Before the Town Was Awake

And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed. MARK 1:35

A Missouri boyhood. Edward McKendree Bounds was born on the fifteenth of August, 1835, in Shelby County, in the north-east of Missouri. He was named after William McKendree, one of the pioneer bishops of American Methodism, and the name tells us something of the household he came from. Missouri was then a frontier state, and its churches were planted by circuit riders who covered great distances on horseback. His father died when he was still a boy, and the family’s circumstances narrowed. Like many young men of his generation he went west in the years of the gold rush, and like most of them he came back without a fortune.

A young lawyer. Back in Missouri he read law and was admitted to the bar while still very young. By every ordinary measure he had a career in front of him. Then, in his early twenties, he came under the preaching of a Methodist revival and was converted, and with conversion came a call to preach that he could not argue away. He gave up the law. In 1859, at the age of twenty-four, he was received into the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and sent to a small charge in Missouri. It was the first of several choices in his life that looked, from the outside, like a step down.

War and prison

A matter of conscience. Two years later the country broke apart, and Missouri, a slave state that did not secede, was torn between the two sides. In 1861 Bounds, then a young pastor, was arrested by Union authorities along with a large number of other men suspected of Southern sympathies. He was required to take an oath of allegiance or to pay a heavy bond. He refused both, on grounds of conscience rather than politics, and was held as a prisoner for well over a year, first at Jefferson City and then at St Louis. It was a costly scruple, and a revealing one: he would not be compelled to swear.

A chaplain. When he was at last released in an exchange of prisoners, he went south and became a chaplain to Confederate regiments from Missouri. It was grim work: preaching to exhausted men, sitting with the wounded, burying the dead, writing to families. At the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in November 1864, one of the bloodiest afternoons of the war, he was taken prisoner again, and he was not freed until the war was over.

It must be said plainly that the cause he served was fought to preserve slavery. Bounds, like most white Southern ministers of his generation, did not stand outside the assumptions of his time and place, and a book about his teaching on prayer should not pretend otherwise. What can be said alongside it is what he did next.

Franklin

A few men on their knees. After the war he went back to Franklin, the town where so many had died, and became pastor of its Methodist church. The town was wrecked and bitter, and the church was weak. Those who have written about his life record that he gathered a small group of men who were willing to meet regularly and pray — for themselves, for the church, for the town and for a revival of religion in a defeated country. It was not a programme. It was a handful of people asking God to do what they could not do. The pattern stayed with him for the rest of his life, and it is the pattern of everything he later wrote.

Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. PSALM 127:1

The editor’s desk. In the years that followed he served churches in Alabama and Missouri, and his gifts as a writer were noticed. He became editor of the St Louis Christian Advocate, a Methodist weekly, and later an associate editor of the Nashville Christian Advocate, the official paper of his denomination. For a time he held one of the more influential desks in Southern Methodism. Homer Hodge, who knew him well, later remarked that through twelve years of editing a Christian Advocate he remained little known outside his own church.

A household and a grief. In 1876 he married Emma Barnett of Washington, Georgia. She died ten years later, leaving him with young children, and in 1887 he married her cousin, Harriet Barnett. There were children from both marriages. The man who wrote so insistently about hours of prayer was not a monk in an empty house. He was a husband and father who knew the ordinary pressures of a large family, and he had known the particular sorrow of burying a young wife.

The hours before daylight

A quieter life. In the mid-1890s Bounds left his editorial post and settled with his family in Washington, Georgia, his first wife’s home town. He held no prominent pulpit again. He travelled when he was invited, preached and held meetings, and wrote. But the centre of his life now was prayer, and he treated it as work.

Four in the morning. The detail everyone remembers is the hour. He rose at four and gave the first hours of the day to God, often until seven. Hodge wrote in his introduction to Prayer and Praying Men that at seventy-five Bounds could still pray for three hours on his knees in the early morning. He was not performing for anyone. Almost nobody was watching.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; PSALM 63:1

The books. Out of those mornings came the books. In 1907 he published a short work for preachers under the title Preacher and Prayer, which circulated widely in Britain and was later retitled Power Through Prayer. It is the book by which most readers still know him. Almost everything else remained in manuscript. He kept writing and revising into his last years, and in 1912, when he was old and frail, Hodge gave up his own pulpit in Brooklyn to let him preach. Hodge recalled that his voice was feeble and the sermon short. In his letters from those years Bounds asked his friend to pray for him, in words Hodge preserved: “Pray for me that God will give me new nerves and new visions to finish the manuscripts.”

After his death

The last word. Bounds died at home in Washington, Georgia, on the twenty-fourth of August, 1913, nine days after his seventy-eighth birthday. Not long before, he had written to Hodge a sentence his friend quoted in the introduction to Prayer and Praying Men: “When He is ready I am ready; I long to taste the joys of the heavenlies.”

The friends who would not let the manuscripts die. The manuscripts could easily have been lost. Instead Claudius Chilton, and after him Homer Hodge, took up the long labour of editing them and finding publishers. Purpose in Prayer appeared in 1920 and Prayer and Praying Men in 1921, and the others followed through the 1920s. Hodge’s hand is visible throughout them, in his forewords and in the epigraphs he set at the head of many chapters. Bounds saw none of them in print.

By it he being dead yet speaketh. HEBREWS 11:4

It is worth pausing over the shape of that life. He gave up the law for the ministry. He lost his liberty rather than swear against his conscience. He saw the worst of war, served a defeated cause, and spent his most productive years in obscurity. His best work lay unread in a drawer when he died. And yet the mornings were not wasted. The prayers he prayed in the dark have been read by millions who never heard his name while he lived. If his own life proves anything, it is what he spent those mornings writing: that God keeps accounts differently from us, and that what is done in secret is rewarded openly.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Bounds gave up a promising career when God called him. Ask whether there is anything you are holding on to that God has asked you to loosen.

2. He refused an oath he believed was wrong, at great cost. Consider where your own conscience is being pressed, and pray for courage to be faithful.

3. Reflect honestly on how his service of the Confederate cause should shape the way you read him. Pray for the grace to see the blind spots of your own time as clearly as you see his.

4. Choose one hour of the day, however small, that you will give to God before you give it to anything else, and keep it for a week.

5. Remember that his best work was hidden while he lived. Ask God to make you content to labour and pray where no one is watching.

A PRAYER

Father, You see in secret, and You reward openly. Thank You for Your servant Edward Bounds, who rose while the town was dark to seek Your face.

Forgive me for how easily I give the first and best of my days to lesser things. Teach me to rise early, or to pause at any hour, and to meet You before I meet anyone else.

Where he was blind, as all Your servants are, keep me humble about my own blindness. Where he was faithful, make me faithful.

And let whatever I do in secret for You bear fruit in Your time, even if I never see it. Amen.