The Shoe Clerk from Northfield

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:27

A fatherless farm. Dwight Lyman Moody was born on the fifth of February, 1837, at Northfield, a farming village in the Connecticut valley of western Massachusetts, the sixth of nine children. When he was four his father, Edwin, died suddenly, leaving debts the small farm could not meet; the creditors took almost everything that could be carried away. His mother, Betsey, refused to let the family be broken up and farmed out to neighbours, and she kept them together by hard work and stubbornness. The boys worked the fields and hired themselves out. Dwight had only a few years of schooling, and his spelling and grammar showed it for the rest of his life. What he did have was a strong body, a quick tongue, an enormous appetite for work and a mother who prayed.

Boston. At seventeen he went to Boston to make his fortune and talked his way into his uncle Samuel Holton’s shoe shop. The uncle set one condition: the boy must attend church and Sunday school. So Moody went to the Mount Vernon Congregational Church, where he understood little and sometimes slept through the sermons.

The back of the shop. His Sunday-school teacher there was a quiet man named Edward Kimball, who resolved to speak to each of his boys about Christ. On the twenty-first of April, 1855, Kimball walked into the shoe shop, found Moody in the back wrapping shoes, put a hand on his shoulder and spoke to him simply of the love of Christ. There, among the boxes, Moody gave himself to the Saviour. It was a real conversion, but a very unlearned one. When he applied for church membership soon afterwards, the examining committee found he could say almost nothing about what he believed and advised him to wait. He was received the next year. Kimball said afterwards that he had seldom met anyone whose mind was spiritually darker. Moody never forgot either the teacher who came looking for him or the lesson that God does not wait for people to become clever.

Chicago. In 1856 he moved to Chicago, a raw and booming city, and sold shoes with the same zeal he brought to everything else. He hoped to be worth a hundred thousand dollars. But his real energy went elsewhere. He rented pews and filled them with young men he gathered from the streets and boarding houses. In 1858 he began a Sunday school in one of the roughest districts of the city, meeting in an old market hall, and drew the children in with sweets, rides and sheer persistence. It grew to many hundreds. In November 1860 the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, visited it and spoke briefly. That same year Moody gave up business altogether to give all his time to Christian work, with no salary and no certain support. His friends thought he had lost his senses.

War and marriage. He threw himself into the Young Men’s Christian Association, of which he later became president in Chicago, and when the Civil War came he worked among the soldiers in the camps around the city and went to the front with the United States Christian Commission. He was among the wounded after Shiloh; in The Way to God he tells of a dying man in a hospital at Murfreesboro who wanted him to help him die, and who died resting on two verses from the third chapter of John. In 1862 he married Emma Revell, a teacher in his Sunday school, whose calm judgement steadied him for the rest of his life. In 1864 the mission became a church of its own, the Illinois Street Church.

Two lessons. In 1867 Moody crossed to Britain for the first time. He wanted to hear Spurgeon and to see George Müller’s orphan houses at Bristol, and he did both. It was on that visit, as the story is usually told, that he heard the evangelist Henry Varley remark that the world had yet to see what God would do with a man fully consecrated to Him, and resolved in his heart to be that man. The following year a young Englishman named Harry Moorhouse, whom Moody had met in Britain, came to Chicago and preached in Moody’s church night after night on a single verse, John 3:16. Moody had preached a God who was angry with sinners. Moorhouse preached a God who loved them, and Moody never preached the old way again. In 1870, at a convention in Indianapolis, he heard a young man named Ira Sankey lead the singing and asked him, almost at once, to come and work with him.

The fire. On Sunday evening, the eighth of October, 1871, Moody preached in Chicago on Pilate’s question in Matthew 27:22, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? At the close he told the great congregation to take the question home, think it over, and come back next Sunday with their answer. Sankey began to sing. Before the hymn was done the noise of the fire bells drowned him out. That night the Great Chicago Fire destroyed much of the city, including Moody’s hall, his church and his home. Moody later said that he never saw that congregation together again, and that he would rather have his right hand cut off than give an audience a week to decide for Christ. The lesson runs through the last chapter of this book.

Power. Some months earlier two women in his congregation, Sarah Cooke and a Mrs Hawxhurst, had begun sitting on the front row and telling him that they were praying for him to receive the power of the Holy Spirit. He was irritated at first; he thought he had power. Then he began to pray with them, with increasing hunger. Late in 1871, while he was in New York raising money for the ruined work in Chicago, the answer came as he walked in the street. He seldom spoke of it afterwards, except to say that God revealed Himself to him and that he had such an experience of His love that he had to ask Him to stay His hand. He went back to preaching the same sermons, and far more people were converted.

Across the sea. In June 1873 Moody and Sankey sailed for Britain with their families and hardly any invitations. They began in York in a small way. At Sunderland and Newcastle the meetings grew; in Edinburgh that winter they became a movement, and cautious Scottish ministers found themselves supporting two American laymen with an organ and a hymn book. Glasgow followed, then Ireland and the great English cities, and finally London, from the spring into the summer of 1875, where the crowds were beyond counting. Britain did not know what to make of an uneducated man who spoke fast, told stories, and never pretended to be anything but a layman. He came home the most famous evangelist in the world.

The builder. For the rest of his life Moody went from city to city in America and, in the early 1880s, in Britain again, where his meetings at Cambridge in 1882 touched students who afterwards gave themselves to the mission field. But he also built. In 1879 he founded the Northfield Seminary for girls, and in 1881 the Mount Hermon School for boys, both for young people who could not otherwise afford an education. From 1880 he gathered Christians each summer at Northfield for conferences on the Bible, and at a student conference at Mount Hermon in 1886 a hundred young men pledged themselves to missionary service, the beginning of the Student Volunteer Movement. In Chicago he founded the training school that after his death took his name, the Moody Bible Institute, to prepare ordinary men and women for Christian work. And in 1894 he began a colportage association to put good books into the hands of people who could not afford them.

Home. Through it all he kept a farmer’s habits. He rose early for the Bible and prayer, and he loved nothing better than Northfield, his family and the hills. In November 1899, in the middle of a campaign in Kansas City, his heart began to fail. He was taken home to Northfield, and on the twenty-second of December he died at home there, among the hills where he had been born sixty-two years before. Those at his bedside remembered him saying that earth was receding and heaven opening, and that this was his coronation day. He was buried on Round Top, a small hill above the seminary he had built. The boy who had been turned away by a church committee had become, under God, a door through which a great multitude came home.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Edward Kimball walked into a shoe shop to speak to one boy. Who is the one person God may be sending you to speak to this week?

2. Moody was refused church membership for knowing too little. Are there people you have written off because they seem spiritually slow?

3. The Chicago fire taught Moody never to delay a decision. What have you been postponing that you know God is asking of you?

4. Two women prayed on the front row for their preacher. Begin praying by name, this week, for the person who preaches to you.

5. Read Moody’s account of the dying soldier in the chapter The Gateway into the Kingdom, in The Way to God.

A PRAYER

Lord, You chose a shoe clerk who could not spell to carry Your gospel to the nations. You are not limited by what I lack.

Thank You for the Kimballs of this world, who go looking for one boy in the back of a shop. Make me one of them.

Forgive me for the decisions I have put off, as though tomorrow were mine to command.

Fill me with Your Spirit, not for my own reputation but for the sake of those who have not heard, and let me finish my course looking up. Amen.