On April 19, 1854, Charles Haddon Spurgeon formally accepted a call to pastor one of the most historic churches in the middle of the largest city in the world. He was only nineteen years old, had never gone to college, and had received no formal ministerial training. He had lived his entire life in the secluded and bucolic environs of the English countryside. Nothing about his family lineage presaged an especially bright future. His education was unspectacular, and he had never found himself near great men or important events. He had begun preaching, almost by accident, at sixteen through a local lay preachers’ association in Cambridgeshire. Before accepting the call to London, Spurgeon had preached most of his sermons under the thatched roofs of country cottages, the old wooden ceilings of barns, and the open sky of the fields of East Anglia. And yet, within just a few months of his arrival in the metropolis, newspapers across the city, and indeed the entire country, were printing reports such as this:

An extraordinary sensation has recently been produced in London by the preaching of a young Baptist minister named C. H. Spurgeon. The crowds which have been drawn to hear him, the interest excited by his ministry, and the conflicting opinions expressed in reference to his qualifications and usefulness, have been altogether without parallel in modern times. What renders the present case remarkable is, the juvenility of the preacher,—his hold on the public being established before he had attained his twentieth year; and his first appearance in London being that of a country youth, without any of the supposed advantages of a College education or ordinary ministerial training.[1]

A year later, the excitement had not waned:

Never, since the days of George Whitefield, has any minister of religion acquired so great a reputation as this Baptist preacher, in so short a time. Here is a mere youth,—a perfect stripling, only twenty-one years of age,—incomparably the most popular preacher of the day. There is no man within her Majesty’s dominions who could draw such immense audiences; and none who, in his happier efforts, can so completely enthrall the attention, and delight the minds of his hearers.[2]

It was clear a new force had entered the nation's religious world. The curtain had opened on one of the most brilliant preaching careers in church history. London would witness a ministry whose storied success would defy belief if it were not so meticulously well-documented.

Spurgeon would demonstrate exceptional staying power in defiance of the many prophecies and prognostications of his critics. The rustic and rough-hewn youth who first arrived in London in 1854 would minister there for thirty-eight years as the pastor of the largest Protestant church in Christendom until he died in 1892. In those years, he would execute a ministry of unparalleled success—one that seemed to elude rational explanation. Even by the end of his life, onlookers were still trying to grapple with what they had witnessed. In the week following his death, a Church of England journal recorded,

Every now and then some one takes the world by storm. Without succeeding to anybody else’s post, the newcomer makes for himself a definite place in the world’s consciousness, and a recognised influence, for good or for ill, in some department of the world’s work. He may be a statesman, soldier, poet, artist or preacher, but he is unique. That is the type of man whose influence lives on, and whose figure becomes historical. If we mistake not, Mr. Spurgeon belongs to this small class of persons whose career seems independent of circumstances just as their genius is independent of training.[3]

Sometimes, in the history of the church, God simply raises up a man—a standard-bearer, a pathfinder, a trailblazer, a tribune, a bright and shining light—and places him in the middle of events. No material or logical account of the events can erase the certainty that one has observed a kind of supernatural intervention in the affairs of men. No study of origins, heredity, intellectual influences, natural events, or social and cultural circumstances can provide an entirely satisfying rationale for the thing. After such fruitless attempts, one must simply step back and say, “The hand of the Lord hath done this.”

If God was pleased to do this in days past, he may be pleased to do it again in our own. God worked in unusual ways to bring Spurgeon to London and set him up as a preacher of extraordinary fruitfulness in that city. Christians should be encouraged by this to pray that God would raise up faithful preachers to reach the present generation. He can do so at any time and by whatever means he chooses. He does not depend on ordinary human means. He is the one who raises up ministers and sends them as gifts to his church (Jer. 3:15; Eph. 4:11-12). Spurgeon’s arrival in London, seemingly out of nowhere, reminds us that God will work out his purposes in his way and in his time, and it may be that he does this by means we least expect. However he does it, he will make it plain that he is the one who gives ministers to his people, and he is the one who ultimately prepares them for their work.

[1] The Friend, n.d., quoted in C. H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography, Compiled from His Diary, Letters, and Records by His Wife and His Private Secretary (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1898), 2:63.

[2] The Morning Advertiser, February 18, 1856, quoted in C. H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography, 2:72.

[3] Record, February 5, 1892, quoted in W. Y. Fullerton, C. H. Spurgeon: A Biography (London: William and Norgate, 1920), 73.