Charles Simeon

Life

Simeon was born in 1759 in Reading, England. In Korean his name is also rendered as 시므온 or 시미언. After attending Eton College, he entered King's College, Cambridge, in 1779. Soon after matriculating, he learned that all students were required to receive Holy Communion. While preparing for the sacrament he read devotional books, and he is said to have experienced conversion upon receiving Communion at Easter in 1779.

In 1782 he became a fellow of King's College and was ordained deacon, the first order of ordained ministry in the Anglican Church. In 1783 he received his bachelor's degree and was ordained priest. Around this time his friendships with John Venn and Henry Venn strengthened his evangelical and Calvinist convictions.

In 1782 the Bishop of Ely appointed him to Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge. The churchwardens and congregation, who disliked his evangelical leanings, opposed the appointment. Some parishioners locked their pews and stayed away from services. Through steady pastoral care Simeon gradually softened the opposition, and he served the church for fifty-four years, until his death in 1836. He never married.

Ministry and Achievements

• Training preachers: At a time when there was no formal course of clerical training, he held fortnightly classes in preaching for students preparing for ordination. He also hosted a weekly conversation party open to any undergraduate. In 1792 he read the French Reformed pastor Jean Claude's essay on the composition of a sermon and was deeply influenced by it. The fruit of this work was the twenty-one-volume Horae Homileticae, a collection of sermon outlines arranged by biblical text, published between 1832 and 1836.
• Missions: In 1799 he took part in founding the Church Missionary Society, the Anglican overseas mission agency, and in 1809 he helped establish the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. He advised the British East India Company in selecting chaplains to be sent to India. His curate Henry Martyn went to India as an East India Company chaplain and became renowned as a pioneering missionary. Simeon also supported the work of the Bible Society.
• The Simeon Trust: John Thornton, who died in 1813, left the advowsons (the rights to nominate parish clergy) of ten parishes to a trust, and Simeon became one of its trustees. Using inherited wealth, he purchased additional advowsons so that evangelical clergy could succeed one another in those parishes. The trust still holds all or part of the patronage of some 160 parishes in the Church of England.

Influence on the Korean Church

No record has been found of activity directly connected with missions to Korea. In Korea he is introduced mainly in writings on church history and the history of evangelism. Christian media present him as a model of campus ministry who invited students into his home for Bible study and prayer meetings, and they sometimes mention him within the stream of the British student missionary movement that led to the Cambridge Seven. A translated book on the history of evangelism treats him, together with William Wilberforce, as one of the figures who transformed British society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Assessment

Simeon is regarded as a leading preacher of the evangelical revival in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and as a major figure in the development of Bible-centered preaching within the Anglican Church. He is also credited with leading the evangelical Low Church party, in contrast to the High Church party, which emphasized liturgy and episcopacy. The historian Thomas Macaulay remarked that his influence extended beyond Cambridge to all of England and that his real sway in the Church was greater than that of any archbishop. His practice of purchasing advowsons to install evangelical clergy is regarded as an innovative effort that later helped build the foundations of evangelicalism. During his lifetime, however, and especially in the early years of his ministry, he long endured opposition and slander from his parishioners.