A Man with Four Wheels on His Chariot

I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. PHILIPPIANS 4:13

A Scottish covenanting home. Albert Benjamin Simpson was born on the fifteenth of December, 1843, at Bayview on Prince Edward Island, off the eastern coast of Canada. His parents, James and Janet Simpson, were Scottish, Presbyterian, and severe in the old covenanting way. His father was a shipbuilder and merchant and an elder in the church; the Sabbath was kept without compromise and the catechism was learned. A depression struck the maritime trade in the late 1840s, the family business failed, and they moved west to Chatham in Ontario. The boy grew up in a home of reduced circumstances, religious discipline and considerable anxiety. He was a nervous, conscientious child, and his religion made him miserable. He believed the doctrines and could not find peace in them, and he wore himself into a physical collapse trying. It was the first of several breakdowns that would mark his life.

The first good work. Relief came through a book. In his fifteenth year, during a season of revival in Chatham under the preaching of a visiting Irish evangelist, he came upon Walter Marshall’s old Puritan treatise The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, and read a sentence that undid the knot: that the first good work a man will ever perform is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. He had been trying to produce a fitness to come. He saw that believing was the coming. He did not receive a rush of feeling — he was honest about that all his life — but he became settled that Christ had received him. In January 1861 he wrote out a formal covenant giving himself to God, and signed it. He entered Knox College, Toronto, and graduated in 1865.

Three prestigious pulpits. What followed was a career of relentless external success and quiet internal dissatisfaction. At twenty-one he was called to Knox Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, Ontario, one of the largest congregations in Canada. He married Margaret Henry two days after his ordination examinations, and was back in his pulpit the following Sunday. He worked ferociously and added some seven hundred members in eight years.

The Hamilton years also brought the first grief. Their second son, Melville Jennings, died at three years old. Simpson wrote afterwards that until then he had gone to bereaved families with sympathy that was honestly meant and touched nothing, because he had no acquaintance with sorrow of his own. Two of their six children were buried young. In December 1873 he moved to Chestnut Street Presbyterian in Louisville, Kentucky, the leading Presbyterian pulpit in that city. There he pressed for united evangelistic meetings across the denominations, and built a plain tabernacle so that working men who owned no good clothes could come without embarrassment. It succeeded, and his congregation was not entirely pleased. In 1879 he was called to Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in New York City, and arrived to find the thing that would define the rest of his life: hundreds of thousands of immigrants pouring into a city whose respectable churches had no intention of receiving them.

Two crises. Two experiences turned him, and they came five years apart. The first was in 1874, at Louisville. Exhausted and conscious that his ministry ran on his own strength, he read W. E. Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life and came into what he afterwards described as the reception of Christ as his sanctification — not a new effort but a new dependence. He dated his real ministry from it. The second was in the summer of 1881. He had been ill for years with a heart condition; a physician in New York had given him three months. At the conference grounds at Old Orchard Beach in Maine he heard Dr Charles Cullis teach on divine healing, and was more struck by the testimonies than the argument. On a Friday afternoon in August he went alone into the pine woods and made a threefold pledge: that he accepted the Bible’s teaching that Jesus is the healer of the body; that he took Him then and there as his own physical life for all the needs of his body until his life-work was done; and that he would use the strength given him for the glory of God and the service of others. He came out of the woods changed. The following day he climbed a mountain of three thousand feet. He lived another thirty-eight years, and worked at a pace that exhausted much younger men.

The break. That autumn he asked his congregation to receive a group of Italian immigrant converts into membership. They declined. In November 1881 he resigned — a settled salary, a distinguished pulpit, and the denomination in which he had been raised and ordained — with no congregation, no income, and seven children. He was baptised by immersion in a Baptist church in New York early the following year. He began preaching in a hall to a handful of people. Within a few years the Gospel Tabernacle was one of the most vigorous congregations in the city, and it was doing what nobody else was doing: rescue missions, work among the poor, an orphanage, homes where the sick could stay and be prayed for, and services for immigrants in their own languages.

Institutions built to send people away. In 1882 he opened a missionary training school — the first Bible institute in North America — on the conviction that ordinary believers with practical training and a call could be got to the field in two years rather than seven. It later moved up the Hudson to Nyack. Nearly every Bible college in the world descends from that idea. At Old Orchard in 1887 he founded two societies: the Christian Alliance, for the deepening of spiritual life at home, and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance, to send workers abroad. In 1897 they merged into The Christian and Missionary Alliance. He never intended a denomination. He wanted a movement inside the existing churches — a fellowship of people from every tradition united by the Fourfold Gospel and the evangelisation of the world. It became a denomination anyway, which is what usually happens. Meanwhile he edited a weekly magazine for nearly forty years, wrote around a hundred books including a commentary on the whole Bible, and composed more than a hundred hymns, often producing the words on Saturday for the congregation to sing on Sunday.

The Pentecostal question. After 1906 the Pentecostal revival swept through the movements nearest to his own, and many Alliance people were caught up in it. Simpson’s response was characteristically balanced and satisfied nobody entirely. He longed for more of the Spirit’s power, and in August 1907 returned to the same pine woods at Old Orchard to ask God for a fuller baptism. He did not speak in tongues, then or later. He concluded that tongues is a genuine gift which God distributes as He wills, and that it is not the necessary evidence of the Spirit’s fullness — and he set the policy that has marked the Alliance since: seek not, forbid not. The cost was real. The movement lost members in both directions, to those who wanted more and to those who wanted the door shut.

The end. His last years were hard. He grew frail, his memory failed, and he passed through a period of spiritual darkness that his friends found painful to watch in a man who had taught so many others about victory. He stepped back from leadership in 1918. He went into a coma on the twenty-eighth of October, 1919, and died the following day at Nyack, aged seventy-five. He left no fortune. He left a training school, a magazine, a hymnbook, a tabernacle full of poor people, and several hundred missionaries scattered across the world in places he had never seen and had prayed for by name.