Ian Shaw traces the life of Leslie Land (1903–1986), a remarkable but forgotten man
‘William Leslie Land, born 20 January 1903 at Wirksworth; son of Samuel Land, retired Draper and Outfitter. Educated at the Grammar School, Wirksworth. Admitted 1 March 1921.’
So reads the Christ’s College, Cambridge, Admissions Book, where he studied for the Natural Sciences Tripos. His father came from a line of lead miners but had established what seems to have been a successful business. Leslie’s mother, Minnie, was a school teacher. His parents were committed members of the local Baptist church, where his father occasionally preached.
Speaking in 1949, he said: ‘I could “hear and hear” gospel sermons, perhaps preached with the very heart-blood and passion of a consecrated preacher, but I could gaily persist in withholding my… heart…
‘But the time came – I cannot tell you the day or the hour… – when Jesus “came alive” and real to me: I heard the gospel message, really heard it,… I saw Calvary as the place where my sin and my self-centred life were crucified and put away for ever… I shall never forget the sight!’
Remarkable talents
He was man of remarkable gifts. Musically talented, a friend recalled: ‘I got him, I think it was a Schubert Impromptu, certainly pretty difficult. I said: “Do you know that, Leslie?” He said: “I cut my teeth on it!”’
Paul Bassett, the present minister of Melbourne Hall, Leicester writes: ‘I shall never forget his walking in from the garden in Worthing, sitting down in his open-necked shirt and grey flannels and nonchalantly playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto.’ He was also an artist of no mean talent.
By his early 30s he was head teacher at Seaford College on the south coast of England.
Friend of ML-J
His call to the ministry was tied up with his close friendship with Martyn Lloyd-Jones. He sent a book to Lloyd-Jones and the reply is a measure of that friendship.
Gradually coming to terms with a call to the ministry, he left his position and moved, via an Oxford scholarship and a short ministry on the south coast of England, to the East Midlands city of Leicester in 1947. A friend recalls Leslie Land’s anecdote about his time at Oxford: ‘It was a habit for them to ask one of the students to preach the service at the end [of the university year], so … they asked him to preach, and he said: “I preached an evangelical sermon and the principal came up to me afterwards. He said: ‘Well, Land, I see we haven’t taught you anything!”’ So Leslie said: “Oh, but you have. After three years here you’ve convinced me that all I ever believed was the real gospel.”’
His ministry at Melbourne Hall in Leicester was to prove more far-reaching than at any time in that church since F. B. Meyer became its first minister late in the 19th century.
Immediate blessing
What kind of church did Leslie Land arrive at with his wife Kathryn and their young son Peter in May 1947? Big names had held tenure in the pulpit. But all was not well. It had become, in the memory of someone there at the time, a rather ‘social’ church. Freemasonry was influential.
The first years saw immediate blessing: 99 people were baptised in the three years from October 1947 and 111 joined the church. Christians, including ministers, travelled from all over to attend his weekly Bible School. Leslie Land avoided labels, but his gentle, impeccably courteous yet penetrating expositions laid the foundations of a Reformed evangelicalism which was to influence many.
His frequent recommendations of good books, tucked away in the pages of the monthly magazine and on the church book-stall, and the string of good preachers occupying his pulpit whenever he was away, were alike testimony to his quiet determination.
Over the years readers would come across Charles Spurgeon’s ‘Precepts for Ministerial Students’, J.I.Packer on ‘The Plan’, an extract from J.C. Ryle on ‘Defective Evangelism’, Alan Stibbs on ‘Parenthood’ and Brownlow North’s ‘Six Rules for Young Christians’. I have little doubt that it was his own action that lay behind a note in the magazine in March 1960 to the effect that ‘in answer to a special request’ the Leicestershire County Library had added to its stock books by Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, Isaac Watts and Samuel Rutherford’s Letters. One of his final acts was to invite Dr Jim Packer to address a flourishing network of lay preachers in the church.
Serious and humorous
His deep seriousness was leavened with a delightful dry humour. He illustrated the importance of giving one’s imagination to the message by saying: ‘I listened in not long ago to the Cup Final at Wembley. At one point in the game I realised I had yielded my imagination to the commentator’s story and I was living in it. Believe me or not, I almost scored a goal for Leicester City!’
He was ready to be straight with his hearers: ‘Heaven save us from long prayers and from long embarrassing silences… Oh that we could be rid of the idea that to take part in a prayer meeting you have to deliver a sermon or evangelical dissertation, or recite the main points of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.’ Rather: ‘The prayer meeting… is the Christian’s workshop where things are done by God and for God…’ ‘It is so much easier to organise than to agonise’, he remarked in 1950. ‘We will do anything rather than pray… The plain truth is we just do not like praying; we find it hard and uninteresting…’
Borders of depression
Leslie Land was a ‘glass half empty’ person. He went through at least two periods when he had to stand back from his ministry due to anxiety and perhaps depression. On one such occasion, in March 1957, Lloyd-Jones wrote to him: ‘I cannot tell how sorry I was to hear from one of your members who happened to be visiting London that you were not well. I gather that it is entirely due to overwork, and, knowing you, I am not at all surprised.’
He had an inescapable sense that God is working to great ends – ‘dealing with sin and bringing back the glory that has departed’, as he expressed it in a Bible School message on Ezekiel and the death of his wife.
These words gain added poignancy knowing he was aware of the early signs of his own illness with Parkinson’s Disease. In his resignation letter to the church he reminded them: ‘I have not shrunk from passing on to you the whole counsel of God. I have sought to emphasise none other loyalty than Christ and his Word.’ By 1980 Leslie Land was, in Kathryn’s words, ‘very poorly’. He died 4 November 1986. He was then to disappear from public – and Christian – view until the last few years.
