By Faith Cook
Banner of Truth. 342 pages. £18.95
ISBN 0 85151 732 3
I personally found this book very fascinating. Partly, I was drawn to a rugged individualist who actually hailed from my own grammar school in Blackburn 200 years before me, and even ministered with John Wesley in the parish of Fulwood in Sheffield, from which I have just retired. But I was much more challenged by the extraordinarily contemporary relevance of this book and this man.
William Grimshaw faced in the 18th century the problems of the priority of evangelistic zeal over ecclesiastical rules. He had to battle with his love for the Church of England and yet his friendship with those who found themselves moving outside its confines into Methodism and other forms of dissent. In his Biblical preaching, Grimshaw found himself often opposed, misunderstood and even physically persecuted. We need men and women of like courage today.
Most of all, I was challenged by this man's willingness to preach the reality of judgment, not only publicly but personally, and his absolute commitment to the great doctrines of the Reformation to which he came through his own deep and prolonged personal experience. It is idle to debate how Grimshaw's kind and length of preaching would be effective today, but there is little doubt that we need to be brought back to the essentials of biblical preaching. Grimshaw's day had its controversies and he always sought to be aloof from them with all his courage in the gospel. Issues of Christian perfectionism were abroad and extreme cults abounded in those heady days.
Perhaps most of all, William Grimshaw will stand out to the reader as a very warm man with deep personal tragedies and yet utterly dedicated to his Lord and the gospel. He saw much quite revolutionary church growth in his apparently tiny Yorkshire fastness. His simple formula was 'a praying Christian is a growing Christian'. With all his zeal for preaching, he was also a faithful visitor and a caring, if very blunt, pastor. John Wesley's comment about him remains paramount: 'He carries fire, wherever he goes.' I found myself praying that there will be more people like that in our very different age which desperately needs the gospel of William Grimshaw.
