Perseverance in ministry

Over the past two months, we have been considering the pastoral ministry of Benjamin Beddome at Bourton-on-the-Water.

In the first 15 years or so of his ministry, the church knew revival. But during the 1750s and the first half of the 1760s the numerical growth of the church began to slow. In 1751 the total number of members stood at 180. Between 1752 and 1754 none were added to the church and 15 members were lost through death. In 1755, though, there were 22 individuals who came into the membership of the church by baptism. Another year which saw a large accession to the church was 1764, when 28 new members were added. A good number must have died since the mid-1750s, for in that year the membership stood at 183. But the next 30 years of his ministry saw a decline in the church membership. And by 1795, the year that Beddome died, the church had 123 on the membership roll, 60 less than in 1764.

It is quite clear from letters that Beddome wrote on behalf of the church to the local Baptist association during the last three decades of his ministry that he lamented this lack of growth. The size of the congregation held its own – probably around 500 or 600 – to the end of his life, but that vital step of believer’s baptism leading to full church membership was taken by far fewer in the final three decades of his ministry than in the first two and a half. A prayer written by Beddome well expresses his concern:

Come from the four winds O Breath & breathe upon these slain that they may live.
Awake O Northwind & come thou South, blow upon our Garden that the Spices may flow out.

‘Spiritual darkness and distress’

These decades were also fraught with earthly trials. In 1762 he wrestled with what a fellow Baptist pastor, Daniel Turner, termed ‘a nervous disorder, attended with spiritual darkness and distress’. Between 1765 and 1784 he also lost three grown sons and his dear wife.

(The Mill Bridge in Bourton-on-the-Water. The bridge was built in 1654 and no doubt often used by Benjamin Beddome.)

From the mid-1770s on, he began to suffer from gout and experience tremendous difficulty in walking. Eventually it got to the point that he had to be carried to the church, and he would preach to his congregation seated. Despite his physical infirmities, though, Beddome simply refused to give up preaching.

At the heart of this refusal lay a deeplyheld conviction about the vital importance of preaching. What historian Michael Walker has said of the 19th-century British Baptist community is equally true of Beddome and many of his fellow Calvinistic Baptists in the 18th century: they regarded the pulpit as ‘a place of nurture, of fire and light, from which words gave wings to the religious aspirations of the hearers, bringing them … to the gates of heaven’.

At the time of Beddome’s death in 1795, almost his sole publication was his Scriptural Exposition. In the years that followed, though, a good number of his sermons were published, as was a volume of 830 hymns. It is noteworthy that close to 100 of these hymns were still appearing in hymnals at the end of the 19th century, though today barely a handful are still being sung. Robert Hall, Jr. spoke for many of his fellow Baptists when he said of Beddome’s gifts as a writer of hymns: ‘Mr Beddome was eminent for his colloquial powers … as a religious poet, his excellence has long been known and acknowledged’.

Beddome did not write his hymns with the intention of ever getting them published. He was in the habit of preparing a hymn to be sung at the close of the morning worship service, which would pick up the theme of his sermon, a practice that prompted Horton Davies to describe Beddome as an ‘indefatigable sermon summarizer in verse’. About 30 of his sermons had been published by the time of his death. It was more than 20 years after his death that Robert Hall, Jr. supervised the publication of the entire collection of 822 hymns and eight doxologies.

In our final instalment on Beddome, next month, we shall look at some of his hymns.