What can one man do?
image source
Charles Simeon leads the way for a new generation of Anglicans.
People trapped in declining institutions feel powerless. That feeling can be an excuse to do nothing. But there is a way forward, as one English vicar demonstrated. It involved launching a movement from within.
For fifty-four years, evangelical Charles Simeon was the minister of a dysfunctional Anglican church in Cambridge, England. His congregation didn’t like him or the gospel he preached. At one point they changed the locks on the church doors and shut him out of his own church building. When he began his ministry in 1782, there were maybe a dozen other evangelical ministers left in the Church of England. Without permission and without an official position, he took responsibility, and he did something.
Simeon saw the students in this university town of Cambridge as future leaders, and so he formed relationships with them through concentric circles:
The entire student body at Cambridge, many of whom at first ridiculed him.
Those who accepted his invitation to Conversation Parties where Simeon served tea and took questions.
Students who met after the Conversation Parties and were invited to a weekly sermon class.
An inner circle of six to eight students who met for supper and reflected on what they had learned that week.
A few who worked with Simeon as interns.
As he got to know them, Simeon recommended students for future leadership as pastors and missionaries. He also recruited evangelical students to Cambridge, and if they couldn’t afford tuition, he raised funds for them. Simeon wanted to place evangelicals in growing population centers and centers of influence, so when an important church became available, he would bid for it and then go out and raise the funds to place an evangelical in the pulpit. Some of his graduates became missionaries with the Church Missionary Society that Simeon had founded.
“No evangelical Anglican in the early nineteenth century exercised a greater strategic influence on the course of the British missionary movement than did Charles Simeon of Cambridge.”
When he began his ministry, there was a handful of evangelical ministers left in the Church of England. When he finished, fifty-four years later, evangelicals led one-third of the churches in England. The vast majority were men influenced by Simeon, including many who had been converted through his influence. He was a man of the Word and a man of prayer.
“He rose early each morning to study the Scriptures, and often could be seen pacing the roof above his rooms as he prayed for friends and enemies.”
Simeon didn’t blame the system; he acted. He didn’t wait for permission or funds; he raised the money he needed. Simeon staked his life on the authority of the Word, he prayed, and he trusted God to do the impossible. Two hundred years later, his legacy continues. Today two-thirds of the world’s Anglicans trace their origins back to the work of the Church Missionary Society, founded by Charles Simeon.
Adapted from The Rise and Fall of Movements.
