Arthur T. Pierson Biography and Books

Arthur Tappan Pierson spent most of his life telling other people's stories. He wrote the memoir of George Müller, filled Charles Spurgeon's pulpit, gave a generation of students its watchword, and edited for more than twenty years a magazine whose whole business was reporting what God was doing in other lands. It is easy, reading about him, to see only the crowds he stood in front of. But the turning points of his own life were small and private: a Sunday evening in Detroit, a railway carriage between Utah and Chicago, a few hours in his study with an old man who would not let him get away with an argument that had no Bible in it.

A New York boyhood

He was born on 6 March 1837 in Chatham Street, New York — the street now called Park Row — and was named in honour of Arthur Tappan, the New York merchant and abolitionist. His father was Stephen Haines Pierson. It was a name that carried a conscience with it, and in time the boy would grow into it.

At thirteen he was sent away from home to the Collegiate Institute at Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. That year, 1850, a series of revival meetings was held in the Methodist church in the town, and there the Presbyterian schoolboy publicly professed faith in Jesus Christ. It is worth noticing where it happened. The man who would spend his life among Presbyterians, and end it outside their ranks, came to Christ at a Methodist meeting. He never afterwards had much patience with the walls between believers.

He went on to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, graduating in 1857, and then to Union Theological Seminary in New York to prepare for the ministry.

A young pastor and a growing household

In 1860 he married Sarah Frances Benedict, and the same year took his first pastorate, at Binghamton, New York. Three years later he moved to Waterford, in the same state, and stayed six years. These were the quiet, formative years in which a young minister learns to preach week by week to the same faces.

The Piersons had seven children. It is recorded of them that every one came to faith before the age of fifteen, and that all grew up to serve Christ as missionaries, pastors or lay leaders. His eldest son, Delavan, would one day write his life. Whatever else is said of Pierson's public ministry, it began at a family table.

Detroit, and a church that burned

In 1869 he was called to the Fort Street Presbyterian Church in Detroit, one of the most prestigious congregations in the city, with one of the finest church buildings in the land. He was an eloquent preacher and a growing Bible scholar, and he was, by every outward measure, a success.

Something was already stirring. In 1874 he hosted the evangelist Major D. W. Whittle and the singer P. P. Bliss for meetings in Detroit, and their simple, direct gospel left him seeking more of God's abiding presence and power in his own life and ministry. He was not looking for a larger church. He was beginning to suspect that the one he had was not reaching the people who most needed it.

Within days, in March 1876, the Fort Street church caught fire. The interior was gutted, the roof destroyed, and the spire came crashing down into the street. The congregation moved its services into the Detroit opera house while the building was restored.

It was in the borrowed theatre that the thing he had sensed came to pass. People who would never have walked into the fashionable church on Fort Street walked into the opera house. And Pierson, standing on a stage instead of in a pulpit, found himself looking honestly at the ministry he had been building. He came to see that he had grown proud, that he had been courting the approval of the wealthy, and that his handsome church had been, without meaning to, a closed door to the poor.

He did not leave the lesson in the theatre. In the years that followed he led his congregation to turn outward toward Detroit's poor. He set himself against the system of pew rents, by which the best seats belonged to those who could pay, and he came to take his own salary on a basis of faith rather than fixed contract. None of this was comfortable in a wealthy church. It was the beginning of a life of obeying convictions at a cost.

A train from Ogden

For more than twenty years Pierson had followed at a distance the career of George Müller of Bristol, the man who fed thousands of orphans without asking anyone but God for money. In May 1878 he was in San Francisco when Müller was to speak on a Sunday afternoon at Oakland, just across the bay. Pierson had a conscientious objection to needless Sunday travel, and so he stayed where he was and let what seemed his only chance go by.

God, it turned out, was not bound by his timetable. When Pierson's train reached Ogden, in Utah, Mr. and Mrs. Müller boarded it, and they travelled to Chicago together. Pierson introduced himself and talked with the old man about the things of God every day of the journey. At his invitation Müller came to Detroit on his next tour, and in January 1880 preached at Fort Street on two Sundays and two weeknights between them.

He also met Pierson privately in his study, for an hour at a time over several days. Pierson brought his questions, and his objections. He had argued persistently against the premillennial view of the Lord's return, and he laid out every argument he had. Müller heard him through and gave a single answer: that the arguments had one fatal defect — not one of them was based on the word of God — and that he would never reach the truth until he laid his prejudices aside and asked, like a little child, what Scripture actually said.

Pierson also told him of the convictions that had been growing since the fire: that the worship of the churches had lost its first simplicity, that pew rents were pernicious, that fixed salaries were unscriptural, and that the duty of Christians to the masses outside the churches was grossly neglected. As Müller rose to leave, he said:

My beloved brother, the Lord has given you much light upon these matters, and will hold you correspondingly responsible for its use. If you obey Him and walk in the light, you will have more; if not, the light will be withdrawn.

— George Müller to Pierson in Detroit, 1880, as Pierson recorded it

Nearly twenty years later Pierson wrote that those words had never left him:

It is a singular lesson on the importance of an anointed tongue, that forty simple words, spoken over twenty years ago, have had a daily influence on the life of him to whom they were spoken.

— Arthur T. Pierson, George Müller of Bristol (1899)

Philadelphia, and a voice for the world

In 1882 he moved to Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, and the next year to Bethany Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, where he served from 1883 to 1889. Bethany was a church that worked among the city's urban poor, and there Pierson ran a missionary training school. The man who had once preached to Detroit's wealthy was now training workers for the streets and for the ends of the earth.

Missions had become his great theme. At one of D. L. Moody's Bible conferences in 1885 he called on the Protestant churches to launch a worldwide missionary campaign, and in 1886 he published The Crisis of Missions, which became the leading missionary book of its day.

In July 1886 Moody gathered college students for a summer conference at Mount Hermon, near Northfield, Massachusetts. Pierson spoke to them on God's providence in modern missions and urged them to evangelize the world in their own generation. By the end of the conference one hundred students had volunteered for service overseas. Out of that response grew the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which in 1888 took as its watchword a phrase traced to Pierson's address: "the evangelization of the world in this generation." By the year of his death the movement had sent some five thousand volunteers abroad from America alone.

From 1888 until he died he edited The Missionary Review of the World, which he and a colleague expanded into a monthly and made the most important nondenominational missions journal of its time. Month after month, for twenty-three years, he gathered the news of the gospel's advance and set it before the churches.

In Spurgeon's pulpit

In the autumn of 1891 Charles Spurgeon, gravely ill, left London for the warmer air of Mentone in the south of France, and Pierson was asked to fill the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in his absence. It was a striking choice: a Presbyterian who had never been baptised as a believer, preaching to the great Baptist congregation. When Spurgeon died on 31 January 1892, the Tabernacle asked Pierson to stay, and he carried the pulpit until 1893, when Spurgeon's son Thomas took it up.

The question of baptism would not leave him. Some time later he became persuaded from Scripture that baptism belonged to believers, and on 1 February 1896, at the age of fifty-eight, he was baptised by James Spurgeon, Charles's brother. It cost him his standing: he left the Presbytery of Philadelphia over it. It was the same principle Müller had pressed on him sixteen years earlier, and he paid its price in the same coin.

That same year, 1896, he was holding meetings in Bristol and heard Müller, then in his ninety-first year, preach at Bethesda Chapel on the seventy-seventh Psalm — on prayer, his favourite subject. Pierson asked "his beloved father Müller" to speak at the close of his own series, and the old man gave a forty-five-minute address on prayer and missions with a vigour that seemed to deny his age.

Pierson became a familiar voice at the Keswick Convention in England, whose teaching on the Spirit-filled life he loved, and in 1903 he published The Keswick Movement in Precept and Practise.

The witness to a prayer-hearing God

Müller died in March 1898, and the next year Pierson published George Müller of Bristol, soon received as the authorized memoir. He did not write it to add to the facts, which Müller had already recorded in exhaustive detail. He wrote it, he said, "simply and solely" to "extend, emphasize, and perpetuate George Müller's witness to a prayer-hearing God." Its pages carry things Müller told him personally, among them this:

Not once, or five times, or five hundred times, but thousands of times in these threescore years, have we had in hand not enough for one more meal, either in food or in funds; but not once has God failed us; not once have we or the orphans gone hungry or lacked any good thing.

— George Müller to Arthur T. Pierson

Reading the book now, it is hard not to hear Pierson's own story underneath his friend's. The chapter that tells of their meeting ends not with praise of Müller but with a warning to the reader, drawn from Pierson's own experience of light received and light obeyed:

We risk the forfeiture of privileges which are not employed for God, and of obscuring convictions which are not carried into action. God's word to us is "use or lose."

— Arthur T. Pierson, George Müller of Bristol (1899)

The last journey

He never stopped working. Across his life he preached more than thirteen thousand sermons and wrote more than fifty books, and he served as a consulting editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909 by his friend C. I. Scofield.

In 1910, past seventy, he set out to visit the missions of East Asia — the fields he had spent a quarter of a century writing about. In Korea he taught the Bible in a number of churches. But he fell ill on the journey and had to turn for home. He died in Brooklyn on 3 June 1911, at the age of seventy-four, and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

Even then the missionary cause had the last word. He left funds in his will for a Bible institute in Korea, and the Pierson Memorial Bible Institute was founded in Seoul in his name; it continues today as Pyeongtaek University. The year after his death his son Delavan published his life under the title A Spiritual Warrior, Mighty in the Scriptures.

Pierson's life is sometimes told as a list of platforms — Detroit, Philadelphia, Northfield, London, Keswick. It reads better as a list of obediences. A proud young pastor let a fire humble him. A Presbyterian let an old Brethren preacher correct his theology. A man with a great reputation let himself be baptised again at fifty-eight and lose his place for it. Each time, as Müller had promised, the light he obeyed was followed by more. And the book he left behind still does the thing he most wanted it to do: it sends its readers not to George Müller, and not to Arthur Pierson, but to the God who hears prayer.