The Church at Work

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. JAMES 1:27

It is possible to read Spurgeon’s sermons and forget that he was also one of the great organisers of Victorian London. Around the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle grew a remarkable cluster of institutions: a college for training preachers, an orphanage, almshouses for poor widows, a society for carrying Christian books into the villages, a fund for supplying poor ministers with books, Sunday schools, mission halls and a monthly magazine. He did not regard any of this as a distraction from preaching the gospel. He regarded it as the gospel at work.

Faith that builds

The best-known of these works began with a gift. In 1866 a widow named Anne Hillyard wrote to Spurgeon offering a large sum to found an orphanage for fatherless boys. Spurgeon had been praying about such a work. The Stockwell Orphanage was founded the following year in south London, and in time received girls as well as boys. It was arranged not as a great barracks but as a group of houses, each a kind of family home. Later in life Spurgeon could use it quite naturally as a sermon illustration. In Around the Wicket Gate he mentions the fountain in the grounds of the Stockwell Orphanage, and how the boys go to it in hot weather without needing to be taught how to drink. Faith, he says, is as natural as that.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. PSALM 68:5

The orphanage was supported largely by gifts, and Spurgeon spoke openly of the times when money was short and the needs were pressing. In the Cheque Book, commenting on a verse from Hosea, In thee the fatherless findeth mercy, he writes a line that clearly comes from those years: “The writer of these pages knows what it is to hang on the bare arm of God.” He adds that no trust is so well warranted by the facts as trust in the invisible but ever-living God.

The poor at the door

The orphanage was only one work among many. The Tabernacle maintained almshouses for elderly women of the congregation who had no other support. Its members ran ragged schools, Sunday schools and mission stations in some of the poorest parts of London. The Colportage Association employed men to go into country districts with Bibles and good books, selling them cheaply and speaking about Christ as they went. Susannah Spurgeon, largely confined to her home by illness, founded a Book Fund that sent thousands of volumes of theology to poor ministers who could not afford them.

He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord; and that which he hath given will he pay him again. PROVERBS 19:17

None of this was new in principle. The church has cared for widows and orphans since the days of the apostles. What is striking is that Spurgeon, whose whole theology insisted that works cannot save, was so tireless in good works. He saw no contradiction. In a passage gathered in Gleanings Among the Sheaves he writes that “our good works spring from union with Christ.” The branch bears fruit not in order to become a branch, but because it is one.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. EPHESIANS 2:10

Men for the ministry

The work closest to his heart was the Pastors’ College. It began in 1856 with a single student, a young man whom Spurgeon undertook to teach and support himself, and grew until it had trained hundreds of ministers. Spurgeon deliberately took men that other colleges would not: those without money or social standing or a good education, but with evident gifts and zeal for the gospel. He had been such a man himself. Students paid nothing; for years much of the cost came from his own income. Every Friday afternoon he lectured to them, and some of those addresses became Lectures to My Students, still one of the most read books on preaching in the English language.

And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also. 2 TIMOTHY 2:2

Many of these men went out to plant churches in London, where new congregations sprang up across the city, and others went to the countries of the empire and beyond. Spurgeon considered the college his greatest work, because it multiplied the preaching of the gospel far beyond anything one voice could do.

What this asks of a church

Spurgeon’s example presses a question on every congregation. What does our faith build? A church can be orthodox in its preaching and do nothing for the fatherless or the poor on its own doorstep. Spurgeon would have regarded that as a contradiction of the gospel it preached. He also presses the opposite question. A church can be busy in good works and forget to preach Christ. He would have regarded that as a building without a foundation.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. MATTHEW 5:16

Honest limits

It is only fair to say that Spurgeon worked within the assumptions of his age. His charity was generous and personal, but it rarely questioned the conditions that made so many people poor, and some modern readers will find its tone paternal. It is also true that the load he carried — preaching, writing, editing, fund-raising and overseeing a dozen institutions — contributed to the breakdowns in health that shortened his life. He is not a model of how to rest. But he is a model of how grace, truly received, spills over into the lives of the needy, and of a man who would not preach a mercy he was unwilling to practise.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask what your faith has built, or helped to build, for someone who could never repay you.

2. Find out who the fatherless, the widowed or the poor are in your own congregation or neighbourhood. Take one practical step to help one of them this month.

3. Give something this week that requires you to trust God, as Spurgeon did when the orphanage funds were low.

4. If you are in a position to teach or train others, ask whom you should be investing in, as Spurgeon invested in his students.

5. Examine whether your church leans towards words without works, or works without the Word. Pray for both to be held together.

A PRAYER

Father of the fatherless and judge of the widows, You have shown mercy to me who had nothing, and I have been slow to show it to others.

Let my faith not be words only. Let it build something for those who cannot repay.

Give me the courage to hang on Your bare arm, and to give when I cannot see how the need will be met.

Keep Your church preaching Christ and practising His mercy, until He comes. Amen.