Who was Charles Simeon?
Charles Simeon (1759 - 1836): Keeping it real to build up real ministers. Keenly aware of his own character flaws, finding it difficult to make friends, this “original campus minister” nonetheless had a fire in his bones to bring life back into the dead faith of Cambridge undergraduates and divinity students. Once an evangelical hothouse, by Simeon’s day Cambridge had fallen into a doldrums, slipping into irrelevance as the bastion of an outwardly powerful but inwardly dying religious establishment. In weekly rap sessions (believe it or not, the highlight of many undergraduates’ social schedule!); touching personal letters of pastoral advice; and straightforward, no-frills sermons of great power, Simeon personally mentored hundreds of effective pastors within both Anglicanism and the non-conformist churches of his day. His warm-hearted, lively style cut across the day’s nominal Christianity, reproducing itself in the ministries of his young admirers and spreading evangelical revival within a lost and tired English church.
Posted by
at
18:45:52
Dear Brother Chris:
It is grand to see your treatment of these ancient godly men. For the message and lives they left behind are to me an inspiration. I have enjoyed your thoughtful work repeatedly. Perhaps in God’s sovereign grace He will raise more of Charles Simeon’s kind in our age for a church that is losing its soul. Many thanks.
One comment on Charles Simeon is raised when you write that "he influenced "non-conformists" as well as anglicians." It is unfortunate that the context appears to suggest that the Anglicians and Non-conformists were attending Cambrige together. I’m sure that is not what you meant but perhaps many would think that is the case.
I know you are aware that the doors of the English Universities and the Anglican school, inTrinity in Ireland were shut tight against non-conformists until Harold Spurgeon (CHS’s grandson) graduated from Trinity in 1924 and the fact that Harold is thus distinguished & documented as the first "non -conformists to gain a University degree from any insitution of its kind in England or Ireland."
I hope this response doesn’t offend. It is not given in that spirit. It just seems to me that in our day of wide opportunities our people just do not realize how difficult and costly Christianity was to our non-conformists forefathers and just how easy it seems to be now.
Your brother in the Lord Jesus,
George McBurney Gray
Dear George,
Asbolutely right about nonconformists being shut out of Cambridge, and Oxford. And lots of verbal (and sometimes physical!) muck thrown at them in their courageous history in England. I wouldn’t want folks to forget that.
Another of my "patron saints for postmoderns," John Newton, spent a long time trying to figure out whether he was going to minister as an independent (Baptist, Congregationalist, etc.) or seek ordination in the Church of England. Though his mother had been Congregationalist and taken him to a Congregationlist church in his youth (then in the tiny minority), John finally decided to minister from within the established church–much as Simeon did. But he was turned down for ordinations by bishops three times, and it was only when Lord Dartmouth sponsored him that the bishops finally relented and let him in. Their reason? He was too "Methodist" for them–too "enthusiastic."
Thank you for your warm note.
Peace,
Chris