Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers
January 21, 2010
In 1898 Charles Edward Jefferson became the pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle in Brooklyn, New York. He stayed as pastor for 33 years of fruitful growth and expanding ministry. He had the “longest run on Broadway” of any of the church’s pastors. During his time thousands of people packed the sanctuary every Sunday to hear him preach.
I would never have heard of him were it not for Warren Wiersbe who devoted a chapter to Charles E. Jefferson in his magnificent book Walking With the Giants. Just yesterday I happened to see a recent book by Dr. Wiersbe called 50 People Every Christian Should Know, which contains chapters on notable Christians such as Fanny Crosby, A. W. Tozer, Amy Carmichael, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Spurgeon and Hudson Taylor. He included a chapter on Charles E. Jefferson, a name most people do not recognize.
I was in seminary when I first read Wiersbe’s chapter on Charles E. Jefferson in Walking With the Giants. He mentioned that all of Jefferson’s books were out-of-print, which led me to the Dallas Seminary library where I found a rather worn copy of a small book called Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers, written in 1901 by Pastor Jefferson as a guide to young men just starting out in the ministry. I liked it so much that I photocopied the pages and had them bound with plastic spiral binding. That was in 1977. For 32 years I’ve carried that spiral-bound copy of Quiet Hints with me wherever we’ve moved. Years would pass between readings, but every time I picked it up I found amazing wisdom.
The book contains 26 short chapters on what we would today call ministerial deportment, an old-fashioned word that refers to how a man carries himself, how he presents himself, his manners, his bearing, his habits, and his whole approach to life. Jefferson wrote in short, pithy statements that encapsulate practical truth in just a few words:
“Many a man in the ministry fails, not because he is bad, but because he has a genius for blundering.”
“Probably no other single sin works such havoc in the Christian church as the impatience of her ministers.”
“Sheep like to be fed. They never resist. When repeatedly fed by the same shepherd they will follow him whithersoever he leads them.”
“Popularity is the most fearful of all tests.”
“If a minister says he loves God, and in his heart slights or despises his people, he is not only a liar but a murderer of the spiritual life of his parish.”
In seminary you learn lots of useful things–Greek, Hebrew, theology, church history, homiletics, missions, and so on. But it’s hard to learn the “nuts and bolts” of the ministry while sitting in the classroom. Most of what Charles E. Jefferson wrote in Quiet Hints I never heard in seminary, but what he writes about is the stuff of real life. And from my vantage point, what he wrote stands up very well 109 years later.
Any man who can successfully pastor a city church for more than 30 years deserves a hearing. And since Quiet Hints is now in the public domain, we’ve uploaded a pdf file of the book to our server. You can download it and see what you think. Although Pastor Jefferson wrote from the standpoint of Brooklyn at the dawn of the 20th century, the challenges of the ministry haven’t really changed since then.
Over the next several weeks I’m going to go through the book chapter by chapter, each day posting some key quotes for our benefit. I know it will be good for my own soul to think about these things. I hope you enjoy it too.