It was in the autumn of 1790.
Before wintry weather made the 20 miles or so between Olney, Buckinghamshire, and Everton, Bedfordshire, quite difficult for travel, two Baptist pastors wended their way to an Anglican parish for a few hours’ visit with its vicar. For much of the 18th century, many Baptists and Anglicans had been like the Jews and Samaritans of old: they had ‘no dealings’ with one another (John 4.9). But times were rightly changing, and Baptists were coming to realise that it was the better part of wisdom to build friendships with gospel-centred Anglicans.
Flying to Jesus
So it was that Andrew Fuller, the tall, broad-shouldered pastor of the Baptist cause in Kettering, Northamptonshire, and the author of The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785), which would do much to open up the Calvinistic Baptist community to revival, along with his close friend John Sutcliff of Olney, came to spend a few hours in the company of John Berridge, the vicar of St Mary’s Church, Everton. Beginning in the late 1750s, this 13th-century parish church had witnessed remarkable scenes of revival when Berridge, after his own conversion in 1757, preached the gospel to literally thousands and hundreds, like him, ‘fled to Jesus alone for refuge’ (part of the epitaph on Berridge’s tombstone in the cemetery of St Mary’s).
In the years that followed Berridge had become firmly associated with other leaders of the revival, men like George Whitefield and Henry Venn of Yelling. Like Whitefield he was a bold itinerant – a ‘gospel pedlar’, as his recent biographer Nigel Pibworth has rightly called him. Though the frankness and directness of his pulpit ministry was considered eccentric by some – Fuller would have admired such a quality, as his own preaching was similarly bold, plain and pithy – Berridge’s life was also marked by what his first biographer and curate Richard Whittingham termed an ‘unaffected humility’.
Typical of Berridge are the following lines he wrote in 1773: ‘I am now sinking from a poor something into a vile nothing.’ And when he died 20 years later he insisted on being buried in the unconsecrated ground of the church’s cemetery reserved for suicides.
Berridge at prayer
What Fuller and Sutcliff remembered especially from their few hours with Berridge – at the time he was in his mid-70s, having been born in 1716 – was the intensity of his love for Christ and the sweetness of his praying.
When they were about to take their leave of Berridge, the three men prayed together on their knees (were they in the church at this point or Berridge’s home, the 17th-century vicarage?). Fuller prayed first, ending his prayer with the familiar refrain, ‘in Christ’s name’. At this point, Berridge took up Fuller’s prayer and began to pray, ‘O Lord God! This prayer has been offered up in the name of Jesus, accept it I beseech thee…’ and he continued on for five or six minutes with, Sutcliff later recalled, ‘such sweet solemnity, such holy familiarity with God, and such ardent love to Christ…that the like was seldom seen’.
The meeting’s meaning
Fuller never forgot the time with Berridge, and he later reckoned it to be one of the happiest events of his life. More than that, it bespoke an important breakthrough for many Baptists like Fuller: they were realising that, while their distinctive Baptist convictions were important, they were not the sole custodians of such primary gospel truths as the new birth and regeneration by the Holy Spirit. There were others, men like Berridge, who shared their fundamental convictions, and with whom they needed to have fellowship and to pray together.
Though we in the West cannot be said to be enjoying the revival blessings of late 18th-century England, yet the sweet fellowship that Berridge, Fuller, and Sutcliff enjoyed that autumn day in 1790 is much needed – much needed indeed!
