Other Times, Other Ministries

Abstract

"Fawcett and McLaren: two names which are household words among northern Baptists yet about whom most can say little more than that the one came from Yorkshire and wrote a famous hymn and the o'ther served in Manchester and delivered a vast series of expository addresses which today are as seldom read as they are often cited as monuments of Victorian pulpit oratory. A vast gulf seems to separate us from these two giants of the past, rendered all the vaster in that neither has a modern biography nor indeed is a particularly rewarding subject for biographical treatment. (1) Yet in both cases a reappraisal, however tentative, is both feasible and overdue. Particularly in this bicentenary year of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Associations their works are well worth recalling, not least because they helped shape the patterns of church life and Christian understanding to which we on both sides of the Pennines remain indebted."