Summary Of The Foundation Laid By Charles Spurgeon

The Foundation Laid by Charles H. Spurgeon

When spectators gather at arenas and stadiums for sporting events, the athletes that they observe running across the fields and courts are the finished products of what has transpired days, weeks and months before. Athletes are conditioned through practice and repetition so that their required activities in the game are spontaneous reflexes with positive results. In the Christian arena these practices are called spiritual disciplines which consist of how a person’s spiritual character is developed and matured continual practice including but constrained to the dedication to solitude, prayer and fasting, meditation, reading the Scriptures and serving others. Although the Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle was known for its Monday night prayer meetings gathering several thousand people in attendance, it was also known that Spurgeon not only practiced but also taught his pastoral students that the disciplines displayed publicly must also be practiced in one’s private life. In explaining this to his students of the Pastor’s College, he states, “How dare we pray in the battle if we have never cried to the Lord while buckling on our armor.” The pubic practices of

Spurgeon, “primarily known for his preaching rather than his daily functions in the pastorate, taught his students the principles of preaching; nevertheless, he viewed the ministry as centered around serving the spiritual needs of his people. He wrote, ‘Ministers are for churches, and not churches for ministers.’” This is demonstrated through his establishment of the Pastor’s college he opened in 1856 , where he taught countless lectures to eager ministry students which stands to this day as his living legacy of the importance of Christian education and the orphanage he founded in 1879 which “is now a charitable organization benefiting the world’s