A. B. Simpson

Albert Benjamin Simpson was born on December 15, 1843, on Prince Edward Island in Canada. He grew up in a strict Scottish Presbyterian home where the catechism was taught and the Bible was read daily. His father was a merchant and a ruling elder. As a boy he was sickly and thoughtful, and he carried a heavy sense of his own sin. At fourteen he found peace with God after reading a book by Richard Baxter that his father had left lying around. The Lord had met him through a Puritan, and he never forgot it.

He studied at Knox College in Toronto and was ordained in 1865. He served a church in Hamilton, Ontario, then a large congregation in Louisville, Kentucky, and in 1879 he became pastor of the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. He was a gifted preacher and worked at a pace that his body could not bear. Twice he broke down. He suffered from heart trouble and exhaustion, and doctors told him he had little time to live.

In 1881 at a camp meeting in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, he gave himself to the Lord for healing and for a new level of service. He later wrote that he took Christ as his strength and that his heart was healed. He lived and worked for nearly forty more years. This experience shaped everything that followed. He came to teach that Jesus is Savior, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King, and he called this the fourfold gospel.

He left his comfortable pulpit soon afterward because he felt a burden for the poor and the unreached of New York. He began to preach to the immigrants and the working people who did not attend church. In 1882 he opened a training school for workers, which later became the Nyack Missionary College. In 1887 he formed two societies, one to reach the unchurched at home and one to send missionaries abroad. In 1897 they joined to become the Christian and Missionary Alliance. It was meant to be a movement and not a denomination, a fellowship that would help believers of every church take the gospel to the nations. Later it did become a denomination, and A. W. Tozer served within it.

He wrote close to a hundred books and edited a weekly magazine. His writing includes The Fourfold Gospel, The Holy Spirit, Wholly Sanctified and a long series of Bible studies called The Christ in the Bible. He also wrote hymns, among them one beginning with the thought that Christ is the believer's all. He was a man of heavy labor and of deep prayer, and those who worked with him spoke of his tenderness with the weak.

He was not without faults. He lived in constant motion and often neglected rest. His family paid for it. His wife, Margaret, bore a heavy load, and he was away from home for long stretches. He had strong opinions about divine healing and about the nearness of the Lord's return, and some of his fellow Christians thought him extreme. He also moved ahead with plans faster than the money allowed, and the societies he founded were often in financial straits. He trusted God to supply, and sometimes he waited a long time.

He died on October 29, 1919, in New York. In his last years he was still working and still praying for the unreached. The movement he started has sent thousands of missionaries to the nations and still serves in many lands. His life shows what God can do with a man who was given up for dead and who gave the rest of his years back to Christ.