Obscure Ministers
By J. H. (John Henry) Milburn
(1842-1914)The great rank and file of Baptist ministers spend their days in the humbler walks of life, where none but those who live in their immediate vicinities know but little about them, or appreciate their labors. Those are God’s noble-men, who, with no reward save the glorious crown the righteous judge will award them when he shall come to make up his jewels, have pressed their way into the nooks and corners and hedges of the poor and lowly until the earth has been made glad and it can be truly said, “The poor have the gospel preached unto them.”
In those obscure servants of the lowly Nazarene has been filled more surely and truly the work of true ministers of the Master than has been by far in the lives of our so-called great ones. They have not been caressed, fondled, petted nor spoiled by the world, nor the church, nor have they sought to be; but to the contrary they have gone straight forward with hearts full of love for God and man, preached the simple, plain, old, old story of Jesus and his love. They have not preached theories, nor the so-called higher criticism, but Christ, and God has greatly honored their labors, the Holy Spirit has attended their humble ministrations and untold multitudes of souls have been born unto God.
Those faithful laborers have gone into villages and into the interior portions of the country and established churches and scattered the precious seeds of the gospel everywhere and have “sown beside all waters” where D.D.’s and L.L.D’s and the average theological graduate could not be induced to go. Those brethren will never be known as great preachers (yet they are truly great), nor do they care to be so regarded; just so the Lord continued to bless their labors, and souls are converted under their ministry, it is enough for them. They have no long strings of titles to their names, and they are content to apply to each other the appellations which the Holy Spirit has applied to the ministers of the gospel of Christ.
Those ministers constitute, probably, nine-tenths of the great army of more than 37,000 Baptist ministers in the United States, whose labors in the way of saving souls are far more highly blessed of the Lord than are the labors of their more highly honored and titled brethren. While a few metropolitan preachers are constantly talking about “how to reach the masses,” as though the masses lived in the slums and back-alleys of a few cities, those comparatively obscure brethren without much ado have gone right forward and reached the masses.
Without those ministers and their labors this world would be poor indeed. Whereas there are over 4,000,000 Missionary Baptists by profession in the United States, without this host of obscure ministers there would be but a few thousand. As it is upon the battle-field, so it is in the army of the Lord Jesus Christ, the big guns make more noise and do less execution than do the small arms. Their fame and their worth are unheralded and unsung, but the righteous judge keeps a record of their labors, and they have sown, for the most part, in poverty, and in tears, shall finally come rejoicing, bringing their numerous sheaves with them.
In our great gatherings and assemblies, ministers with great literary advantages, but not so far advanced in spiritual attainments, meet and deliver fine speeches previously prepared for the occasion, and elect and appoint those of their own caste to positions of honor and talk eloquently about “our” almost phenomenal growth and the great numbers “we” have gained during the last year, not remembering that at least seven-eights of the 172,000 converts baptized last year into the fellowship of Baptist churches in the United States were brought into the fold of Christ by their brethren, whose eyes and hearts were not fixed so much on fine salaries, easy positions, city pastorates and the like as they were on the salvation of immortal souls.
But in the light of the great final day of accounts, however the fact will then be fully ascertained that no place nor position where work was to be done for the Master is without honor, and no one is obscure who with willing heart and ready hand, went forth and faithfully worked for Christ. To win souls to Christ, then, and to be loyal and true to his doctrines, teachings and ordinances is in God’s estimation truly great. At that time and on that occasion those obscure toilers will cease to be obscure; they will then stand among God’s brightest jewels and be honored of him before men and angels as the great Judge shall say, “Come, ye blessed of my father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”
========================== [Reprinted by the J.H. Spencer Historical Society as a tract. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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