Spurgeon who is he

Soon thereafter he moved to Cambridge, joined St. Andrews Street Baptist Church, and began his ministry as an itinerant preacher. In the Metropolitan Tabernacle opened and his ministry exploded resulting in the founding of 66 parachurch ministries. His remarkable ministry in London would last 38 years before his death on January 31st, in Menton, France.

Born in the country, when the nineteen-year-old moved to London in he was entering the largest and most powerful city in the world. However, in London he found himself on the south side of the river, in Southwark borough. When the congregation — and the giving! He earned this money from speaking fees and from the sale of his wildly popular sermons and books. Charles Spurgeon was a truly unique instrument of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Spurgeon's preaching was both enormously popular and highly controversial. Some regarded him as the greatest orator since Whitefield; others criticized him as theatrical, awkward, and even sacrilegious. Two of his most controversial works were his "Baptismal Regeneration" sermon and his "Down Grade" articles.

On June 5, , he preached a sermon entitled "Baptismal Regeneration," objecting to Anglican teachings on the sacramental power of infant baptism.

Over , copies were sold, and the furor it provoked led to Spurgeon's withdrawal from the Evangelical Alliance, an ecumenical association of Dissenters and Evangelical Anglicans. The "Down Grade" controversy began in , when Spurgeon published a series of articles declaring that evolutionary thinking and liberal theology threatened to "Down Grade" the church. In this case, he was concerned not with Anglican teaching, but with what he believed to be doctrinal error, particularly Unitarian ideas, within the Baptist Union.

Spurgeon was born in Kelvedon, Essex, to a family of clerics. His father and grandfather were Nonconformist ministers meaning they weren't Anglicans , and Spurgeon's earliest memories were of looking at the pictures in Pilgrim's Progress and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. His formal education was limited, even by nineteenth-century standards: he attended local schools for a few years but never earned a university degree.

He lived in Cambridge for a time, where he combined the roles of scholar and teaching assistant and was briefly tutored in Greek. Though he eschewed formal education, all his life he valued learning and books—especially those by Puritan divines—and his personal library eventually exceeded 12, volumes. At age 15, Spurgeon broke with family tradition by becoming a Baptist. He attributed this conversion to a sermon heard by "chance"—when a snowstorm blew him away from his destination into a Primitive Methodist chapel.

The experience forced Spurgeon to re-evaluate his idea on, among other things, infant baptism. Within four months he was baptized and joined a Baptist church. His theology, however, remained more or less Calvinist, though he liked to think of himself as a "mere Christian. Still a teen, Spurgeon began preaching in rural Cambridgeshire. He quickly filled the pews in his first pastorate in the village of Waterbeach. He had a boyish appearance that contrasted sharply with the maturity of his sermons.

He had a good memory and always spoke extemporaneously from an outline. There were about five hundred people in Stambourne, a town so remote that even at the end of the nineteenth century it lacked a railroad station. The revolutions in industry and transportation that transformed Victorian Britain were unknown to Stambourne, where the pace of life revolved around the seasons rather than the machine.

Ten years after leaving Stambourne, Spurgeon began his London ministry, and for the rest of his life the metropolis was his home. Yet he was never truly comfortable in an urban setting. All his life he continued to return to Stambourne, hoping to find in that tranquil setting some respite from the hectic pace of city life. His roots and values remained those of rural, pre-industrial Britain. The fictional character of John Ploughman was modeled upon Will Richardson, a farmer and neighbor in Stambourne; but there was much of Spurgeon as well in the blunt, opinionated, and humorous ploughman.

For many, the result was alienation, displacement, a lack of tradition, and an end of purposeful work. Spurgeon shared the misgivings about the disappearance of the old England, but he never lost his faith in the fundamental decency of ordinary Englishmen. He understood the values of faith, kinship, and meaningful work that had given purpose to the lives of villagers for centuries.

And he was able to recall those values to urban congregations in such a plain and compelling manner that he seemed to many to embody all that was quintessentially English.

In Dr. After returning to live with his parents in Colchester, he attended a local school for a few years, and then for a brief time was an usher or teaching assisant at an Anglican school in Newmarket where a maternal uncle was a master. He moved to Cambridge in , and he lived in the Cambridge area until he began his London ministry four years later.

During his years in Cambridge he combined the roles of scholar, teaching assistant, and preacher. He was briefly tutored in Greek, but his acquaintance with the classics was fleeting in a period in which the undergraduate curriculum was overwhelmingly classical, and knowledge of classical languages was assumed to be the prerequisite to scholarship.

As a Dissenter, Spurgeon could not at that time take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge, but there were excellent Dissenting academies and denominational colleges open to him. But Spurgeon decided that he would not seek formal ministerial training. His example was unusual, even among the Baptists. Although Spurgeon did not attend a college, he valued learning and loved books. He collected Puritan editions, and his personal library of twelve thousand volumes contained one thousand works published before There is a hint of youthful rebellion in his move.

Spurgeon had become convinced while he was still a schoolboy that the ritual of infant baptism, practiced by his father and grandfather, was unscriptural. Spurgeon attributed his conversion to a sermon he heard by chance when a snowstorm blew him away from his destination and into a Primitive Methodist chapel.

The event reinforced his conviction that truth was more likely to be found among the poor and humble than among the overeducated and refined. Spurgeon began preaching in rural Cambridgeshire when he was barely in his teens. His first pastorale was in the village of Waterbeach, a few miles from the university. Spurgeon was not average; even as a teenaged pastor in a country town he had star quality. His boyish appearance was in startling contrast to the maturity of his sermons, which naturally were strongly influenced by the Puritan works he had studied since childhood.

He had a retentive memory and always spoke extemporaneously from an outline. His youth, energy, and oratorical skills, combined with his command of old-fashioned texts, made a vivid impact upon his congregations. People trekked from miles away to hear the preaching prodigy of Waterbeach.

Within eighteen months his reputation had spread to London, and he was invited to preach at the historic New Park Street Chapel.