ARCHIBALD G. BROWN
Spurgeon’s successor
By Iain Murray. Banner of Truth. 432 pages. £16.00
ISBN 978 1 848 711 396
The church that is today East London Tabernacle was founded just over 150 years ago in 1861 in Stepney.
In that same year a young man in South London named Archibald Brown was converted through the witness of a Sunday school teacher (whom he later married) and an itinerant Anglican evangelist. Six years later, Brown, at the age of 23, was called to be the minister of the Stepney church. In the intervening period he cut his teeth in ministry preaching to workers on the railways lines then being built, as well in chapels and the open air. The well-known preacher C.H. Spurgeon recognised Brown’s gifts as a preacher and admitted him to his Pastors’ College. After a short pastorate at Bromley Baptist Church, which he planted, Brown became pastor of the Stepney church on Spurgeon’s recommendation. At one service some 40 young men were converted and later baptised and added to the church after an extraordinary prayer meeting. The congregation grew very quickly, necessitating the move to Mile End, where a new tabernacle was built on the site of the present tabernacle (the former was destroyed by enemy action in 1941).
