Charles Spurgeon

Life

Spurgeon's father and grandfather were both Nonconformist ministers. Nonconformists were Protestants who did not belong to the Church of England, the established church. Spurgeon spent most of his childhood at his grandfather's home, where he read Puritan devotional literature. On January 6, 1850, at the age of fifteen, he took shelter from a snowstorm in a small Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester. There he heard a layman preach on Isaiah 45:22 and was converted. That same year he was baptized and became a Baptist, and at sixteen he preached his first sermon.

In the early 1850s he took charge of a small church in Waterbeach, near Cambridge. In 1854 he became pastor of the New Park Street Chapel in Southwark, London. As the congregation grew rapidly, the church rented Exeter Hall and the Surrey Gardens Music Hall for worship, and on March 18, 1861, it dedicated the Metropolitan Tabernacle, which seated five to six thousand people. His twin sons, Charles and Thomas, were born in 1856. In his later years he suffered from gout and depression. He died in Menton, France, on January 31, 1892, at the age of fifty-seven; approximately 100,000 people are reported to have paid their respects at his funeral.

Ministry and Achievements

• Sermon publication: Beginning in January 1855, his sermons were printed and published weekly. The practice continued after his death until 1917. Collected as The New Park Street Pulpit and The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, the sermons fill some sixty volumes in all.
• Founding of institutions: He founded the Pastors' College for the training of ministers, the Stockwell Orphanage, and the monthly magazine The Sword and the Trowel.
• Theology: He belonged to the Particular Baptists, a branch of the Baptist tradition that follows Calvinist theology. He has been described as "converted among the Methodists, a Baptist by profession, and a Calvinist by inheritance," and he is also known as "the last of the Puritans."
• Controversies: In his "Baptismal Regeneration" sermon of June 5, 1864, he rebutted the Anglican teaching that infant baptism has sacramental efficacy. In 1887 he published a series of articles in The Sword and the Trowel warning that evolutionary thinking and liberal theology were leading the faith of the church down the "Down Grade." At the close of this "Downgrade Controversy," he withdrew from the Baptist Union of Great Britain.

Influence on the Korean Church

In the Korean church, Spurgeon is commonly called the "Prince of Preachers." The books of his translated and introduced in Korea are mainly collections of sermons, and several publishers have also issued volumes of sermons selected around themes such as prayer or preaching. He has been presented in Korea as a man who preached to vast audiences without having received formal theological training.

Assessment

Opinions of Spurgeon were divided even in his own day. Some praised him as the greatest orator since George Whitefield, while others criticized his preaching as theatrical, coarse, and even blasphemous. The Baptismal Regeneration sermon and the Downgrade Controversy are regarded as the most significant controversies of his lifetime. Today, conservative evangelicals hold his stand in the Downgrade Controversy in high regard as a courageous effort to defend orthodox faith. At the same time, the controversy is known to have placed a heavy emotional strain on him in his later years as his health declined. His collected sermons are regarded as the largest body of printed sermons in the history of the church.