A. B. Simpson Biography, Books, and Sermons

Albert Benjamin Simpson had, by his mid-thirties, everything a minister of his era could want: a large salary, a fashionable New York pulpit, and a reputation as one of the ablest preachers on the continent. He laid it all down — the salary, the pulpit, and eventually his denomination’s security — to preach Jesus to the immigrants and working poor no one else wanted in their pews. Out of that surrender came a worldwide missionary movement, the first Bible college in North America, more than a hundred books, and a simple message he never tired of repeating: not the blessing, not the healing, not even the deeper life, but Christ Himself.

A Boy on Prince Edward Island

Simpson was born on 15 December 1843 at Bayview, Prince Edward Island, Canada, into a devout Scottish Presbyterian home where the Sabbath was kept strictly and the catechism learned early. The family soon moved to a farm in western Ontario. As a teenager, studying too hard for the ministry and haunted by a sense that he did not yet know the God he meant to serve, Albert broke down in body and soul. Light came through an old Puritan book, Walter Marshall’s Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, which told him that the first good news of the gospel is that a sinner may come to Christ just as he is. He came — at about fifteen years of age — and never afterwards doubted that Christ had received him.

The Young Presbyterian

He earned his own way to Knox College, Toronto, teaching school and winning scholarships, and while still a student wrote out a solemn covenant of self-dedication — pages long, signed and dated — giving himself to God for whatever service, suffering, or sacrifice might be asked. The document, found among his papers, reads like a prophecy of the life that followed. In 1865, only twenty-one, he was called to Knox Church, Hamilton — one of the largest congregations in Canada — where in eight years some seven hundred and fifty members were added. In 1873 he accepted the pulpit of Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. There, in a city still wounded and divided by the Civil War, he persuaded rival congregations into united evangelistic campaigns and learned to preach for a verdict. And there a deeper crisis found him: outwardly successful and inwardly exhausted by his own striving, he read of the higher Christian life and yielded himself wholly to Christ — discovering, as he later put it, that sanctification is not an attainment to be struggled toward but an indwelling Person to be received.

New York and the Neglected Masses

In 1879 Simpson came to Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. He was soon burdened beyond bearing by the crowds outside his church’s doors — Italian immigrants, dock workers, the unchurched poor — who could never feel at home among rented pews and formal society. When it became plain that his congregation did not share the burden, he resigned, in November 1881, with no salary, no society behind him, and a wife and six children to feed. Margaret Simpson later confessed she thought the decision madness; she came to share the work with her whole heart. Beginning with a handful of followers in a rented hall, he formed an independent Gospel Tabernacle where every seat was free and every class of person welcome.

Healed and Wholly His

Behind that resignation lay another transaction. Simpson had been sickly for years — a heart condition so serious that physicians gave him little hope of continued labour. In the summer of 1881, at Old Orchard Beach in Maine, he heard the scriptures opened on Christ’s ministry to the body, and alone among the pines he made a solemn covenant: he took the Lord Jesus as his healer, promised to use whatever strength was given for God alone, and asked never to be released from the bargain. The chronic trouble lifted; the man whom doctors had written off carried one of the heaviest workloads in American church history for nearly forty more years. From this grew his best-known formulation, the Fourfold Gospel: Jesus Christ our Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King.

The Alliance

Simpson could never see a need without founding something to meet it. In 1883 he opened the Missionary Training Institute — the first Bible college in North America, later settled at Nyack on the Hudson — to prepare ordinary, consecrated men and women for the fields no one else would fill: not scholars only, but clerks and carpenters and widows who had heard the call of God. The same year he sent his first missionary party toward the Congo. In 1887, at Old Orchard, he formed two societies, one for the deeper spiritual life at home and one for the evangelization of the world, which united in 1897 as the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He meant it as a fellowship across the churches, not a new denomination; it became, in time, both a denomination and a missionary force on every continent, from China and India to South America and the Congo basin. The unreached world lay on him like a private grief. His missionary hymn mourns the “hundred thousand souls a day” passing into eternity without the gospel, and answers with Christ’s own commission: all power is given unto Me — go.

Pen and Hymnbook

Out of the same tireless heart flowed the writing: weekly editorials in the magazine he founded (today’s Alliance Life), devotional classics such as Days of Heaven Upon Earth, A Larger Christian Life, and The Fourfold Gospel, Christ-centred expositions spanning the whole Bible, and hymns still sung wherever the deeper life is prized. The best window into the man is the testimony he gave at Bethshan, London, in 1885, published ever since as Himself — the story of how he stopped seeking experiences and found everything in the Person of Jesus. He set it to verse:

Once it was the blessing, now it is the Lord;
Once it was the feeling, now it is His Word;
Once His gift I wanted, now the Giver own;
Once I sought for healing, now Himself alone.

— A. B. Simpson, “Himself”

Rest at Nyack

Simpson preached, travelled, wrote, and administered at full stretch into his seventies, and when his strength finally failed he grieved most that he could no longer carry the missionary burden in prayer as before. He died at Nyack, New York, on 29 October 1919, and was buried on the hillside campus of the institute he founded. The societies he began now number their churches in the thousands and their missionaries around the globe; but his truest monument is smaller and nearer: the reader who, somewhere in his pages, stops chasing the blessing and finds the Blesser — Himself.