My evangelist friend was over ninety, but very alert as he reminisced about old friends. Referring to one of whom he spoke with particular affection, he showed me a postcard written in 1929 by a dying man. “Dear brother,” it said simply, “I have raced you to Heaven. I am just off. See you there. Love. F. B. Meyer.”
That winsome humor had been an integral part of Meyer’s sixty-year ministry. Once during a major London dock strike he held spellbound a congregation of tired and hungry workers, and closed with a discerning prayer for their wives and children. There was silence, then a burst of applause, with many of the men crying “Encore! Encore!” One of them stood up and said, “Won’t the Reverend do another turn?” The Reverend did, taking full advantage of a unique spiritual opportunity, while careful also to do his utmost for their material plight. “I am just God’s errand boy,” he would say.
Son of a London merchant, Frederick Brotherton Meyer was born in 1847, when Spurgeon was thirteen years old, Moody ten. He studied at Regent’s Park Baptist College, graduated from London University in 1869, and as an assistant served Baptist churches in Liverpool and York. His subsequent career was unusual in that three times he left Baptist pastorates for independent churches, and twice he returned to a former charge.
While impatient of denominational bounds, Meyer held strongly to believer’s baptism, but added, “You may be baptized and still continue in communion with that Christian body with which you have been accustomed to worship. This rite is a personal matter between the Lord and the individual.” Some found this disconcerting, but at a Baptist Union meeting Dr. J. H. Shakespeare thus addressed Dr. Meyer: “Forgive us if, just as the world never recognizes the Child in the manger, nor perceives the kingdom in the seed, and just as Anglicanism had no room for Baxter or Wesley, we have not always made the most of you.”
Meyer’s methods were often unorthodox. In Leicester he would keep a predawn vigil to welcome released prisoners. He established a window-cleaning brigade that provided welcome work to men who wore hats inscribed “F. B. Meyer.” For jobless boys in danger of drifting into crime he started a business with a truck that advertised “F. B. Meyer, Firewood Merchant.”
A profound social concern marked his life. In 1892, pastor of an influential and successful church, he looked beyond London’s West End across the Thames where “the great masses of people were living in sin and need.” To them he went, as pastor of Christ Church, Westminster Bridge Road. He was concerned for the streetwalkers of Lambeth and many responded because “he cares for the likes of us.”
He condemned the drink trade, exposing himself to severe criticism from those who should have known better. In 1911, when Jack Johnson was billed to fight Bombardier Wells in London, racial feelings ran high. As secretary of the Free Church Council, Meyer so rallied, civil and ecclesiastical authorities that Britain’s Home Secretary banned the contest—though thirty-eight clergymen had booked seats for the occasion. Meyer made world headlines as a result. A Scottish newspaper cartoon featured him knocking out both boxers, and quoted Job 29:17. A wave of revulsion swept America against the ferocity of the prize-fighting staged at Madison Square Garden.
But Meyer’s was no mere ministry of rebuking. “It is miserable business to be always protesting and warning,” he wrote to a friend. “After all, the constructive work is best, and one breath from God would alter in a moment the entire outlook.” Among his many projects were a children’s home and a society that befriended unmarried mothers. For years under YMCA auspices he lectured on Saturday afternoon to hundreds of budding Sunday school teachers. His many honors included the presidency of the World’s Sunday School Association. At one WSSA gathering in Washington, D.C., he insisted Mrs. Taft join her husband on the platform, and introduced her as the real President of the United States.
By British statesmen too he was highly regarded and listened to, and by Anglican bishops not normally given to making friends of Nonconformists. In Stockholm the Swedish queen greeted him warmly as an old acquaintance whose books she had read. That was another aspect of the man. It was estimated at his death that five million copies of his devotional and expository books and tracts had been circulated, and that he had preached over 15,000 sermons. While his output was enormous (he once addressed fourteen meetings in a day), he was never in a hurry. Loving letters of thanks acknowledged even the most trivial piece of service. Said his biographer, W. Y. Fullerton: “Dr. Meyer was a Christian cosmopolitan, an evangelical opportunist, the world was his parish, and Christ was his life.”
Another writer jocularly referred to his “persistent peregrinations” and called him “St. Francis with a Bradshaw” (railway guide). He could sleep on buses and trains for ten minutes and awake completely refreshed. He traveled in Europe and parts of Africa, in North and Central America, in Asia and Australia. He was a regular speaker at Keswick from 1887, his appeal only enhanced by the sometimes startling openness with which he shared his own inner experiences to help others.
Just as remarkable was his impact on Northfield. Moody had been a close friend since 1873 when he and Sankey, suddenly stranded in England without sponsors, were guided to York and taken in hand by a local pharmacist-evangelist called Bennett—and F. B. Meyer, then an assistant pastor. Twenty-four years later, Moody wrote to Meyer after a Northfield occasion: “I do not think you will ever know on earth what you did or what the Lord did through you. I am hearing all the time of blessing.”
Meyer warmly returned the affection of his American brethren. He knew they appreciated candor, and freely expressed misgivings about spurious revivalism and the disastrous reaction it could cause. He had indeed been advised, he said, that in America he must never mention a word about holiness if he wanted to make people really holy. He addressed packed meetings in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York on one trip, including thousands of ministers, and thus set down his reflections: “Let us put away our sectarianism,” he pleaded, “it is the curse of the church! Put away this backbiting, this merciless criticism of one another’s methods, this perpetual jealousy—sweep it all away before the tide of the love of God, and then the great world of men will be reached presently.”
F. B. Meyer died at Bournemouth in March 1929, eleven days before his eighty-second birthday, and the very day on which the intrepid preacher had planned to leave on yet another journey to North America. His passing gave London newspaper sellers their headlines that night. Of his funeral his friends made what he wanted—a joyous occasion. They sang “For ever with the Lord, Amen, so let it be” and the “Hallelujah Chorus.” And Dr. Dinsdale Young spoke for all in a gripping quotation: “There he lies, preacher once, witness now!”
G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.
