- By the Cloud and the Fire

Upon his recovery Mr. Simpson returned immediately to his duties as pastor of the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church. He felt like a man under sentence of death who had received a full pardon. Hope returned like a sunrise and his plans soared out again to meet the challenge of the unevangelized millions.
The old urge to reach the masses came back upon him with overwhelming force. Nearly two years before this he had accepted the call to the pastorate of the Thirteenth Street Church “with the explicit understanding on the part of the new church officers that they would unite with him in a popular religious movement to reach the unchurched masses.” These are his own words. The church had never made good on that promise. They simply could not see it as he did. They had received a new impulse of life from the ministry of the new pastor. Attendance had stepped up and many members had been added to the rolls of the church, but the two viewpoints were irreconcilable. “they wanted a conventional parish for respectable Christians. What their pastor wanted was a multitude of publicans and sinners.” So Mr. Simpson explained later. If he could not inspire them to follow him, neither would he be hindered by them. He must follow his star. So he determined to resign his pastorate and launch out on his own. This step was taken only after a full week spent in earnest prayer. He would not trust to his own wisdom.
“The parting was most friendly,” he assures us. “It is pleasant to look back to a crisis of so much importance passed without any strain whatever. While the personal relationship between him and his church always remained warm and kindly, there were two circumstances which led him to feel that he should not only resign from the pastorate of his church but should retire from the Presbyterian ministry altogether. One was his experience of divine healing a few months before. His ministerial brethren were not unkind in their attitude toward him, but he knew his presence might easily prove embarrassing to them. The other was his being led to accept the doctrine of baptism by immersion as a scriptural teaching. He had been immersed himself after his miraculous recovery. Then he found that he could no longer in good conscience sprinkle helpless infants as required by the rules of the Presbyterian Church.
It is amusing to note that during his seminary days he had written a prize-winning paper in defense of infant baptism. Now he is withdrawing from his church because he no longer believes in the validity of his old thesis. “A foolish consistency,” wrote Emerson, “is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” A. B. Simpson was never a slave to consistency. He could sometimes contradict himself with an elegant grace that made the hide-bound “theologicians” wring their hands in impotent despair. For instance, he believed in immersion, was himself immersed, would administer baptism after no other mode. Yet he would receive into full membership in his church any child of God regardless of his stand on water baptism. He might pause before immersing a candidate long enough to ask a non-immersionist brother to lead in prayer! It was all very puzzling to the ecclesiastical stickler. But Mr. Simpson never saw anything incongruous about it. Neither was he always consistent in his application of the doctrine of divine healing to the requirements of actual life. The pitiful little syllogisms upon which some of his professed followers sometimes stretch poor distressed believers as upon a rack would have been summarily rejected by him. Kindness and love dictated his attitude toward the sick. He was more concerned with the leading of the Spirit and the prayer of faith than with rigid conformity to a doctrine—even his own doctrine.
His decision to quit his church and strike out alone into the work of evangelizing the multitudes of New York City looked to everyone except A. B. Simpson like a piece of rare folly. He had been earning five thousand dollars a year at his old job. Now he has exactly no income at all, and a family of seven to support. It looked like lunacy, and of course there was no lack of comforters to assure him that it was indeed lunacy. There were clergymen in the city who frankly stated their opinion that the brilliant young minister had lost his reason. To trust God for his health was bad enough, but to trust for his daily bread as well—that was sure proof of insanity! The elders of his church came down to the parsonage the morning after the news broke, and offered their condolences to Mrs. Simpson. They felt, they said, “as if they had come to his funeral.” “And it is possible,” said Mr. Simpson afterwards, with dry humor, “that she may also have felt that he might as well be dead.”
The wife of a prophet has no easy road to travel. She cannot always see her husband’s vision, yet as his wife she must go along with him wherever his vision takes him. She is compelled therefore to walk by faith a good part of the time—and her husband’s faith at that. Mrs. Simpson tried hard to understand but if she sometimes lost patience with her devoted but impractical husband she is not for that cause to be too much censured. From affluence and high social position she is called suddenly to poverty and near-ostracism. She must feed her large family somehow—and not one cent coming in. The salary has stopped, and the parsonage must be vacated! She tries to keep calm, but she is secretly frantic. And her husband’s placid, “Now Margaret darling, don’t get upset. God will provide,” did not help too much. Mr. Simpson had heard the Voice ordering him out, and he went without fear. His wife had heard nothing, but she was compelled to go anyway. That she was a bit unsympathetic at times has been held against her by many. That she managed to keep within far sight of her absent- minded high soaring husband should be set down to her everlasting honor. It is no easy job being wife to such a man as A. B. Simpson was.
Mr. Simpson lost no time in getting started upon his new project. Through the newspapers (which for some reason were always interested in him) he announced a Sunday afternoon meeting to be held in a cheap place on Eighth Avenue known as Caledonian Hall where he would deliver an address on the spiritual needs of the city. He had specifically instructed his former parishioners not to attend the meetings. He did not wish to disturb the unity of Thirteenth Street Church. Only two persons disregarded his wishes and came. There was a fair crowd in attendance at that first meeting, though it must be acknowledged that New York managed to stay away in considerable numbers. That afternoon he announced his intention to launch a continuous campaign for the evangelization of the masses of the city, and invited all who were interested to meet him later for prayer and consultation. Only seven persons responded. But they were not discouraged. They knelt down and actually thanked God that they were poor and few and weak! And then they “threw themselves upon the might of the Holy Ghost.” That was the rather inglorious beginning of what was to be one of the strongest forces for world-evangelization since the days of the apostles.
Sunday services continued at Caledonian Hall, with mid-week meetings at the Simpson home. Numbers increased greatly as the weeks went by, and scores were brought into the fold. A little organization was formed with the simplest kind of skeleton constitution. The new movement was on its way. The pastor had a little flock and the flock had his own spirit. They were all out for evangelism. Everyone went to work and sinners came flocking in. The crowds soon outgrew the hall, and the meetings had to be moved to larger quarters.
For the next eight years, or until the completion of their permanent home on Eighth Avenue, this band of peculiar people continued to move from place to place like the children of Israel in the wilderness. They were attempting a work so radically different that they had no precedent to guide them. They were compelled to learn by the hard and expensive method of trial and error. There were mistakes made and losses suffered as a result of bad business judgment or some unforeseen shift in human population or change in real estate values in a given locality. But the victories outweighed the defeats, and so they marched on. From hall to tent, from tent to theatre or on to some abandoned church went this happy band of soul-winners·. Always they were busy at the one task to which they believed God had called them—that of bringing lost men to the Saviour, and always they were learning, were getting experience, were winning souls and adding to their number.
A. B. Simpson was in his glory. He was seeing Christian democracy at its simple best. No social lines separated his people from each other. His members came from every level of human society from the gutter to the penthouse. Any Saturday night “a brother of low degree” might be seen standing on a street corner giving his testimony while a well-to-do and cultured believer stood beside him holding his hat while he talked. It was a free church in the fullest sense of the word. The old irritating conservatism that used to block so many of his plans was gone. Gone were the paralyzing traditions that had stopped his best efforts for so many years. No blessed antiques were there, sitting solemnly about the church building to woo the minds of the worshipers back into the musty past. With the past they had little to do. Most of them were glad to be rid of it. The future allured them and the present kept them busy. There were no pew rents and no assessments. The stranger and the poor were received with open arms. Their eloquent and scholarly pastor was their undisputed leader by common consent and joyful acclaim. The meetings were marked by deep spirituality and mighty flowing power. Altogether they presented as strange and as wonderful a sight as might have been seen anywhere in Christendom as they preached and sang and prayed their way through the wilderness that was New York.
As the years went on Mr. Simpson and his people came to see the need for a permanent base of operation, located near the center of the city and built to meet the needs of their work. They had become weary of the hand-me-down buildings they had been forced to put up with for so long. These were never satisfactory. A suitable location was accordingly chosen at the corner of Eighth Avenue and West 44th Street, only one block from Times Square, and plans were drawn up for the new building. It was to provide a large auditorium for the public meetings, three chapels for smaller gatherings, an educational building for the Training Institute which was already established, a book store on the ground floor and a Missionary Home, or Christian hotel, with accommodations for about one hundred guests. The cornerstone was laid in the fall of 1888 and the completed building dedicated in May 1889.
There was great rejoicing as the congregation moved into their new working quarters and set about the business to which they had given their lives. The Gospel Tabernacle, as the place was called (too bad they could not have thought of a name for it. But that was one rather unfortunate blind spot in the luminous mind of Simpson; he was never happy at choosing names), was the new home base, but it never became an end in itself. From there the busy workers radiated out like spokes from the hub of a wheel. When the new work began under Mr. Simpson eight years before, there had been no thought of forming another church. They planned rather to carry on an aggressive evangelistic effort, leaving the converts free to join the churches of their own choice. But as the congregation grew, the clamor became insistent for a church home for the new believers. “Some wanted to be baptized,” said Mr. Simpson later, “all wanted the Lord’s supper and none wanted to be sent away.” That was the cause back of the organization of a little church of less than twenty members. “At first there were not men enough to go around and fill the various offices, so some of our trustees had to be ‘elect ladies.’” That was about seven years be fore the opening of the Gospel Tabernacle. By this time they had increased to a multitude which swarmed about the new center like swallows around an old chimney at sundown. The fame of the pastor and the wonder of his unique work had spread far abroad. From that time on they never suffered for lack of men.