A. C. Dixon

Amzi Clarence Dixon was born on July 6, 1854, in Shelby, North Carolina. His father was a Baptist minister, and the home was strict, warm and full of the Bible. He was converted as a boy and was baptized in his early teens. He studied at Wake Forest College and then at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was a tall, vigorous man who loved people and spoke with a plain, straight force.

He began his ministry in small North Carolina churches and soon moved to larger pulpits. He pastored in Chapel Hill, then in Baltimore, and then in Brooklyn at the Hanson Place Baptist Church. Everywhere he went, his preaching drew crowds and many came to faith. He was known for the way he held to the Bible as the Word of God and for his stress on prayer. He once said that when we depend on organization we get what organization can do, and when we depend on prayer we get what God can do.

In 1906 he became pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, the church that grew out of the work of D. L. Moody. He remained there for five years. In that time he helped to plan and edit the first volumes of a series of booklets that came to be called The Fundamentals. They were sent free to pastors and missionaries around the world and set out the central truths of the faith in answer to the doubts that were spreading through the church. Dixon edited the early volumes before the work passed to others.

In 1911 he accepted a call that few men would have dared to accept. He became pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, the great church where Charles Spurgeon had preached for decades. Spurgeon's shadow lay heavily on that pulpit, and the church had known a time of decline since his death. Dixon served there during the years of the First World War, with bombs falling on the city and the congregation scattered by military service. He preached through those years and kept the church going. He left in 1919.

He returned to the United States and served at a church in Baltimore and then took the pastorate of a church in Chicago. He kept up a heavy schedule of preaching and writing. He wrote on evangelism, on the Bible and on the work of the Holy Spirit. He also had a hand in the early life of Bible schools in America and was a popular speaker at conferences.

He had a younger brother, Thomas Dixon Jr., who became a popular novelist and whose books carried harsh and racist views of the American South. The two men took different paths. A. C. Dixon did not share his brother's career, and it should be said honestly that men of his time and place were often shaped by the attitudes around them and needed to be corrected by Scripture. His strengths lay in his boldness for the Bible and in his belief that the church was hindered most by its lack of prayer.

He died in 1925 in England, while on a preaching trip. He had given himself to the Word and to the nations. He is remembered mostly for the pulpits he held and the Fundamentals he helped to launch. His life shows the strain that comes on a man who follows a giant, and how a faithful pastor can serve in another man's shadow and still be used by God.