Lord, make us ambitious!

It would have been in the late 1880s, when the ministry of C. H. Spurgeon was drawing to a close, that a Dubliner by the name of Hugh Dunlop Brown (1858–1918) attended worship at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle with a few thousand other men and women and children.

As Spurgeon came to preach he caught sight of Brown in the congregation and immediately exclaimed: ‘I see my friend Brown from Dublin; will he please come round and help me.’ One can well imagine that it was a rare occasion for Spurgeon to invite a man out of the vast audiences that attended on his preaching to help him in the pulpit. But then Hugh Brown was a remarkable man, though I dare say his name has been forgotten a little over a century since his stepping into heaven.

Material wealth & spiritual riches

Hugh Brown came from wealth. His father, also Hugh Brown (d.1882), had founded the department store now known as Brown Thomas with a James Thomas in 1848 on Grafton Street in Dublin. The wealth that accrued to him enabled him to raise his family in comfort. Such wealth has proven to be a snare to many, but Hugh Brown and his wife Marianne (d.1912) were evangelical Christians, faithful members of the Church of Ireland, and sought to use their wealth for the advance of God’s kingdom.

For instance, when their son became the pastor of the Baptist congregation that met in Lower Abbey Street, Dublin, and whose origins stretched back to the 17th century, it soon became evident to Hugh Dunlop Brown that the church needed a new building. His widowed mother, Marianne, generously paid for the entire cost of the new building on Harcourt Street, which was between £7,000 – £8,000 pounds, a huge sum in those days.

Hundreds came

The auditorium of the new church could seat up to a thousand people. To the amazement of many in Dublin, and even to the 38 men and women who were the members of the church when it moved to Harcourt Street in 1887, hundreds soon came to hear the young preacher in his mid-twenties. By the close of 1887, the membership of the church had increased to 135, and seven years later, it stood at 380. Seventeen years later, in 1904, the membership was over 400, where it remained to the end of Brown’s ministry in 1914.

The younger Brown, who had been trained at Trinity College and was a barrister-at-law, had begun preaching for the Dublin Baptists in 1881, and after three years, had accepted their call to the pastorate. When Brown came to the church, it was small and struggling. But through Brown’s preaching, as noted, the church began to experience renewal.

No title or attire

When he accepted the call to the church, he told a close friend that he was determined not to wear any special ‘clerical attire’ nor to go by the title ‘Reverend’ (here he might well have been following the example of his future friend, Spurgeon). As he put it to his friend: If I cannot be recognised as possessing other tokens of service, the quicker you get rid of me the better. God grant us to be ambitious men. There is no limit to the possibilities of faith. Man is indeed contemptible, but not the God of Pentecost.

Should not we pray the same? Oh Lord God of Pentecost, make us to be ambitious men and women for you and your kingdom.