The Secret Place of Samuel Chadwick

Samuel Chadwick was born in 1860 in the mill towns of Lancashire, England, among looms and smoke and the honest poverty of working people. As a boy he rose before dawn to labor in the cotton mill and returned home with lint in his lungs and a heart that longed for God. The chapel was his schoolroom and the Bible his chief book. By his mid teens he had been converted and taken his place among the local preachers of the Wesleyan Methodists, walking miles on Sabbath evenings to small chapels where miners and mill hands gathered with expectant faces. He carried no polish from universities and wore no academic gown. He carried a Bible warm with use and a soul quickened by prayer.

At sixteen he preached his first sermons with more zeal than wisdom, but the Spirit began to mark his labors. He studied at night with a hunger for truth and holiness, reading John Wesley and early Methodist lives until the passion for scriptural holiness became the ruling aim of his ministry. In his early twenties he was accepted for the Wesleyan ministry and sent to serve in northern circuits where he learned to live among the people and to burn for God in prayer before he spoke for God in the pulpit. He was no strategist of display. He was a pastor who believed that revivals are born in secret. His preaching was plain, searching, and full of Christ. When the Lord visited, prayer meetings lengthened and families restored the lost habit of worship in the home.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth he was called to larger responsibility in the great industrial city of Leeds. There the burden for prayer deepened into a ruling conviction. He gathered the congregation to seek God, to confess known sins, to make restitution, and to ask for the fullness of the Holy Spirit. He believed that the church must be a furnace rather than a museum, that the prayer meeting must be the engine room, and that preaching without prevailing prayer is a candle in the wind. He wrote and taught out of lived experience, not out of speculation. People came not to hear a novelty but to find God.

In 1912 he was appointed Principal of Cliff College in Derbyshire, a training school for evangelists and class leaders known for early rising and long hours of prayer. For two decades he shaped its rhythm. Mornings belonged to Scripture and intercession, midday to lectures, afternoon to open air witness and visitation, evenings to the prayer meeting. Students learned to pray by praying. Among them were young workers who would carry his spirit of intercession around the world. He kept himself close to the college family, counseling in the vestry, praying in the corridors, and slipping quietly into the hall before dawn to wait on God. The inner fires burned until the end. In 1932 he laid down his work and entered the presence of the Lord.