the outbreak of the First World War.119
The Third Great Awakening had a tremendous effect on the world. In fact, this Awakening’s enduring impact on behalf of Christ is still felt today. Considering all three of these phases makes the great magnitude of the Third Great Awakening’s influence upon the nineteenth and the early twentieth-century world clear.
Simpson’s Neglect Today
During this period, there were many Christian leaders who were initially involved in the Third Great Awakening. One Christian leader who was instrumental in the Awakening and who seems to have been neglected by most religious historians—even many of the more evangelical Christian historians—is A. B. Simpson, the founder and first president of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination. He was a leader in the Awakening and built his ministry upon both evangelistic outreach in the urban setting of the United States as well as an international mission emphasis. He was one of the leaders in the holiness movement and the related healing movement. He was well known at the time in evangelical circles and played an important role in the Third Great Awakening.
Why, then, has Simpson been forgotten by most religious historians and writers on revival? In A Religious History of the American People,120 which is one of the more popular books on the history of the American church, author Sydney E. Ahlstrom fails to mention A. B. Simpson even once in 1,096 pages except in a single footnote. In his classic work, Revivals, Awakenings and Religion, William McLoughlin also neglects to write one word about Simpson or his impact on the period. The same is true of McLoughlin’s book Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham, in which Simpson is not addressed. In his classic work, They Gathered at the River, Bernard Weisberger also makes no mention of Simpson. In William Sweet’s book Revivalism in America, there is also no reference to Simpson. Daniel Cohen does not include Simpson in his book The Spirit of the Lord: Revivalism in America.121 Ernest Sandeen writes about the founding of Bible colleges in North America in his book The Roots of Fundamentalism, but he fails to recognize Simpson in the text. Although Simpson founded one of the first Bible schools in North America, the only mention Sandeen makes of Simpson is in a footnote at the bottom of a page.
When evangelical scholars do mention Simpson, it is usually with reference to his contribution to the mission movement in the nineteenth century. An exception is J. Edwin Orr, who gives Simpson his proper place and recognizes his importance. Most secular scholars have ignored the impact Simpson had on the church in the nineteenth century as well. Even within the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the society Simpson founded, it is pastor and author A. W. Tozer who is better known among the laity than Simpson. Simpson is truly the forgotten man.
Why this neglect? Why has Simpson been so nearly forgotten? Most of the historians who have written about revival and the Third Great Awakening have focused on D. L. Moody and his associates. The reason for this is obvious, since these figures had the greatest impact on the period. No one had more impact on spreading the revival than Moody. All scholars who look at the Third Great Awakening recognize that it was Moody who was responsible for spreading the Awakening worldwide. Later it would be R. A. Torrey and Wilbur Chapman, both of whom were Moody’s associates, who would continue to spread the revival after Moody’s death in 1899.
Chapman eventually took a young man under his wing who would become the setup man for Chapman’s crusade work. When Chapman retired from crusades, he recommended this young man for a revival in Iowa. The young man’s name was Billy Sunday.122 Sunday would become the greatest evangelist in the early part of the twentieth century. Sunday was at the height of his popularity when World War I broke out. After the war, his fame and popularity diminished.
In looking at the Third Great Awakening, it becomes clear that Moody’s influence was integral, whether it was directly through him, through associates such as Torrey and Chapman, or indirectly through leaders like Sunday. These men are widely recognized as the most important figures of this period. Moody and his associates were all interdenominational and not aligned with any one church. They were well known in all church circles. Perhaps, if they had been connected to one denomination, they might have been kept from becoming so well known.
Simpson’s Popularity
Simpson may have been forgotten by modern historians, but he was well known at the time among his contemporaries for his influence and impact on the church. A. E. Thompson comments about Moody and Simpson by writing, “One day when Dwight L. Moody was in New York, he said to his friend, Dr. A. T. Pierson, ‘Pierson, I have just been down to hear A. B. Simpson preach. No one gets at my heart like this man.’”123 F. B. Meyer, the great English preacher and author of devotional literature, said this about Simpson: “He leaves a trail of light which will linger long as an inspiration and appeal.”124 C. I. Scofield, the original editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, said, “It has been my privilege to know with some measure of intimacy the greatest preachers and men of God of the present time. Among those, and with no disparagement to any, I found Dr. A. B. Simpson the foremost in power to reach the depths of the human soul. And his message was so bathed in love that it was always redolent of the personality of him whom having not seen we love.”125
Thompson, in his biography on Simpson, quotes T. Dewitt Talmage, a contemporary of Simpson’s. On Talmage’s impression of Simpson, Thompson writes, “Dr. T. Dewitt Talmage said that he had recently attended a meeting in a New York City church with a dingy auditorium and a very ordinary looking crowd of people, with nothing aesthetic or emotional in the service; but before the minister had been preaching three minutes he felt that his head and shoulders had been lifted into heaven.”126 Edward Shaw, who was a little boy in Simpson’s first church in Hamilton, Ontario, related this story to Thompson:
Waiting for a train in a little village in Massachusetts, I got into conversations with a flagman. There was no mistaking that he was Irish. ‘Did you ever hear a man named Simpson?’ said he. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I have known him many years.’ ‘And how do you like him?’ he asked. ‘Very much,’ said I. ‘He is a great preacher!’ ‘Son,’ he said, ‘I could sit on the point of a picket fence twenty-four hours and listen to that man.’127
Simpson was certainly well known by his contemporaries.
Simpson’s writings were also quite popular in his time. He published a weekly deeper life and missionary periodical called The Word, the Work, and the World. It was the first illustrated missionary magazine. At the close of the nineteenth century, paperback books were becoming quite popular. Moody was the first religious author to take advantage of them, and Simpson soon followed suit. Simpson published a number of these paperback books.128 He initially published four books, and Simpson wrote in June 1899 that “tens of thousands of copies of these four paperbacks had been sold in the last few years.”129 These books were popular among the Christian reading public. One of the books Simpson published was The Life of Prayer. This book had a profound effect on Jonathan Goforth, who played an important part in the revival that took place in Manchuria, China, at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Goforth wrote,
I have read and reread Dr. Simpson’s book, The Life of Prayer, with the deepest interest and profit. No one can give this little book a careful reading without realizing that the author has lived in the secret of his Master’s presence. Every page makes it evident that here is a man who has prayed through. Down through the Christian centuries few men have had greater prayer results. Great would be the spiritual quickening if every Christian mastered this classic on the prayer life.130
Simpson’s preaching and writings helped spread his message, which he called “the Fourfold Gospel.” In fact, one of the first books Simpson published was called The Four-Fold Gospel, and it explains this important message.131 What was the Fourfold Gospel? It was the preaching of Jesus Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King. In the incorporation papers of the Christian and Missionary Alliance it is stated, “For the Christian Alliance its particular business was to bear united testimony to:
1. Salvation through Christ.
2. Sanctification through Christ for all who fully yield themselves to him.
3. Healing through the name of Jesus for those who believe and obey him.
4. Christ’s personal and pre-millennial coming.”132
Indeed, the message of the Alliance was Simpson’s own message, and this was the Fourfold Gospel.
Many leaders in the Christian church during this period were influenced by Simpson. He was considered a leader in both the holiness and healing movements as well as in urban evangelical and missionary developments at the end of the nineteenth century. As Orr comments on Simpson’s impact on this period of time,
In 1886, A. B. Simpson organized a summer convention at Old Orchard, Maine, out of which came the Christian and Missionary Alliance, at first interdenominational. Simpson laid emphasis upon Sanctification and Healing, but his primary motivation was the preaching of the gospel to all nations before the coming again of Jesus Christ. When he died in 1919, the Alliance was worldwide.133
Orr also explains that although Simpson’s Christian and Missionary Alliance was at first an interdenominational organization, the Alliance “later itself became a denomination as missionary-minded as the Moravians.”134
Simpson also made a tremendous impact on urban evangelism. Joel Carpenter states that Simpson, along with D. L. Moody and A. J. Gordon, was integral in prodding complacent churches into new evangelistic outreach.135 Simpson was involved in the holiness movement, and his message helped spread the deeper life view of sanctification.136
The Reason for Neglect
If Simpson was so important, why has he been largely forgotten? As stated earlier, one major reason is that Moody and his associates have gotten most of the press. In addition, Simpson was not a traveling evangelist but chose instead to stay in a settled pulpit, which lessened his exposure. He founded a denomination—the Christian and Missionary Alliance—and ministered predominately within Alliance circles, though he did minister outside at times. All of his books have been published by a publishing arm of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, so most of his writings have stayed within the reading of Alliance readers. Simpson was also a very humble man and did not build himself up. He was happy if others got the credit and praise.
The author of this book was once asked by a seminary professor why nothing had been written on Simpson. He concluded that Simpson is one of the most neglected men in the modern church. This has also been true in the wider branches of church history and academic circles. Simpson is mentioned here and there, but usually just in passing. Most of what has been written about Simpson has been confined to authors within the Christian and Missionary Alliance circles or those who have close ties with it. Those books have not been widely disseminated among the academic community and the general reading public.
So who was Albert Benjamin Simpson? The following section will trace his life and work to highlight the ministry of this often-overlooked evangelical leader.
The Life of Albert Benjamin Simpson
Albert Benjamin Simpson was born on December 15, 1843, in Bayview on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Both his father, James, and his mother, Jane, were from Scottish backgrounds and traced their ancestry back to the Reformers in Scotland.137 As a baby, Albert was baptized and dedicated in prayer to missionary service by the Presbyterian missionary John Geddie.138 Geddie was the first missionary from Canada to go overseas and was known as the Apostle to Aneityum in the South Sea Islands.139 On furlough twenty-one years later, Geddie would remind Simpson of that prayer of dedication.140
Young Albert was born into a religious family. His father was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and would lead the family in daily devotions. On the Sabbath, he would teach the children the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Simpson’s mother was also religious and sensitive. Young Albert inherited his love for poetry and literature, as well as his sensitive nature, from her. When Simpson described his upbringing later in life, he said, “We were brought up according to the strictest Puritan formula.”141 Even though Albert was brought up in the faith from infancy, he would not meet Christ as his Lord and Savior until his teenage years.
Albert’s father was a shipbuilder on Prince Edward Island. Due to a financial depression, he was forced to sell his business, and the family moved to Western Ontario. There they bought a farm, and James Simpson became a farmer.142 Albert grew up helping with chores on the farm. He had dreamt ever since the age of ten that he would become a minister. Albert kept this dream completely to himself despite this intense desire. His father decided that Howard, Albert’s older brother, would go into the ministry and that Albert would stay on the farm to work.143 After a difficult struggle with his father’s decision, Albert went to his father to reveal his desire and asked his permission to go into the ministry. He describes this encounter with his father this way:
I can still feel the lump that rose in my throat as I stammered out my acquiescence. Thus I ventured with broken words and stammering tongue to plead that they would consent to my getting an education if I could work it out without asking anything from them but their approval and blessing. I had a little scheme of my own to teach school and earn the money for my education. But even this I did not dare divulge, for I was a lad, less than fourteen. I remember the quiet trembling tones with which my father received my request and said, ‘God bless you my boy!’144
Albert was given permission to pursue the ministry, but he would not get any financial help from his parents for this goal. He would be on his own.
At age fifteen, Albert suffered a physical collapse. At the time, the doctor labeled it nervous exhaustion. Today one might call it a nervous breakdown. In describing his illness, Simpson says,
A physician told me that I must not look at a book for a whole year for my nervous system had collapsed, and I was in the greatest danger. There followed a period of mental and physical agony that no language can describe. I was possessed with the idea that at a certain hour I was to die; and every day as that hour drew near, I became prostrated with dreadful nervousness, watching in agonized suspense till the hour passed and wondering that I was still alive.145
During this time, Simpson began reading Walter Marshall’s The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification and came to the full assurance of his salvation.146 He soon recovered from his illness and went on to graduate from high school at the age of sixteen. After graduation, Albert taught school for two years to save money for college so he could prepare for the ministry.147
In those days, the first step before entering college for the Presbyterian ministry in Canada was to go before the local presbytery. Simpson and his brother Howard both went before the Presbytery of London, Ontario, and both were accepted for the ministry. Howard Simpson would wait a year before starting college, while Albert started immediately.148 In the fall of 1861, two months before Albert’s eighteenth birthday, he enrolled as a student at Knox College in Toronto, Canada, to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry.149 While at Knox College, Simpson supplied his services to local churches to help earn money for school.150 Although Simpson was a good student, he excelled at preaching.151 J. M. Mitchell, an upperclassman at Knox, described Simpson’s preaching this way: “I did my work faithfully and acceptably, but was quite thrown into the shade by my junior, for already his pulpit gifts were notable.”152 Before Simpson graduated from Knox College in the spring of 1865, he was serving as a supply preacher at Knox Church in Hamilton, Ontario. Knox Church was considered one of the most important and prestigious churches in all of Canada.153 Only the best preachers in Canada were invited to preach there.
Simpson graduated from Knox College in April of 1865. Knox Church immediately extended an invitation to young Simpson to be their pastor. Simpson was only twenty-one years old when he was called to pastor one of the most important Presbyterian churches in Canada.154 Tozer gives a description of Simpson’s first week at the church. He writes:
But A. B. Simpson was not the average man. So on September 11 he delivered his maiden sermon as the new pastor of Knox Church, Hamilton. The next day in the afternoon he appeared before some of the local luminaries and was solemnly ordained to the ministry by prayer and the laying on of hands. That same night he caught a train for Toronto, and the next day he was married! There followed a short honeymoon trip down the St. Lawrence, a swift journey back across the country to Hamilton and a rousing reception for the bride and groom given at the manse by the members of Knox Church.155
Simpson and his new wife, Margaret, served at Knox Church for eight years and had a successful and popular ministry there. During this time, they added over 750 new members to the church.156 While at Knox Church, Simpson suffered from the cold, harsh Canadian winters that were beginning to take their toll on him.157 Knox Church would always hold a special place in the couple’s hearts, and later on they were asked to come back for special occasions.158
While pastoring at Knox Church, Simpson became acquainted with the Evangelical Alliance. This organization was a worldwide fellowship of evangelical Christians working for closer unity and cooperation that would show the world the oneness of the body of Jesus Christ.159 The Evangelical Alliance sponsored a convention in New York City in 1873 that Simpson attended as a delegate. While in New York City, Simpson preached a message on a Sunday morning at the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church. It was there that convention delegates from Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, first heard Simpson preach. They extended a call to him to be their pastor, which he accepted.160 Nearly six years later, Simpson left the church in Kentucky when the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in New York called him to be their pastor.161
Simpson resigned from Knox Church to begin his ministry in Kentucky in January of 1874. At this time, Louisville was still a divided city following the wake of the Civil War. Kentucky had been a border state, and loyalties were still sharply split. What better way to unite a church than to bring a Canadian pastor who would be neutral?162 This is exactly what Simpson did. During Simpson’s ministry at Louisville, he organized a citywide crusade. He and other pastors invited Major D. W. Whittle, an important evangelist, along with gifted soloist P. P. Bliss, to lead the crusade. During this crusade, hundreds were converted throughout the city.163 After Whittle and Bliss left, Simpson continued with the evangelistic crusades on Sunday evenings. His church built a tabernacle to try to reach the unevangelized masses in Louisville. It was during this time that Simpson experienced a deeper understanding of sanctification. It was also in Louisville that God gave Simpson a vision for a worldwide outreach.164 Simpson had a desire to be involved in the center of missionary activity, and he had already begun formulating the idea of publishing an illustrated missionary magazine.165
When Simpson received a call from the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church, he saw it as an opportunity to expand his vision to reach the world—both those in his own church and in other denominations. Thompson, a personal friend of Simpson and his biographer as well, wrote, “In New York he would be at the missionary center of his own denomination and others, and plans were formulating for a personal ministry on behalf of Christian millions.”166 Simpson accepted the call and began his ministry at Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church on December 9, 1879.167 Membership at Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church began increasing almost immediately after Simpson began his ministry there, since many who attended were being converted.
It was during these two years of ministry at Thirteenth Street that Simpson experienced a divine healing that would change his ministry. Although things were progressing well at the church, conflict arose between Simpson and the leadership of the church. The congregation and its leaders had a different vision of who it was that they wanted to reach and bring into the church for the Savior than Simpson did. Church leaders wanted only those of similar social and economic status in their church. They did not want to allow those from the lower classes to attend their fellowship. Simpson had been doing street evangelism that had won more than one hundred converts from a poor Italian quarter of the city. When he came to bring these converts into the church session, the leaders asked him to find a church for them that would be more in line with the newcomers’ social and economic class. It was felt that these converts would be more “comfortable” with people of their own status.168 Simpson realized that at this church, he could never fulfill his vision of reaching the lost masses. Writing about the experience, Simpson states,
For two years I spent a happy ministry with this noble people, but found after a thorough and honest trial it would be difficult for them to adjust themselves to the radical and aggressive measures to which God was leading me. What they wanted was a conventional parish for respectable Christians. What their young pastor wanted was a multitude of publicans and sinners. Therefore, after two years of most congenial and cordial fellowship with these dear people, and without a strain of any kind, I frankly told them that God was calling me to a different work, and I asked them and the Presbytery of New York to release me for the purpose of preaching the Gospel to the masses.169
Simpson resigned from the church on November 6, 1881, and he preached his last message at the midweek service. His sermon was from Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor.”170
The Beginning of the Christian and Missionary Alliance
Simpson asked the people from his church to stay rather than to follow him in his new outreach. Most followed his advice. He announced in the New York newspapers that he would begin Sunday afternoon services in Caledonia Hall near Eighth Avenue. At the first meeting, seven people showed up.171 In February of 1882, the group organized a church. There were thirty-five original members. They called the church the New York Gospel Tabernacle.172 Over the next year, the church would meet in such diverse locations as the Academy of Music, Steinway Hall, Grand Opera Hall, a tent, an armory that had been refurbished into a theater, a massive church building, and the Hippodrome that would later become Madison Square Garden.173 The church finally built a permanent building on the corner of Eighth Avenue and West Forty-fourth Street, which was jut one block from Times Square. It was dedicated in May of 1889.174 The Gospel Tabernacle soon grew to well over one thousand members.175
From the beginning, many new ministries were born from the Gospel Tabernacle Church. The New York Missionary Training College was founded in October of 1882. This would later evolve into Nyack College. The Training College was one of the first Bible colleges in the country.176 During this time, Simpson began a publishing house that began printing the magazine The Word, the Work, and the World, a missionary and deeper life periodical. In 1883, Simpson opened a home in the city to help those in need of spiritual and physical healing. This would become known as the Berachah Home and would later move to Nyack.177 Several rescue missions were also opened, and an orphanage was begun on Long Island.178 The Gospel Tabernacle became a hub of activity reaching out to the lost masses throughout New York City and to the outermost parts of the world.
In 1887, Simpson began the Christian Alliance. The Christian Alliance was to be a group of evangelical Christians in various churches who believed in the Fourfold Gospel. They would meet together to fellowship, to pray, and to encourage one another. They would aggressively proclaim these great truths to all those around them.179 This group of believers was organized into several small groups called “branches.” Simpson emphasized that this was not a church body. He stated, “It is not an ecclesiastical body in any sense, but simply a fraternal union of consecrated believers in connection with the various evangelical churches. It does not organize distinct churches or require its members to leave their present church connections.”180 Anyone could join by signing a simple pledge that was an outline of the gospel and belief in the Fourfold Gospel.181 Simpson formed the Evangelical Missionary Alliance in 1887, shortly after the Christian Alliance. It was to be an association within the Christian Alliance that was to support missions and missionaries. The Evangelical Missionary Alliance was to serve as the missionary outreach of the Christian Alliance.182
Tozer defines the goals of the Evangelical Missionary Alliance in simple terms. He writes, “It was an undenominational society for the rapid evangelization of the most neglected sections of the foreign mission field, using laymen and laywomen as well as regular ministers to carry on its work.”183 The name was changed two years later to the International Missionary Alliance.184 Simpson was the leader of both of these societies. Ten years later, in 1897, these societies combined to form one society called the Christian and Missionary Alliance.185 This was the forerunner of the present denomination. Simpson was elected president of this new society the same year and would continue to lead the Christian and Missionary Alliance until his death in 1919.
With each passing year, the Alliance continued to grow. By 1917, shortly before Simpson’s death, the Alliance had 292 missionaries overseas and 270 Alliance evangelists and superintendents in the United States and Canada.186 John Sawin comments, “By 1917, after an entire generation of activity, the Alliance was looking more and more like a missionary denomination instead of a missionary movement.”187
While talking to a visitor from Jamaica on his porch at his home at Nyack, Simpson passed into the presence of God. This was on October 28, 1919. On hearing of Simpson’s death, Henry Frost, President of the China Inland Missions, made this comment: “Dr. Simpson belonged to the whole Church of Christ. His ministries overflowed boundaries and went out into every place.”188 Simpson died shortly after the Third Great Awakening ended.
In the next section, we will look at Simpson’s message and how he personally experienced the Fourfold Gospel before he preached it to the world.
Simpson’s Message: The Fourfold Gospel
The Fourfold Gospel, which was the message of A. B. Simpson, also became the message of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. What is the Fourfold Gospel? As David Fessenden explains, “Simpson’s formula [the Fourfold Gospel] placed the emphasis on Christ, but also stressed the benefits to the individual believer from a relationship with Him (Christ our Savior, our Sanctifier, our Healer and our Coming King). Moreover, the use of the term ‘gospel’ implies the necessity to proclaim it as the church’s primary message, while the four ‘folds’ of the phrase outline the content of the message.”189 Each of the folds of the Fourfold Gospel speaks of the roles that Christ plays in a believer’s life. It is a Christ-centered message.190 It was a message being proclaimed and preached by many in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term “Fourfold Gospel”—which sums up an emphasis on Jesus as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King—was coined by Simpson. It became the watchword of the Alliance and many other movements. While speaking at the opening of a convention in 1890 at the Gospel Tabernacle, Simpson remarked that the term “the Fourfold Gospel” came to him by inspiration.191 William MacArthur, who was an associate and friend of Simpson’s, comments on the Fourfold Gospel’s impact on Simpson: “The facts of the Fourfold Gospel became like fire in his bones.”192 Simpson saw the Fourfold Gospel as a whole as well as the sum of its components. It was necessary to preach and emphasize all the folds of the Fourfold Gospel because they were deeply interrelated.193 Simpson wrote:
Christ as our Savior is not enough. The new convert must be led forward into the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Every Christian needs the inspiration and support of a deeper life and an abiding union with the Lord Jesus Christ. Divine healing alone will surely lead you into fanaticism and distortion. It must spring in its truest meaning from a deep spiritual intimacy with the Lord Jesus.194
The message of the Fourfold Gospel is simply that one needs to accept Christ as one’s Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King. Sawin, an Alliance historian, understood Simpson to believe that the Fourfold Gospel was the key to unlocking people’s hearts so that they would accept the burden of reaching the world for Christ.195 This was the emphasis of Simpson’s ministry, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance continued this message in its local and worldwide outreach.
For Simpson, the Scripture was always primary; whatever he believed or taught had to be based on the Bible. Simpson turned first to the Scriptures to answer the questions that came up in his life and ministry. After he was convinced a notion was biblical, he would then seek to have it confirmed by his own experience. All the ideas that Simpson preached had to be taught by the Scripture and confirmed in the Scripture. Simpson also looked to the history of the church to validate his experience. Simpson had been educated with a classical seminary education and was familiar with both church history and theology. He wrote about how the medieval treatise True Peace, a book that dealt with listening to God, impacted his life and changed his ministry.196 This shows Simpson’s familiarity with this period of the church.197 Simpson did not preach anything he had not experienced personally. Experience was important to him, but the Bible reigned supreme as the best judge of experience. This is one of the reasons why Simpson was such an effective preacher of such powerful messages.
Frederic Senft, in the introduction to Simpson’s The Four-Fold Gospel, wrote,
The title of this little volume, The Four-Fold Gospel, has been a familiar phrase to thousands of God’s children during the past 40 years. Not that the truths contained in the statement were unknown before, but the grouping of them in form was given to Dr. A. B. Simpson after he had happily experienced the fullness of the Fourfold Gospel in his own life.198
Without this truth, all that Simpson accomplished would have been in vain and his ministry never would have had the impact it did.199 Walter Turnbull, an early leader in the Alliance, wrote in the foreword to the first volume of Simpson’s The Holy Spirit that “Sunday after Sunday Dr. Simpson poured out his heart in Scriptural teaching and earnest exhortation, aiming constantly to lead his auditors to definite acceptance of the fullness of the Spirit. His own life flamed with the reality of the message his lips proclaimed.”200
Simpson shares in his writings that there were three crises he went through to discover the first three folds of the Fourfold Gospel. While Simpson was speaking in 1885 at the International Convention on Holiness and Divine Healing at Bethshan, London, he shared the following testimony with the delegates:
Some twenty-seven years ago, I floundered for ten months in the waters of despondency, and I got out of there just by believing in Jesus as my Saviour. About twelve years ago I got into another deep experience of conviction, and I got out of that by believing in Jesus as my Sanctifier. After years of teaching and waiting on Him, the Lord Jesus Christ showed me four years ago that it was his blessed will to be my complete Savior for body as well as soul.201
The following section shows how those three crises actually came about and how they changed Simpson’s life.
Simpson’s Three Crises
A. B. Simpson grew up in a Christian home. Both his parents were devout Christians who attempted to bring up their children in the ways of God. His parents were Presbyterians and brought the children up under Reformed and Puritan principles of the faith. Young Simpson had memorized the Westminster Shorter Catechism by the time he reached the age of twelve.202 Simpson, looking back at his strict religious upbringing, saw its value as preparation for his ministry. He reminisces:
Looking back on these early influences I cannot say I wholly regret the somewhat stern mould in which my life was shaped. It taught me a spirit of reverence and wholesome discipline for which I have often had cause to thank God, the absence of which is perhaps the greatest loss of the rising generation today. It threw over my youthful spirit a natural horror of evil things which often safeguarded me afterwards when as a young man amid the temptations of the world.203
Simpson valued the doctrine he was taught as a child and even the lessons he found boring as a child. He remembers:
The religious knowledge, which was crammed into my mind even without my understanding it, furnished me with forms of doctrine and statements of truth which afterwards became illuminated by the Holy Spirit and realized in my own experience, and thus became ultimately the precious vessels for holding the treasures of divine knowledge.204
Simpson saw God’s hand on his life even before his conversion. He recognized God’s divine protection in saving him from death at least three times in his unregenerate state.205
Although raised in a spiritual environment, Simpson had no idea how he could know God in a personal way. God seemed far off and austere to Simpson, and there appeared to be no way he could ever please God. Martin Luther’s struggle to know God and his resulting realization that he could do nothing to make himself acceptable to God closely paralleled young Simpson’s own struggle with God. It was during this time that Simpson had a nervous breakdown and sank into a deep despondency. Simpson commented that up until and during this crisis, no one had shared with him the simple gospel message. He remarks, “It now seems strange that there was no voice there to tell me the simple way of believing in the promise and accepting the salvation fully provided and freely offered.”206 It was during this time that Simpson met Christ as his Savior.
During those months of darkness and despondency, Simpson happened to be in the library of his former minister and teacher when he stumbled on an old and musty book.207 The book was Walter Marshall’s Gospel Mystery of Sanctification. Tozer describes Simpson flipping through the pages. He writes:
. . . suddenly his eyes were fixed on a passage that stood out like fire from the rest: “the first good work you will ever perform is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Until you do this, all your works, prayers, tears and good resolutions are vain. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to believe that he saves you according to his Word, that he receives and saves you here and now for he has said: ‘Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.’”208
This was enough for young Simpson; he got down on his knees and received Christ as Savior.209 After Simpson’s conversion, he recovered physically and was ready to serve God as his child rather than as an outsider.
The second crisis that influenced the next fold of the Fourfold Gospel happened during Simpson’s pastorate at the Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He ministered there from 1874 to 1879 during the turbulent years after the Civil War. This was a time of struggle for Simpson. While in Louisville, Simpson sensed his lack of personal holiness and failure of power for service.210 Simpson later describes this struggle while referring to himself in the third person.211 Recounting his despondency, Simpson writes of himself, “He struggled long and vainly with his own intense nature, his strong self will, his peculiar temptations, and his spiritual life had been constant humiliation. He had talked to the people about the deeper things of the spirit but there was a hollow ring, and his heart was breaking to know the Lord Jesus as a living reality.”212
Upon hearing of a Christian Worker’s Conference sponsored by the Moody Evangelistic Association in Chicago, Simpson decided to attend. He went to a pre-conference testimony service, and there God spoke to him.213 Simpson later describes what happened: “I came here expecting Mr. Moody to help me. But last night I saw Jesus, and I got such a look at Jesus that I am never going to need anything [else] as long as I live.”214 After experiencing this, Simpson came to the conviction that he must go directly to Jesus.215
Without attending the conference, Simpson took the train back to Louisville and arrived early in the morning. He talked to no one and went directly to his study, where he locked himself inside.216 Simpson went directly to God on this issue. While in his library, he took out W. E. Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life and started to read through the book. He began to see Christ was indeed the Sanctifier. The Christian life was not meant to be understood as Christians trying to live their lives independently, but rather as a personal surrendering to Christ to allow Christ to live his life through humankind. Samuel Stoesz writes: “Christ had not saved him merely from future peril and then left him to fight the battle of life, but the Christ who had justified him was waiting to sanctify him through the Holy Spirit. Christ had come to enter his spirit and to substitute his strength, holiness, joy, love, faith and power for a helplessness and emptiness that had troubled him.”217
Following this crisis experience, Simpson’s personal life and ministry underwent tremendous change. This new infilling of the Holy Spirit inspired Simpson to unite the quarreling Louisville churches in order to conduct a city-wide crusade in 1875.218 The Louisville ministers invited Major Daniel Whittle and Phillip P. Bliss to lead the meetings. Both men were involved with Moody and his ministry. Whittle, besides preaching a salvation message, also proclaimed the necessity of being filled with the Holy Spirit.219 This message only confirmed what Simpson had discovered about Christ the Sanctifier in his study. During the crusade, five thousand people were converted, and these conversions had a tremendous impact on Louisville. As a result of their meetings, revival came to the Louisville churches.220 Simpson was moved by the effectiveness of mass evangelism. He was also impressed by the spiritual power in Whittle’s ministry.221 Simpson’s ministry would never be the same, as he would make evangelism his priority for the remainder of his life.222 Although it was in Kentucky that Simpson came to understand Jesus as Sanctifier, it was in New York City that he would discover Christ as Healer, the third fold of the Fourfold Gospel.
Simpson considered his healing as the third greatest crisis of his life, surpassed only by his salvation and the infilling of the Holy Spirit.223 For most of his life, Simpson had very poor health. Even as a young pastor at Knox Church in Hamilton, Canada, Simpson would carry around a bottle of ammonia in his pocket to take for his heart. If he went up even a slight elevation or climbed a flight of stairs, his heart would race until he felt he could not breathe. His health gradually deteriorated until his condition became very serious. By the time he began his pastorate in New York City, there were serious questions as to whether he could continue to minister or, for that matter, how long he might live. Simpson describes his condition by writing:
A few months before I took Christ as my Healer, a prominent physician in New York insisted on speaking to me about my health. He told me that I had not constitutional strength to last more than a few months. He required my taking immediate measures for the preservation of my life and usefulness.224
The future looked bleak for Simpson and his ministry.
The feeble pastor took the advice of his physician, and in the summer of 1881 he went to Saratoga Springs to recuperate and to try to regain his health. On a Sunday afternoon there, he heard an African American singing group called the Jubilee Singers. They were leading the music at an evangelistic service.225 Simpson describes his mood as follows: “I had been deeply depressed. All things in life looked dark and withered. Suddenly I heard a chorus: My Jesus is the Lord of lords: No man can work like him!”226 The Lord spoke to Simpson through a song. He said it was like a voice from heaven and seemed to possess his being. This knowledge that Jesus could do all things enveloped his soul. He comments: “I took Jesus to be my Lord of lords and to work in my behalf. I know not how much it all meant. But I took him in the dark and went from that rustic old-fashioned service remembering nothing else, but strongly lifted up forevermore.”227 This was the preparation that Simpson needed to later take in Christ as Healer.
A few weeks later, in late July or early August, Simpson and his family went on vacation in Old Orchard, Maine. At the time it was one of the most popular seashore resorts and religious convention grounds in the country.228 While there, Simpson lived on the seashore and occasionally went to the meetings on the conference grounds. He reminisces, “Up to that time, I had not committed myself in any full sense to the truth or experience of divine healing.”229 However, Simpson had been interested in divine healing before his experience at Old Orchard, Maine. Several years before, he had been called by a member of his church to come pray for her son as he lay dying. Simpson prayed for the son, and he was miraculously healed. For a while, Simpson trusted Christ as his Healer, but he abandoned this position when a devout Christian physician told him it was presumptuous.230 Simpson confesses, “I abandoned my position of simple dependence on God alone and floundered and stumbled for years.”231
While Simpson was at Old Orchard, Charles Cullis was conducting meetings on divine healing on the conference grounds. Cullis, a Boston physician and former director of a tuberculosis hospital, was a devout Episcopalian layman. He not only treated his patients medically, he also prayed for them. Cullis saw some remarkable healings. This drove him to the Scriptures and convinced him of the truth of divine healing. He became convinced that God wanted him to carry on a healing ministry while continuing his medical practice.232 Simpson wandered into one of Cullis’ meetings in which people were sharing how they had been miraculously healed by simply trusting Christ for their healing as they trusted him for their salvation.233 Simpson comments:
These testimonies drove me to my Bible. I determined that I must settle the matter one way or the other. I am glad I did not go to man. At Jesus’ feet, alone, with my Bible open and with no one to help or guide me I became convinced that this was part of Christ’s glorious gospel for a sinful and suffering world—the purchase of his blessed cross for all who would believe and receive his Word.234
He went out into the woods and made a pledge to God that he would never doubt the truth again and that he would preach Christ the Healer as a regular part of the gospel message.235
It was not long after Simpson took Christ as his Divine Healer that his faith was tested. A few days after his experience at Old Orchard, he was asked to preach at a Congregational church several miles north of Intervale, New Hampshire.236 Simpson felt impressed by God to preach a message on divine healing, but instead he preached what he labeled a “good sermon.” He immediately felt convicted, and that night at the service that was being held in his hotel he gave this testimony on how God had healed him.237 He never shrank back from preaching on divine healing again.
He was tested again a few days later. A small group had invited Simpson to hike up Mount Kearsarge, a 3,000-foot mountain in New Hampshire. Simpson recalls what went through his mind after the invitation: “Did I not remember the dread of heights that had always overshadowed me? Did I not recall the terror with which I had resolved in Switzerland and Italy never attempt high places again? Did I not know how ordinary stairs exhausted me and distressed my poor heart?”238 Simpson trusted that God had healed him and could give him the strength, and he ascended Mount Kearsarge. He would never be the same again. Simpson’s health was restored, and he was a new man physically. Simpson writes of his newfound strength and vigor: “A few months after my healing, God called me into the special pastoral, evangelistic and literary work that has since engaged my time and energy. I may truthfully say it has involved four times more labor than have any period of my life. And yet it has been a continual delight.”239
The final test for Simpson came when his three-year-old daughter Margaret came down with diphtheria. Simpson’s wife wanted to call the doctor. They had already lost a son of the same age from the same disease.240 Simpson instead anointed her with oil and prayed for her. He lay down with her that night, and the following day little Margaret was fine.241 These three tests confirmed to Simpson that Christ is indeed the believer’s Healer.
Simpson was faithful in preaching on divine healing, which alienated him from some of his Christian friends who could not go along with the third fold of the Fourfold Gospel. Simpson writes: “My old friends seemed to leave me, and for months I seemed to be alone—separated from hundreds and thousands of ministers and people I had loved and worked with all of my life. I felt I did not know them now and they did not know me as before.”242
Simpson taught that although healing was important, it was subservient to the first two folds of the Fourfold Gospel: Christ as Savior and Christ as Sanctifier. He explains: “It is most important that it [healing] should be ever held in the true place in relation to the other parts of the Gospel. It is not the whole Gospel, or perhaps the chief part of it, but it is a part, and in its due relationship to the whole it will prove to be, like the Gospel itself, ‘The power of God . . . to everyone that believeth.’”243
In the first three elements of the Fourfold Gospel, Simpson experienced three crises that brought about his experience of Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, and Healer. The last aspect of this fourfold presentation was Christ as our Coming King. Simpson taught that the second coming of Christ had a sanctifying influence on the believer. It also encouraged the believer to work for God’s kingdom.244 Simpson states that “it is one of the strongest influences to separate us from an evil world.”245 Fessenden makes the observation:
At first glance, ‘Christ Our Coming King’ would seem to depart from the other three ‘folds’ in the Fourfold Gospel because its direct relationship to the daily walk of the individual believer is not as obvious and yet Simpson presented the personal return of Christ as the zenith of the believers pilgrimage and the complete fulfillment of the Gospel. All the blessings of salvation, sanctification and divine healing are merely the shadow of what is to come when Christ returns for his bride.246
Simpson wrote that the second coming was the glorious culmination of all the parts of the gospel—that of Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King.247 Simpson concludes, “So that the truth and hope of the Lord’s coming is linked with all truth and life and is the Church’s great and blessed hope.”248
Simpson had grown up in the Presbyterian church and attended Knox College, which was a Presbyterian college. His eschatology growing up and throughout his years in seminary as well as during his first two pastorates was a “spiritualized amillennial” or “post-millennial” view of Christ’s second coming.249 Simpson attributed his conversion to premillennialism to the Lord, who revealed to him through the Word by the Holy Spirit the truth of Christ’s second coming.250 It is important to remember that the popular view among many evangelicals, especially among Presbyterian pastors such as Arthur T. Pierson and W. J. Erdman, was premillennialism. Pierson was a close associate of Simpson’s. He ministered at Simpson’s missionary conventions and taught at the Missionary Training Institute. Although Simpson was a premillennialist, he was not a dispensationalist, which was a popular view at the time.
Another good friend of Simpson’s was A. J. Gordon, who he considered to be his mentor in eschatology.251 During the eulogy Simpson gave at Gordon’s funeral, he stated that Gordon’s book on premillennialism, Ecce Venit: Behold He Cometh, was “one of the best ever published on that theme.”252 Finally it was Major Daniel Whittle, the main speaker at the Louisville crusade, who was the outspoken premillennialist who may have most influenced Simpson’s view of Christ’s second coming.
Simpson was unique at this time in his eschatological views because he saw a direct correlation with Christ’s second coming and the fulfilling of the Great Commission verses found in Matt 28:19–20 and Acts 1:8. He also was convinced that, along with these Great Commission verses, Christians had to fulfill Matt 24:14.253 Matthew 24:14 states, “And the Gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come” (NIV). Simpson linked the return of Christ with the church’s missionary responsibility.254 Sawin comments that “Students at his [Simpson’s] Missionary College and those who attended the conventions felt the urgency of this verse. Failure to take the Gospel where Christ was not known simply delayed His return. Therefore, to the work!”255 Sawin goes on to say that Walter Turnbull, an associate of Simpson’s, declared Simpson to be the only missionary leader that associated Christ’s second coming with the completion of the missionary task.256
Missions and evangelism became the lifeblood of Simpson and the early Christian and Missionary Alliance. They were proclaiming the gospel to unreached people to help bring back the Coming King. Simpson writes in his book Missionary Messages, “We know that our missionary work is not in vain, but, in addition to the blessing it is to bring souls to Christ, it is to bring Christ himself back again.”257 He knew that not all would accept the gospel message. The goal was to gather a remnant for Christ’s return. When this remnant was complete, then Christ would come. Simpson remarks, “We know that as many as are disposed to eternal life will believe and that when the last of this glorious company shall have been gathered home, the age will close and the Lord will come.”258 This motivation of bringing back the Coming King drove the early Christian and Missionary Alliance to become one of the great missionary forces in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as it still is today.
Another aspect of Christ as the Coming King was that it had a sanctifying effect on Christians. It would cause believers to live holy lives and work for Christ.259 In Simpson’s The Four-Fold Gospel, he tells of the effect Christ’s second coming has on believers: “It causes the Christian to be ready. Secondly, it causes us to be watching. Thirdly, it causes us to be faithful. Finally, it causes us to be diligent.”260
Christ’s second coming sanctifies believers and encourages them to live holy lives. Both of these aspects of Christ as the Coming King drove Simpson to serve God. He wanted to be involved in helping to bring back the King. He also wanted to be a faithful servant so that God would be pleased in his work for the Savior. The vision of Christ as the Coming King is what drove Simpson and the Christian and Missionary Alliance. It became a model and an example to other denominations and missionary organizations, which has impacted both North America and the world at large.
The Third Great Awakening made a tremendous impact on Christianity at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was due to the Awakening that the church reached out to the masses in North America and the unreached peoples of the world. Moody, Phoebe Palmer, Gordon, Pierson, Torrey, Chapman, and Simpson were instrumental in the Great Awakening. Simpson was one of the leaders of the Awakening and well known in his day, but today he has been neglected by scholars despite the fact that he began the missionary church, helped found the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and helped popularize the Fourfold Gospel. The Fourfold Gospel and the missionary outreach of Simpson and the Alliance impacted the Awakening as a movement. Evangelism was the key component in the spread of the Third Great Awakening, and the next chapter will examine the evangelism phase of the Awakening as well as Simpson’s place in evangelism.
101. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings and Reform, 10.
102. Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost, 3.
103. Hardman, “Return of the Spirit,” 28.
104. Ibid., 29.
105. Ibid., 32.
106. Scharpff, History of Evangelism, 173.
107. Orr, Second Evangelical Awakening, 121.
108. Hardman, Seasons of Refreshing, 173.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid., 174.
111. Hardman, “Time for Prayer,” 33.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid.
115. Shattuck, “Revivals in the Camp,” 30.
116. Ibid., 33.
117. Orr, Second Evangelical Awakening, 121.
118. Ibid.
119. Ibid., 122.
120. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People., 812 n. 5.
121. Cohen, Spirit of the Lord, 149.
122. Ibid.
123. Thompson, A. B. Simpson, 200.
124. Ibid.,199.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid., 200.
127. Ibid., 202.
128. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 298.
129. Ibid.
130. Simpson, Life of Prayer, 7.
131. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 298.
132. Ibid., 2.
133. Orr, Light of the Nations, 204.
134. Ibid., 273.
135. Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 78.
136. Orr, Light of the Nations, 206.
137. Thompson, A. B. Simpson, 2.
138. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 20.
139. Stoesz, Understanding My Church, 102.
140. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 20.
141. Thompson, A. B. Simpson, 9.
142. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 19.
143. Stoesz, Understanding My Church, 102.
144. Thompson, A. B. Simpson, 14.
145. Ibid.
146. Stoesz, Understanding My Church, 102.
147. Ibid., 103.
148. Tozer, Wingspread, 30.
149. Ibid., 33
150. Stoesz, Understanding My Church, 103.
151. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 26.
152. Ibid., 26–27.
153. Ibid., 27.
154. Ibid.
155. Tozer, Wingspread, 39.
156. Ibid., 44.
157. Ibid.
158. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 30.
159. Ibid., 29.
160. Ibid., 28.
161. Ibid., 29.
162. Tozer, Wingspread, 55.
163. Ibid., 58.
164. Ibid., 61.
165. Stoesz, Understanding My Church, 105.
166. Thompson, A. B. Simpson, 83.
167. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 35.
168. Thompson, A. B. Simpson, 68.
169. Ibid., 84–85.
170. Ibid., 85.
171. Stoesz, Understanding My Church, 107.
172. Ibid.
173. Ibid..
174. Tozer, Wingspread, 91.
175. Stoesz, Understanding My Church, 109.
176. Ibid.
177. Ibid.
178. Ibid.
179. Thompson, A. B. Simpson, 128–29.
180. Ibid., 129.
181. Ibid., 129–30.
182. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 76.
183. Tozer, Wingspread, 84.
184. Ibid., 100.
185. Ibid., 100–101.
186. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 132.
187. Ibid.
188. Ibid., 141.
189. Fessenden, “Present Truths,” 3.
190. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 4. Simpson explained the message of the Fourfold Gospel as follows: He writes:
1. Christ is our complete Savior from guilt . . . from inbred sin, from sickness . . . for time and for eternity. 2. Christian holiness is . . . Christ life, perfection in Christ abiding in a perfect Christ. 3. Christian holiness is a free gift of God through Jesus Christ . . . received by faith and retained by abiding in Him . . . We do not grow into it, but we go into it and grow out from it into all the fullness of stature of Christ. 4. Healing is the purchase of Christ’s atonement and the gift of Christ indwelling and resurrection life. Through the indwelling Christ, we are supernaturally quickened, sustained and enabled to rise above the power of disease, to overcome infirmity and to fulfill all of the work to which He calls us until our life work is complete and we rise to the higher life of immortal resurrection. 5. The age we live in points to a speedy consummation. The Holy Scriptures meet this expectation with the personal and pre-millennial coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to set up His Kingdom on earth (ibid.).
191. Ibid.
192. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 3.
193. Ibid., 4–5.
194. Ibid., 6.
195. Ibid., 4–5.
196. Simpson, Holy Spirit, 1:160–62.
197. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 166. Dwayne Ratzliff, in his chapter titled “An Old Medieval Message: A Turning Point in the Life of A. B. Simpson,” writes of the impact of the treatise True Peace and other literature that had an impact on Simpson’s spiritual life and ministry.
198. Simpson, Four-Fold Gospel, 4.
199. Ibid., 5.
200. Simpson, Holy Spirit, 1:3.
201. Simpson, Four-Fold Gospel, 3.
202. Stoesz, Sanctification, 11.
203. Thompson, A. B. Simpson, 11.
204. Ibid.
205. Ibid., 12.
206. Ibid., 16.
207. Ibid.
208. Tozer, Wingspread, 24–25.
209. Ibid.
210. McGraw, “A. B. Simpson as a Missions Advocate,” 3.
211. Gilbertson, Baptism of the Holy Spirit, 36.
212. Ibid.
213. Stoesz, Sanctification, 21.
214. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 113.
215. Ibid.
216. Ibid.
217. Stoesz, Sanctification, 60.
218. Gilbertson, Baptism of the Holy Spirit, 37.
219. Ibid.
220. Ibid.
221. Ibid.
222. Ibid.
223. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 43.
224. Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 121.
225. Ibid., 122.
226. Ibid.
227. Ibid.
228. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 40.
229. Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 123.
230. Ibid., 124.
231. Ibid.
232. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 40.
233. Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 124.
234. Ibid.
235. Ibid., 125.
236. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 41.
237. Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 127.
238. Ibid., 129.
239. Ibid., 140.
240. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 43.
241. Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 136.
242. Niklaus et al., All for Jesus, 43.
243. Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 6.
244. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 16.
245. Ibid.
246. Fessenden, “Present Truths,” 18.
247. Simpson, Four-Fold Gospel, 68.
248. Ibid., 67.
249. Nienkirchen, A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement, 70.
250. Ibid., 20.
251. Ibid.
252. Ibid., 22.
253. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 15.
254. Ibid
255. Ibid.
256. Ibid.
257. Simpson, Missionary Messages, 167.
258. Ibid., 176–81.
259. Hartzfeld and Nienkirchen, Birth of a Vision, 16.
260. Simpson, Four-fold Gospel, 90–93.