I confess that Charles Simeon is a name that I have been aware of for a long time but knew really nothing about, so it’s been a sheer delight to read this superb biography of him by Hugh Evan Hopkins.

Mind you, it was a bit surreal at times, as I was reading this during my recent visit to Khartoum, with the juxtaposition between the life of this quintessentially Englishman of the 18th and 19th centuries and present day Sudan.

Hopkins account of Simeon’s life is a very warm but not uncritical one, and he paints a picture of a somewhat eccentric lifelong bachelor whose own ministry was quite remarkable but who also had a profound influence on the Church of his day and on the lives of some very influential Christians.

As a preacher, Simeon was in many ways, a man going against the tide.   In a day when the Anglican Church was dominated by patronage and ministers with little if any experience of the workings of grace in their lives and still less any sense of divine call to the ministry, Simeon, who had a clear conversion experience and call to preach, had a very high view of his calling and his commitment to an expository ministry of God’s Word.  “Simeon believed that his task was to let the Bible speak, and in doing so he was to act as an interpreter.   The deep things of God which he discovered in his long hours of personal study were to be expounded in such a way that his hearers, who may not often have read and seldom understood the passages concerned, would be left in no doubt of their meaning and application.  Hence his reiterated advice about giving a text ‘its just meaning, its natural bearing and its legitimate use’, and the need for the preacher to ‘ascertain from the original and from the context the true, faithful and primary meaning of every text’.”   He was a strong believer in well structured sermons and once said “A sermon should be like a telescope.  Each successive division of it should be as an additional lens to bring the subject of your text nearer, and make it more distinct.”

He published huge numbers of his sermon outlines.  Fifty years after beginning his ministry at the age of 23 he made available no less than 2536 outlines, covering the whole Bible; a publishing work which employed 32 men full-time for16 months.

There is no doubt that Simeon, gifted by God as he was, was a natural orator, and those gifts were used to the full and to great effect in his preaching.  He was a master at word pictures and making scenarios come alive in the minds of his hearers.  He preached with great fervour, so unlike the dry lecturing normally found in most pulpits of the day, leading one little girl who heard him to exclaim, “O Mama, what is the gentleman in a passion about?”

Simeon was also greatly used of God in what we would today describe as the mentoring of younger men starting out in the ministry.  “Simeon saw himself as supplying his beloved Church of England with generation after generation of young clergy instructed in their faith and trained to express it clearly”.  Literally hundreds of young ordinands embarked on their ministries under Simeon’s tutelage and guidance.   He had an amazing ministry of encouragement through letter writing.  Remember that this was the day of handwritten letters when copies were simply handwritten copies of handwritten letters, yet after some 40 years in the ministry, Simeon had more than 7,000 copies of letters he had written filed away in his study.

I was struck by how many influential Christian leaders and missionaries had been hugely influenced directly by Simeon or even brought to saving faith under his ministry.  People like Samuel Marsden, Patrick Bronte, Hery Martyn and others all owed a great deal to this outstanding Christian leader.  Simeon had a heart and passion for the work of world mission, again not common in his generation, and especially for the Jewish people.

In a day when the veracity of the Bible had not yet really been questioned, Simeon allowed perhaps more flexibility than we would be comfortable with.  “He was quite prepared to admit that ‘while no error in doctrine or other matter is allowed; yet there are inexactnesses in reference to philosophical and scientific matters because of its popular style’.”  Nonetheless, he clearly accepted its authority - “I soon learned that I must take the Scriptures with the simplicity of a little child, and be content to receive as God’s testimony what he has revealed, whether I can unravel all the difficulties that may attend it or not…I feel that I cannot even explain how it is that I move my finger, and therefore I am content to be ignorant of innumerable things which exceed not only my wisdom, but the wisdom of the most learned men in the universe.”

Hopkins brilliantly portrays a man with very strong convictions, a great heart for God’s Word and his workers and a compassionate and gentle spirit.   As I thought of these qualities and the amazing influence he had on so many within Anglicanism in his day, more than once I found myself thinking of him as a 19th century Dick Lucas.

During his last illness he wrote these moving and revealing words, testifying to his assurance “in the sovereignty of God in choosing such a one - and the mercy of God in pardoning such a one - and the patience of God in bearing with such a one - and the faithfulness of God in perfecting his work and performing all his promises to such a one.”