At the Church Meeting in ole Gravell Lane the 25th of December 1677 was John Okey Cut off and Excommunicated from all the priviledges of the gospel for the sin of lying and Revilling and for Refusing to hear the Church: together with his Invocating the God of Heaven to cut off and destroy Bro: Collings and saying also that he would be Revenged.

On a bit more pleasant note than the Christmas 1677 meeting, the Wapping Church took up a special collection for London pastor Benjamin Keach on December 25, 1679 in response to his recently having been robbed.

December 25th 1679 The Congregation in old Gravell Lane Did then Raise and give to Bro. Benj. Keach when he was Robed the Sum of Three pound five shillings

The church ultimately gave 3 pounds and eight shillings to Keach. On December 30th 1679, it was recorded in the minute book that: “Bro. Collings gave to Bro. Keach the Sum of three pound Eight Shillings which was gathered for him of the Church.”

The above was posted last week on my personal blog and the Hercules Collins site.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

“André Bazin, the great Catholic film critic and theorist, wrote about the mission of art to rescue the world from transience and corruption, to capture moments and events in time and space before they slip into the irretrievable past, and so bear witness to the hand of God in creation.”

What accounts for all of this? Numerous reasons could be cited, many of which may indeed play a secondary role in his ministerial success. For example, in a fairly recent biography of Spurgeon, Mike Nicholls emphasizes the importance of Spurgeon’s voice to his success as a preacher.  He possessed, Nicholls writes, “one of the great speaking voices of his age, musical and combining compass, flexibility and power.”(1) Augustine Birrell (1850-1933), the son of one of Spurgeon’s fellow Baptist pastors and who served as the Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1907 to 1916, testifies to this fact. Birrell records that when he went to hear Spurgeon preach once, the only seat he could find was in the topmost gallery, in what the English call “the gods.” He was squished between a woman eating an orange and a man sucking peppermints.  Finding this combination of odours unendurable, he was about to leave, when, he said, “I heard a voice and forgot all else.”(2) But Spurgeon himself looked to quite a different source for the blessings that attended his ministry.  In a speech that he gave at a celebration held in honour of his fiftieth birthday in 1884, the Baptist preacher forthrightly declared that the blessing he had enjoyed in his pastorate “must be entirely attributed to the grace of God, and to the working of God’s Holy Spirit… Let that stand as a matter, not only taken for granted, but as a fact distinctly recognized.”(3) In other words: behind Spurgeon’s successes as a minister of the gospel was his walk with God.

1. C. H. Spurgeon: The Pastor Evangelist (Didcot, Oxfordshire: Baptist Historical Society, 1992), 37.
2. Cited E.J. Poole-Connor, Evangelicalism in England (London: The Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, 1951), 226-227.
3. C.H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography, compiled Susannah Spurgeon and J.W. Harrald (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1900), IV, 243.

Now, the first Puritan leader in the Suffolk town was Henry Coppinger, Lavenham church’s longest-serving pastor, who was there from 1578 to 1622. When his father, also Henry Coppinger, was dying, he asked the younger Coppinger, one of eleven sons, what course of life he would follow. When the latter told him he intended to be a minister of gospel, the elder Coppinger was immensely pleased, for he said, “what shall I say to Martin Luther when I shall see him in heaven, and he knows that God gave me eleven sons, and I made not one of them a minister?”

PS One of the great joys at Southern, where I teach, is serving with Dr Mark Coppenger. Drafting this mini-post I was obviously struck by the similarity of his name with that of Henry Coppinger (a difference of an i/e, easily accounted for). Maybe I am serving with a descendant of this Puritan leader who helped prepare the way for the great Gurnall!

Here are two from Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho 96.3 and then right at the close where Justin prays for Trypho and his friends (Dialogue with Trypho 142.3).

Also noteworthy is what Justin says about the common perception regarding the type of prayers that God hears: “who does not know that prayer is the most pleasing to God which is uttered with lamentation and tears, with prostrate body or bended knees?” (Dialogue with Trypho 90.4). Of course, in the context, Justin is seeking to show that Moses’ prayers during the battle with the Amalekites were nonetheless heard even though he was seated. The whole passage needs read, for it is a fascinating piece of early Christian exegesis to show that it is prayer through the crucified Christ that wins the hearing of God.

2. Peter J. Morden, ‘Communion with Christ and his people’: The Spirituality of C.H. Spurgeon (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2010). I find Spurgeon to be a perennial source of inspiration and delight. And this new study by the Tutor in Church History and Spirituality at Spurgeon’s College tells me of the hidden springs of why I find him to be so: here is the heart of Spurgeon’s ministry displayed in great detail.

3. Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford. A Memoir (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011). I love to read biographies, collections of letters and memoirs. And this was a delight. I had not heard of Carolyn Weber before my good friend and research assistant Ian Clary alerted me to this book. It is the story of the conversion of a feminist literary scholar, who is a fellow Canadian, in one of my favorite cities in all the world. A truly charming read.

4. Then tied for number 4 place are two books by two of my favorite historians: John Lukacs, The Future of History (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2011), a short essay-style book on the future of a variety of things dealings with being an historian—vintage Lukacs. And then Gertrude Himmelfarb, The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill (New York/London: Encounter Books, 2011), also a monograph, on love for the Jewish people. In a very short, and masterly, compass she deals with this history from Cromwell’s Puritan interest in the Jews that culminated in the readmission of the Jews to England—they had been expelled en masse in the Middle Ages—down to Churchill’s philo-Zionism, something quite different from Cromwell’s affection. Also vintage history.

5. Daniel C. Goodwin, Into Deep Waters: Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinistic Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). This is a tremendous study of an overlooked area of Baptist studies. I have spent much time studying the English Calvinistic Baptist scene and also, to some degree, that of the Southern Baptists in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the Baptist world of the Maritimes is a third important area of Calvinistic Baptist impact that should not be overlooked. Very illuminating.