Oswald Chambers

Life

Chambers was born in 1874 in Aberdeen, Scotland, the son of the Baptist minister Clarence Chambers. His father's ministry took the family to Stoke-on-Trent and Perth before they moved to London in 1889. He is said to have been converted as a teenager after hearing Charles Spurgeon preach, and at sixteen he was baptized and became a member of Rye Lane Baptist Chapel in London.

Chambers initially hoped to become an artist and studied art at the National Art Training School in London (now the Royal College of Art) and at the University of Edinburgh. While in Edinburgh he sensed a call to the ministry, and in 1897 he entered Dunoon College near Glasgow to study theology; he later taught there.

Ministry and Work

During his years at Dunoon, Chambers met the barrister Reader Harris and became a speaker for the Pentecostal League of Prayer, the interdenominational prayer fellowship Harris had founded. Through the League he met Juji Nakada, a Japanese Holiness evangelist, and developed an interest in world missions; in 1906–1907 he traveled with Nakada by way of the United States to Japan. In May 1910 he married Gertrude Hobbs, whom he called by the nickname "Biddy." A skilled stenographer, she took down her husband's sermons and lectures in shorthand.

In 1911 Chambers founded the Bible Training College in Clapham, London, in a building purchased by the Pentecostal League of Prayer, and served as its principal. Some 106 resident students are reported to have studied there between 1911 and 1915. After the outbreak of the First World War, he suspended the college's operations in 1915 and became a YMCA chaplain, ministering to Australian and New Zealand soldiers in camps such as Zeitoun, near Cairo, Egypt. In October 1917 he developed appendicitis but reportedly delayed going to the hospital, saying the beds would be needed for soldiers wounded in an impending battle. He did not recover after surgery and died of a pulmonary hemorrhage on November 15 of that year. He was buried in Cairo with military honors.

Chambers wrote only one book himself. His more than thirty other books were published by his wife, Biddy, who compiled them from her shorthand notes. Among them is the devotional My Utmost for His Highest, arranged for daily reading, which was published in Britain in 1927 and in the United States in 1935. The book is reported to have been translated into thirty-nine languages, and an updated edition in contemporary language was later released.

Assessment

Chambers is sometimes called an "evangelical mystic." His devotional writings, which emphasize a life of complete surrender to God, are widely read across denominational lines. Most of his works, however, are not manuscripts he wrote himself but compilations of lectures and sermons transcribed by his wife. It is therefore also noted that this editorial process should be taken into account when examining his thought. In addition, since the release of revised editions that render the original prose in contemporary language, readers have been divided over whether to choose the original edition or the updated one.