141: A Pilgrim's Coffer

to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.

He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Well, it's a chilly January.

Actually, I have no idea, because this is coming out in January, but we're recording this in December, brother.

People who are listening have no idea that it's December 17th, because I think this is probably gonna come out around January 7th, or no, it should be

January 14th. But welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I am your host,

Alan Nelson. I'm one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church. We are a

Reformed Baptist Church in central Arkansas, Perryville, right in the center of the state, really.

And I have a great brother with us this morning. This is

Pilgrim's Coffer himself, a Pilgrim's Coffer himself, Jared Payne.

How are you doing today, brother? Good, good. I'm glad to be able to chat with you for a little bit. I think you were the last time that you were in Arkansas, or maybe the only time.

Have you been to Arkansas more than once? No, that's the only time. So the last time that you were in Arkansas, that was 2021, right?

Yep, for that conference out there with Grace, right? Yep, yep. I picked you up at the airport, and you actually stayed with us.

And at that point, we were Perryville Second Baptist Church, but we have undergone some,

Lord has brought some beautiful changes. And so we were on the road to Reformation then, but the

Lord has accelerated that. And so God's been very gracious to us.

So I'm grateful for that. So now it's Providence Baptist Church for the last, oh well, two and a half years.

Which is funny because that's our church's name too. Are you serious? Yeah, Providence Baptist Church, Asheboro, North Carolina, yep.

Wow, okay, so we're Providence Baptist Perryville Campus. So we're like one big name now.

That's right, that's right. Yeah, so to start out, tell us a little bit about your church then.

I'm intrigued. I guess I didn't know that, Providence Baptist. So tell us about your church.

Yeah, so we're a particular Baptist church here in Asheboro. And when my wife and I were looking for a church in the area, as you can imagine, there's not that many

Calvinistic Reformed churches around, especially when you get kind of in the

Bible belt. It can be quite hit or miss. Now, these days, since we were looking for a church at that point, it seems like there's been more of a resurgence.

We're starting to see some more churches kind of pop up that teach the doctrines of grace.

And what have you. And so, but at the time, we had looked out probably using, probably

Founders, you know, Founders Church Search that they have online. I probably might've looked at a few others and we did find

Providence in Asheboro there. And they, we found out they were a church plant out of a, from about 30 minutes away from a church about 30 minutes away.

And so, yeah, that's how we found it. And really that's probably the only thing that was around in, you know, kind of a 30 to 45 minute radius, honestly.

And there may be some others, but you know, when you do find them occasionally, they're just not very,

I don't know if I would say advertised, but you know, it's just hard to find out about them. And so, we started looking for the church right around, right before all the

COVID stuff hit. Oh, okay, yeah. And so, was getting ready to go visit and then

COVID hit. And so, I had to wait until, they weren't closed an extended amount of time.

Of course, nobody really knew what was going on. So, it was a little bit of time.

And then they started having, the building that we were in had a garage roll -up doors at the back.

So, then they started rolling those up and letting people sit outside and come for the church services and things like that.

And so, that put a little bit of delay in there, but we hung in there and said, no, we wanna visit this church and give it, you know, a good chance.

And it's been such a blessing. I really believe that folks, if you overlook, you know, you've probably heard many people say this, but if we overlook these smaller churches, just because they're small, you're making a terrible mistake, you know.

Go to the churches nearest to the Bible, you know. Yes. Yeah, be there. And we've seen growth.

I mean, we've got a lot of young couples, a lot of, I wish I could have, would have thought about this beforehand, but I bet since we've been there, including having two of our own, there's probably been at least, at least four or five more babies born since we got there.

And when we came to the church, it was a church of, you know, maybe a hundred that were on the list, but it included some, you know, kind of your shut -ins, and it had some people that had been coming, but with health and things.

And so we've seen tremendous growth just being faithful, and, you know, and really seeing the

Lord work in that. We have a pastor's school that we started in Africa.

And so we were working with, the church was working before we got there, had been in a relationship with some missionaries there, who the missionaries were from South Africa.

And they had been working with them for some time, and unfortunately the husband passed away, and it had been on our elders' hearts really to invest even more in the pastors that they had come to know in that area.

And so, yeah, we've got a pastor's school there, and we have, literally have pastors coming from across the country.

And I mean, these guys, some of these guys do not have the means to be doing this, and they are learning about the doctrines of grace, learning about scripture, learning the real meat of the gospel, and they are just on fire for it, and it's just been a wonderful thing to see.

So we have, we visit, our church goes at least quarterly and has classes, do tests, and all sorts of these things for the pastors over there.

So yeah, it's been a blessing. Our church, the Lord has really worked through our church, especially considering our size.

You say your size, how big are you guys? What's the size? Now we might be, you know, maybe 120, maybe.

Wow, that's a good, that's a good size. Now you gotta remember, brother, you are on. Now I don't mean 120 necessarily there every

Sunday. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to talk about the book, but when I got there, you were probably talking, you know, you might've been talking 40 to 50 people in the seats, and I would say now we probably, you know, we probably see, you know, we might see 60 to 80 or 90, you know, it just kind of depend.

And we do have a lot that we're, like I said, we're older and kind of are unable to be there. But we do have sermon audio out and some of those things for our elders, but go ahead.

No, I was just saying, you're on the Rural Church Podcast. So we love all churches, rural churches.

Now to be rural doesn't necessarily mean you are small, but we love all churches.

And I think it's amazing that God, it's amazing what God does.

I think sometimes, we left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2025.

And I think a lot of people are afraid to do that because they're afraid sometimes about, not everybody, but some, they're afraid that they'll lose impact, you know, and they think about the big, but God is pleased to work through small things and small churches.

And he loves his church. And even, you know, like what you guys are doing in South Africa, we have some, and we have some connections with Mexico.

We're doing some things and it's really a beautiful thing. But anyway, so we, it is - Well, let me give you just a little more encouragement since this is the

Rural Church Podcast, right? So we, this church has been truly just an independent church, not

IFB church, right? Just independent church, just not affiliated with anything. And, but just to give some encouragement, this, you know, we're not large, we're, you know, we're not,

I'm sure there's plenty of smaller churches, but, you know, in the scheme of American Christianity type things that we're used to today, a small church, but we have had, we have had people who do not go to our church, who are contacts with our elders, who have, we have used and collected for the mission work that we do directly.

I mean, now we do support some through some of like the master's seminary, some of their international groups that have schools in Europe and some different places.

But, you know, we've got missionaries in some different places,

Central America, and that we support. The pastor school has been, of course, a passion of ours, but we've had some years.

Now you're talking a church of, as far as regular attendance, under a hundred, right?

We've had some years where people have found out what we're doing and what we're seeking to do and what we're laboring to do.

And you're talking, we've had people help us be able to use six figures, bring it overseas for a church of a hundred.

And we start, the church's story, and I won't go through all that, but the

Lord has been present in so many steps. I mean, when they didn't have a church, and we're looking for a place to be, you know, really praying as to whether, you know,

Lord, do you want us here? Is this what we should be doing? Had one of the churches here that was kind of dwindling, that was just, you know, a couple of families were still there, come to them and say, hey, we wanna give you our church and our checking account.

I mean, you know, which wasn't anything outrageous, right? But was the

Lord working to provide, to get them from point A to point B? Now the Lord gives and the Lord takes. They were given that church.

And a couple of years later, found out the whole basement was collecting moisture and toxic mold was building up, had to burn the church down.

Wow. They had to take. And then the Lord provided for them to relocate. And so the

Lord has just, has worked a lot and through, you know, the elder's faithfulness and the church's faithfulness.

And, you know, I hope that it's an encouragement that especially with today's interconnectedness and with the ability that we have to, you know, quickly communicate and more quickly raise funds and some of these things, that small churches today have more accessibility and accessibility to funds and fundraising and more ability to go out and serve in the world than ever before.

Amen, brother. I'm all in on the local church. So that's good. That's encouraging to hear you say that.

And what I wanted to have you on today for, let's see, I had this pulled up just a second ago. Yep, there it is.

I'm on a pilgrimscoffer .com. It's spelt just like it sounds there, a pilgrimscoffer .com.

And why don't you tell us a little bit, okay, first of all, what is a pilgrimscoffer? I think you had,

I know that this was kind of, was it started in 2021 already when we,

I remember us talking about some things, but I do know since then things have really taken off. So just, I'm going to give you the floor, talk to us about what is a pilgrimscoffer?

What's the vision of this? What are you doing? And then we'll get into here in a little bit about some projects you've got upcoming.

Yeah, so it's really started, a lot of it's been just kind of an evolution of sorts.

Didn't really, wouldn't have thought I would be doing at this point what I am doing.

But when I started a pilgrimscoffer, I probably technically started it in concept, not as a business or anything, not from that front, a business, but really more of a labor for the church, but as far as technically being a business where you're selling things.

But I started this as a way, a coffer. In my mind,

I was thinking kind of like the Puritans coming over to America. The old coffers that they had were kind of looked like, kind of looked like your quilting, your quilt cabinets at the end of your bed, that kind of thing, the old style, but they had a lock on them.

And that was really kind of like our modern safes.

Of course, that was not very safe in the scheme of things, but that's what they had to lock their valuables in, their family valuables and whatnot.

And so that was kind of my thought in putting together this idea of a pilgrimscoffer was a place where I could kind of keep my resources and keep my information, my quotes, a lot of these things, because after spending so many years in tax accounting that I had spent, my mind had gotten conditioned to keeping track of where things are.

And I knew, oh, I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna read this volume or I'm gonna be looking for something.

And there's gonna be just an absolutely stellar quote or there's going to be a sermon notes, a sermon breakdown that I'm gonna wanna go back and reference later.

And so I said, if I don't keep this stuff together, I can go through hundreds of volumes and it's not gonna do me any good if I can't go back and find it later.

And so that was kind of what I was thinking. And so I started, I really started a pilgrimscoffer as a

WordPress. And so I was just trying to figure out how to make some pages with tables where I could start collating quotes by topic and this and that, things that weren't the mainstream, the common things that you heard.

I figured if I was gonna be going through it rather than put it in an Excel page or whatnot,

I should, if I'm gonna do the work, I may as well make it easy for somebody else to access. So we're not duplicating efforts here.

And so, yeah, so that's what I started doing. And then part of doing this type of work, the part -time work, which sometimes at times can feel like full -time job, or at least it did for some periods throughout, is accessing the old materials, tracking down the old materials, getting ahold of them.

What's your process, Matt, tracking down materials? I mean, when you start out, you're just opening up eBay and looking.

You're just, I don't, I mean, you have no idea. And occasionally as you go through, you find out more, you run into somebody who collects and they've got extras.

And then they might say, hey, check with this person or those types of things.

Have you ever stumbled upon like a yard sale or like an estate sale and just found something?

I've gone, I don't think I have yard sales. I'm trying to think if my brother has, my brother's picked up a few little things for me here and there.

I have it at antique shops and stuff. You'll find just some old books and it'll be in kind of the

Christian section there. And they don't know who some of these guys are, but yeah, it depends.

You gotta be, I would say certain parts of the country are probably better for it. You get down here, most of the old

Christian books you're gonna see down here are probably not ones you and I are gonna spend a whole lot of time reading.

Unfortunately, you know, it's gonna be probably more 1930s, 1940s fundamentalism type stuff.

And it's just not, it's a, so, but occasionally you can still find some things there too. But yeah, so that, but that, then you get, you know, over time you get hooked up with, you know, some antique book dealers and things overseas and you make friends and it helps.

And so, you know, but the Lord has been very gracious and this was one of the encouraging things when we, when

I decided particularly that I was gonna start publishing. I started collecting original

Spurgeon material. That was, well, Spurgeon to begin with is kind of low hanging fruit, right?

You know, we're Baptists, we're here in the States, like that's not exactly going out on a limb.

But, so I would try to track down some of his books and then I would obviously try to find some others, but Spurgeon probably had the, had more of my focus.

And I'll pause real quick and I'll say, this was one thing that I had in mind. I had a family friend who was a pastor and what he had told me one time, and I'm not saying

I've entirely heeded his words, but I've kept it in mind because it is something that I would like to do.

And I think I've kind of got half of this equation, obviously, but is he said that he had a professor when he was in seminary tell him to find one historical church figure that you want to collect and read everything that you can on and try to become your own little version of an expert, you know, over your life to where you get like, you feel like you really know that person.

And then find, or not find, choose one book out of the

Bible and do the same thing with it and find all the commentaries that are worthwhile and read everything and study it and get to know it and have those kind of as two companions for your life that you really put a little bit more investment in.

I don't mean to an extreme, but something that you can say, hey, you know, 30 years down the road, hey,

I put a lot of time into reading about this figure, this pastor, this theologian, whoever it might be.

And this book of the Bible, you know, I've really walked with the Lord in and really tried to mine as much gold as I could out of it.

So Spurgeon's your guy, what's your Bible? Well, yeah, I hadn't got there. That's so tough.

You know, when you get to, I mean,

I have my proclivities on some of those things, like, you know, like a Hebrews or the

Psalms. The one thing that I'll say is I feel like, you know,

Job and the Psalms to some degree cover basically everything else that's in the

Bible, you know, which is really neat. You can find elements of scripture being reflected basically everywhere in those two.

But, you know, how easy is it to say, you know, Isaiah or Hebrews or Romans?

You know, so I haven't quite gotten there. I've been collecting a lot of the antique volumes particularly just because again, low hanging fruit makes it so accessible.

But a lot of people today, not knocking on this, will go out and buy all sorts of kind of modern commentaries and that's fine,

I've got no problem with it. I don't have any dog in that fight. But very few will go out and look at, you know,

Spurgeon's commenting and commentaries volume and see what his recommendations are.

And some of those volumes, again, I don't know if this is kind of contributes a little bit to our jump into publishing, but some of those volumes,

Spurgeon gives sparkling recommendations for and you can't go out and find a nice new volume anywhere.

Nobody reprints it. And you go, isn't that a little bit wild? You know, they'll read all sorts of things about Spurgeon, but they won't read, but, you know, we move on and don't read what

Spurgeon read. So I'm a little bit biased, of course. So this gets me to a good question here.

So what's your theological aim? Like what's your aim for a person who visits a pilgrim's coffer and they buy, like, what are you trying to accomplish in the resources that you have available there to people?

Yeah, so really we're trying to do two things and we're not, of course, exclusively the only ones that would be doing elements of these, but we're trying to start with a focus on Spurgeon, but we've got many more volumes that I would love to get into here in the coming years.

But we're looking at taking some of the older volumes, making them accessible again, as many as possible, re -typesetting them, making them easier to see.

We've got so many of the old volumes, whether it's worksets, whether it's

Spurgeon sermons, whether, no matter what it is, there's, when it comes to material that's 150 years old or older, there's a lot of it that has never been re -typeset.

They've just photolithographed or scanned the old copies. And so the problems that we run into is, number one, it can be hard to read.

I get a lot of older gentlemen tell me, hey, I've seen Spurgeon's original stuff.

I just can't read it. I cannot sit for a long time and read that small a font. And the other thing is that when we don't have it re -typeset, we don't have it digitized.

So being able to take an extract out of that edition, requires you to go look at a scan or an original and have to type out that segment versus if we have these volumes available, they're ones where pastors can say, hey, bought this book of yours,

I love it. Could you send me that extract from page whatever? I wanna use it in my, in one of my sermons, or I wanna, if you've got somebody who's also a student, they're gonna use it in their dissertation, they need a reference to it.

We're just trying to make these things readable again, more readable and accessible and kind of make old material kind of great again.

And again, I don't have a strong bias against, I of course like the old material.

I like the way that they wrote. I think that they had a little bit, they had a little bit different audiences but they had a little bit different aims in some regards.

And so I think we always need to be learning and reading things that challenge us. And so that's kind of one of the things that we wanna do.

But there's also, once we get past some of this lower hanging fruit, I've said that a few times, but once we get past that, there's a lot of volumes that we have that it was difficult for me to find the original or the latest printing anyway.

And there's, you can't go out and buy it. The best you have maybe if you're lucky is a

PDF scan on Google, maybe. And it's a shame because there's so many volumes that even

Spurgeon said things like sell what you have but make sure you go buy this book.

And they're not even available anymore. And you're sitting here going, how does this make sense? I think just from a theological perspective, it's absolutely essential that we find, whether you're a pastor, lay person, that you find opportunity to read some people from the past because we have blind spots in our own age.

They of course had blind spots in their age but you can read from those who've gone before us.

I don't think you should read to the exclusion of contemporary authors because sometimes there are maybe like new word studies or new things that come out.

We do have a lot more ability to dig into some things that they would have loved to have been able to crack open a

PC and look at and they didn't. So I think having a good balance, but yeah, not neglecting these guys.

And I like, look, so there's some places out there that you can get some old works on digital, and that's great and I'm thankful for that but I love to hold books in my hand.

That's just how, I think we, I don't know, maybe not everybody learns like this but I think

I learned better when I'm holding a book in my hand. So I appreciate the republication of these books.

So what, so if someone goes to your website, they can find like these old books that I assume that you found or been connected with these booksellers and stuff, like, well, there's several things sold out here but I'm looking at Shed's.

I got a lot more to put on the old material. Yeah, like a history of Christian doctrine, two volumes from 1888 or I guess published 1888 from Shed, there's, you know, they could find these

J .C. Ryle, Knott's and Tidewell, that one's sold out right now. But what do you've got, what's your, what do you got going on right now that you're really excited about?

Well, I mean, the primary thing that's just gonna be ongoing is of course our republication of Spurgeon's Sermons.

So that's the kind of the bread and butter of what we started.

That was something that before we started publishing, we, you know,

I started asking some questions to folks. I may, I think

I even kind of posited it to some of the, some publisher folks, but said, why has, you know, why is

Spurgeon not been, since Pilgrim Publications, you know, why has Spurgeon not been reprinted?

Why have his sermons not been reprinted? And on top of that, you know, why haven't, why hasn't anybody tried to update it?

You know, bring it kind of into 21st century. I mean, you know, we're in the day of AI where, you know, you can find all sorts of material or answers or whatnot in a matter of seconds.

And, you know, but you've got some of these big works that, you know, we've kind of, you know, in a way neglected, you know, and just kind of carried on the original typesetting and whatnot.

And the issue with the sermons are that they are unique in that they were very quick weekly productions, right?

So people who know of the pulpit sermons of Spurgeon, these are sermons that were recorded in shorthand on Sunday and were typeset and printed for sale by no later than the next

Sunday. So within a week, his sermons, just the amount of words that show up on some of those, you know, that's a pretty, that was a pretty good feat, but they specifically mentioned, including

Spurgeon himself in a number of areas, that they were not, you know, they were not able to edit these the way that they would have liked to, as if you were producing a work that you could, that you could edit kind of at leisure, right?

Because you had such a time limitation. Normal volume, right? You would write it and submit it and have somebody edit it.

And then they would take it to typesetting and then they could bring the galley proofs back and then you could go back through them line by line and make sure everything was grammatically correct, that the punctuation was exactly what you wanted to be.

They had to forego a lot of that. And so a lot of the end result was often the by -product kind of when you work through it logically, kind of the by -product of the typesetter in the shop putting these together, looking at the handwritten, the cursive shorthand notes and trying to put this into English, proper

English sentences and do everything like that. So, yeah, but volume four, which is, we're supposed to have in a matter of days to mail out, we'll probably be mailing out.

I wouldn't be surprised if I'm sitting here doing work through Christmas Eve, you know, getting stuff out just because this is kind of a, almost a 365 day thing.

There's just so much to do. But volume four in the preface, you know,

Spurgeon says, I've noticed many typographical errors in this volume.

And they say, we just, but you know, you'll have to excuse it cause we just don't have time to go through. So it's never really had somebody sit and give it attention and say, and this isn't being creative or inventive.

We're not trying to be novel and turn his spoken words as much as are reflected in the sermons into literary writing.

We're not doing any of that stuff. We are only going through and looking at what are blatant issues that we can say having gone through so many of these sermons, we are, you know, all but 100 % positive that this is an error here.

This isn't supposed to be here. You have, Spurgeon was so good illustration and gave so many anecdotes that you get a lot of quotations in his sermons.

And so a lot of typesetting issues with quotations, they would get, Spurgeon would be giving anecdotes where it's a quotation, but then he, then the person in the anecdote is saying something.

So you've got the single and double quotes and they would get those messed up all the time. And they wouldn't have the correct beginning and ending quotes.

And so, you know, we just, when we were looking at that saying, hey, you know, pastors and seminaries students need to be able to quote these things and it not look like a train wreck in some places.

And it's not bad all over, but I change, I change dozens of things every sermon,

I'll put it that way. And then you got to remember in the originals, there's plenty of places where the ink didn't lay down.

So you get to the end of a line and there's supposed to be a period and nothing shows up.

So, you know, I've had people ask, you know, why don't you just go through and AI the whole thing, you know, and just get

AI and it goes, because it can't read, it can't, the way that the actual type setting worked back there, back then you've got gaps and extra spaces all over, but then you've got ink that didn't lay down or letters that smudged.

And then on top of that, I correct spelling errors. Now I'm not, you know, this is

British English from the Victorian era. And so I'm not trying, I'm not saying I'm the expert, but when you go through there, you'll notice,

I think the first volume that we did, that I really went through of, which was 1855.

I think that I, I kind of calculated that I had in that volume,

I had to research something like six to 700 words to make sure that that was an acceptable way for them to spell it back then.

And the issue that you get is because of course, we don't have this large swath of time to do editing, but in 1855, particularly, they were still spelling a lot of words the way that the

Puritans spelled them when they were talking about theological things. So there's a lot of words that you could tell that person, either whoever was typesetting it or whoever shorthand, you know, documented the words as they were listening to Spurgeon, transcribed it, they, somebody was familiar with some of the

Puritan writings on it because they would spell it that way. And so I would have to go in and if you just go to Merriam -Webster, it's gonna say, that's not a correct spelling.

But then you go back and you start looking at, oh, well, the Oxford Dictionary, and you'll see that it's an antiquated spelling or sometimes it wouldn't show up there.

And I would go in and do research on Google Books, right? And so you might go through and look through those

PDFs and find just pages and pages of things where it did or didn't really apply.

But then you'd get in, you know, if we got into some of the Puritan works and I see this word not spelled once that way, but spelled repetitively, then

I go, okay, somebody was reading that and that's acceptable. I'm not updating those things, right?

And so that's another, I won't get into that whole end of things, but for American printing, we have,

American printing has never even, other than Pilgrim Publications, when they went and photolithographed

Spurgeon's sermons, outside of that, everything before, basically everything that was printed was

Americanized and edited. So have you seen those?

And again, this isn't to talk bad about those things. Obviously it's great to have the material out no matter. So I'm not saying that.

You ever seen the green reprint volumes of Spurgeon? It's like five volumes. It's like 10 volumes in five books.

Yep, I'm looking at them right now. Okay, so those originated from, so a company called

Sheldon and Blakeman and then Blakeman dropped out and it was Sheldon and Company. They were given the,

I guess you would say the rights to reproduce Spurgeon's sermons. And that was at the same time that they were coming out, right?

So there was a little bit of a delay. Passmore and Alabaster would come out with volumes in England. Sheldon and Blakeman would get them.

And then it was kind of delayed. And then they would come out with their first series, second series. And they went through 10 series of books, but they're not every sermon.

So they selected sermons out, number one. And in those sermons, they

Americanized all the spelling. And then I've gone in, unfortunately, and found where they've removed material from sermons.

There's one particular, there's one particular that I was trying to check a word on.

I was trying to say, did they spell this right? Did Passmore and Alabaster spell this right in the original or is that a mistake?

Tried to look for some other references to where that sermon had been documented or printed to kind of see.

Sometimes you can see, hey, let me check this person's judgment, that came after them and see whether they thought that was original or whether it was a mistake.

Sometimes you can glean from those things. Went into that sermon and yes, Spurgeon had spoken about slavery and they took out about a 250 word paragraph and zipped the whole thing because it said that.

Yeah, wow. So if you go into the sermon, I'm just objectively saying right, wrong or indifferent.

I'm just telling you that's what happened. And so when you start looking at a lot of those things, so the green volume that you have, have you ever seen the

Funkin' Wagnalls set that's like 20 volume, 20 of those brown volumes and it says like memorial volumes on the side?

I've seen it. I've seen, I think they're at the, are those at the seminary at Grace Bible Theological Seminary?

I can't remember. I can't remember. They might be, but what those are is those are Sheldon and Blakeman's.

Okay? Okay. And so it's 10 series of sermon volumes and then it's 10 additional volumes like John Plowman and probably

Storm Signals. I've got a list of them somewhere. So that's what that 20 volumes is. It was the

American Sheldon and Blakeman's or Sheldon and Company. They changed names early on.

And that's what those are. And so Funkin' Wagnalls after, I guess they were years later, took those books and made a 20 volume set.

And so a lot of American reprintings, that's what they come out of. But you're not getting the originals.

You're not getting the original spelling. You're not getting, and you don't know what's edited. You kind of got to match up.

But again, I've noticed segments that were missing out of those. So it just became evident as we went along and we were asking questions saying, hey, why is nobody doing this?

Why is nobody? That it was pretty evident that, hey, some people have gone back and just scanned it.

That's a huge work in and of itself. And then as far as American printing, hey, some of this work's been done and it was replicated a couple of times and we'll just keep kind of scanning those.

And I just had enough problems with both of them. Again, not downplaying them, not saying they're terrible, not saying don't read them, not saying any of that.

But as far as what I felt like as somebody who was biased, who has tons of original

Spurgeon material, hey, this is what we need to have on, like seminaries need to have access to something that is readable, it is corrected, and that people can trust for a long time and don't have to worry about the books falling apart because they're 150 years old and some of those things.

So I just said, hey, why not me? At a certain point, it's kind of like, if you have access to most of all the material that you need and the

Lord has provided that for you, at a certain point, you run out of excuses a little bit and you say, maybe

I need to be a solution to the problem. So we've got that. And then we're also starting the

Sword and Trowel. The Sword and Trowel, Spurgeons Magazine, has never, since the original, the volumes have never even been scanned and reprinted in a hardback form.

In a proper form, I don't mean somebody taking a Xerox scan and having one of those overseas kind of quick things made.

But I'm saying an actual publisher go in. Never been done. If you don't own an original of some of these

Sword and Trowels that I've got on the shelf, you've never seen a full volume. So I've been looking around now and you can pre -order the

Sword and the Trowel, volume one. So I don't know how much, what does the volume one include?

How much is that? I mean, I'm not talking about classic. How much content is that? So that's a full year.

That's 1865, right? That's the, I know you're seeing this on video. They're probably not seeing this.

It's the full 1865 year from January to December. So it was 12 monthly issues and it will be, the original is 550 some pages.

Mine will probably wind up being a little bit bigger. But if you've never read, most people, because like I said, it's not accessible.

You can find scans online. Again, that's for people who want to have something in hand and want to highlight and want to make notes to things and use them.

That's not really that fun to just have old kind of black and white scans that really aren't that well.

And again, you still run into some of the ink issues that where it didn't lay down very well on this, or excuse me, where the scan didn't pick it up very well.

And so I'm able to go through with the originals and clear that up. But you're talking about articles from Spurgeon that you've never read.

You're talking about him giving anecdotes and stories of his life and his childhood that are not completely replicated in his autobiography.

You've got, I've run into poems by Spurgeon that Spurgeon wrote. You've got, but some of the greatest stuff,

I mean, that stuff, of course, everybody's gonna like. But when you start going through there, you're seeing a group of people involved with the church, which is the

Metropolitan Tabernacle at that time, right? They had already moved in to the Metropolitan Tabernacle. And Spurgeon had years before started what became the

Pastor's College out of his house. And then it moved into the basement of the church. And then they built a proper building beside the

Metropolitan Tabernacle a number of years later. And so what you're getting out of this is he includes so many of his former students and professors at the

Pastor's College that are writing articles and giving information and giving you a look into not only their church, but the

Pastor's College and where they're sending their students who have not graduated yet, sending their students to fill pulpit for pulpit supply and events that they're having and how many people showed up and how the

Lord moved in all these little instances. It is, they're my favorite volumes.

They're my favorite volumes, the Sword and Trouse. And again, it just became evident that it's a shame that nobody has taken the time to make these available.

Spurgeon's supposedly the most reprinted pastor in history and the magazine that he edited until he died, from 1865 until he died, you can't go out and buy individual copies of anywhere.

So think about that. Yeah, this is amazing. I'm just kind of looking here. So it says pre -order. So if someone, when is it expected to be?

Yes, so when we open pre -order sometimes, because again, we're small. I mean, this is largely me just plowing through this work.

When we first open pre -orders, we consider those like early pre -orders. We use that for people.

So if you ever see me just come out with a new pre -order, you see it just listed. Sometimes that's gonna be a number of months in advance at a minimum.

That's me trying to, that's you saying, hey, I want this volume no matter what. And that's me saying,

I'm trying to get a good count on how many volumes we need. So if I first open one, a pre -order, you're not gonna get it in like 60 days.

I mean, I've got to go through. These are hardback Smithson, Smithson, right?

Books that are done the right way, which some in our theological world do, but the majority of people that do hardback books today do not sew their books.

So that I'm trying to make these, I'm looking at antique books on my shelves that are in some cases, 250 years old that are still holding up together.

Wow. And so I'm trying to put, I'm trying to have books printed as many as possible in a way that are gonna last beyond our lifetime.

And Lord willing, go be able to be a part of your kid's lifetime or somebody at your churches that you can give them to, a younger pastor who you mentor, all these types of things.

So we're trying to do them the right way. If we wanted to do them the least expensive way, yeah, it would cost a lot less and they'd be a lot quicker, but that's just part of what

I've kind of wanted to be committed to doing in being able to give something that will be long lasting.

I do not want to give off something that's disposable because it's been so many years that these have not been printed that, they deserve to last a long while instead of needing to be repurchased and then chucked.

So if you go out there on the sword and trowel right now, the sword and trowel is gonna come out the early part of next year.

So I would like for it to be manufactured in January. It could creep into February, but it's soon.

It's not gonna be long. We've got volume one through three in hand of Spurgeon's sermons.

Literally in less than a week, I should have, possibly in three or four days,

I should have volume four in hand. So while, when this podcast comes out, which this is, we're talking in December, it's gonna come out mid -January.

You should have that in your hand. I have one through four and then we'll just have five and six to go and then you'll have the whole

New Park Street library, right? That's the six volumes that make up him in the pulpit at New Park Street.

Then they moved to the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Back then, they didn't bring church names with them most of the time, right?

So when you left a church and went somewhere else, you gave the church a name. It didn't mean the church body's any different, but you just brought in, the name kind of stayed with the church building a lot of times.

Well, I've got to land the plane here, but I wanna, this has been encouraging, interesting.

You know, again, at pilgrimscoffer .com. I wanna ask you two questions.

One is probably gonna be kind of hard because it's like picking a favorite child or something, but is there,

I doubt anyone's listening to this who's never read a Spurgeon sermon, but maybe there are.

Is there a Spurgeon sermon that you could say, you know what, if I could just have every believer read this

Spurgeon sermon, I'd have them read this. Do you have one? I know that's hard.

Yeah, there's, you get, it's funny because you kind of get into, when you do this work, you get into, you obviously have your personal preferences, but as you read and you look up extra material, like if you go in the back of our volumes, one things that aren't in the originals is we add an appendix.

If there are instances in that year that where he gives particular sermons that are very notable, generally speaking, he didn't fully, his church, his listeners knew what the issue was that he was talking about.

So he doesn't go into a lot of detail. So we will go in and if we think there's enough of a need for explanation on some of these sermons, we will go in and get real time, in his day, newspaper articles and printings that give detail to what he was preaching on.

And we will put that in the appendix. So I'll give just a couple of quick examples because I know we're winding this down, but there was a gentleman who committed a murder in London, came out of a public house, right?

That would have been a bar back then. And supposedly, unbeknownst to him, ended up getting kind of in a fight with a guy and I think cracked him on the head with a stick or a bottle or something, ended up killing the guy.

Well, this guy was going to be hanged. And it was a big deal, all over every newspaper, big deal.

Even for back then, for that to be done kind of right in the city, in a public space, and not something that was really premeditated, but just somebody acting out.

And you gotta remember, this is just, this is a number of years before a lot of temperance movement really starts kicking off over there because of some of this behavior.

Well, Spurgeon gives sermons. He mentions this fella three times in three consecutive sermons.

But you never really get any detail because the audience knows who he's talking about.

So we go in there and we put full articles in there that explain who that was, what the issue was, so that people can actually connect with a little more of what he's saying.

He has, in volume four that we're coming out with, he's got a sermon on the solar eclipse.

That was the most prominent solar eclipse in Spurgeon's lifetime that took place in the

UK. Or that would have been close to the London area. And so he preached on it and people think, oh, okay,

I guess he's just preaching about a solar eclipse. Solar eclipses happen around the world different times all the time. But then we go and bring an article out that explains how much of a complete or near complete solar eclipses was.

It was an annular eclipse. Things like this, we try to help. So when you're reading a lot of that material and you're going through,

Spurgeon will tell you which sermons the public at the time really clamored for.

Ones that really hit home and were popular. So personal preference, whether that be

Spurgeon's preference, which he probably wouldn't care which sermon is as long as it preached

Christ and it resonated with folks. But as far as my preference and then what would be interested, he's got a sermon called

Everybody's Sermon. Okay. That is fantastic. I go through so many every year for every volume that are so good that it's a little bit different probably hearing it and reading it on paper.

And when you have it on paper, being able to go through there and see exactly how he broke down the sermon, it becomes a little bit more identifiable.

Whereas when you're listening, if you're not taking notes, you can kind of get captivated by just hearing the preaching, which is wonderful.

When you see it on paper, you can kind of see that outline and go, wow, what a fantastic way to break down that.

So he's gonna have plenty of Christ crucified sermons. We got Christ crucified in the first volume that I really liked.

But yeah, I have a list. If somebody wanted to email me and ask me, hey, give me 10 that you really, really liked from the ones that you've gone through.

I definitely could. But there's gonna be - How can they email you? How can they email? Is it on the website or?

Yeah, there's a contact us on the website or you can a pilgrimscoffer at gmail .com.

But there is a contact us on the website if you go to the bottom of the homepage.

But there's so many. So Spurgeon's really, particularly in those early years, he's very doctrinal.

So if you're interested in doctrinal, I mean, there's a laundry list that I could almost give you that would be borderline systematic theology, where he went through these sermons and we could put them one right after the other and it would be bam, bam, bam.

And you would be getting your fill of doctrinal teaching. And some people that's gonna resonate with.

And then he has, of course, his evangelistic sermons, like that Everybody's Sermon.

And there's certain ones that, I think looking unto Jesus is one that was really popular.

And again, I'm just kind of really focusing on the first couple of years that I'm working through. I've got a lot more to go.

But yeah, every year there are ones that I'm telling you just are out of the park.

And so we'll eventually come back in as we notate those and probably go back and print some paperbacks that put some of those together.

But for now, we're going through all of them and kind of like you alluded to, getting into a volume,

I'll run into the third sermon and go, oh man, oh, this is gonna be my favorite. Oh, this is,

I love this. And then literally get four sermons later and go, I don't know, Matt, this one might be, it's just too good.

It's just very difficult. So let me, this is the last question. And this would equally be probably, maybe not as tough, but if you could just say, hey, look, if I could put this resource, so now not just a sermon, but this resource, whether it's the sword and the trowel or it's a particular volume,

I would like to put this resource in the hand of every pastor in maybe the world, but particularly the

U .S. If I could just, one resource, what would you say would be the most helpful?

Maybe you'd say a biography of Spurgeon. Maybe you'd say a certain volume that you guys are reprinting or what would you say?

And is this, this is a Spurgeon -tented question. This is as it regards Spurgeon.

Sure, I guess. Yeah, I guess, unless you just say, unless there's something else jumping out in your mind right now, you can go with that.

Well, one of the main things that I like about Spurgeon outside of the obvious, outside of just his sermons and his prayers, is

Spurgeon was a reader of many people, including folks that he disagreed with. He was knowledgeable.

And this is coming from a pastor who never went to seminary, right? And that was providential.

You can read that about his biography. But the wonderful thing about him is

Spurgeon points you, if you will read him, he points you to so many directions.

When you, Spurgeon is a landing pad that then pushes you to so many names and publications throughout the 200 years before him, that you learn so much and you get pointed to pastors you'd never heard of, your

Roland Hills, your William Jays, your Joseph Irons. Some people have heard some of those, but there's a lot of pastors that he loved that even

Spurgeon fans don't know about. And he mentions them in some of these materials. So, you know, if I had to say,

I'm obviously biased towards, I don't know that I could pick a certain

Spurgeon volume as far as his sermons. The Sword and Trowels are all fantastic.

They are a menagerie of sermons, of articles, of poems, of book reviews.

Tells you what Spurgeon and them thought of these books as they were coming out real time. I mean, can you imagine opening a magazine and seeing

A .A. Hodge's outlines of theology given a real time book review because it was just released?

I mean, how cool is that type stuff? So you get that information. They tell you about books that have not been reprinted in decades, if not over a century, that they're saying, hey, go buy this.

This is a super resource. Nobody's reprinted those. You know, that's another thing we're kind of looking at. But I would probably, it would be hard not to say

The Treasury of David because obviously the book of Isaiah touches on so many elements of all of scripture coming through there.

And the Christology and whatnot in Isaiah. But he gives you on the breakdown of, and I'm talking about Isaiah.

I don't know why I was talking about Isaiah because he's got some other material on that. That's The Treasury of David's on the Psalms. And so I didn't mean to say

Isaiah. But he goes through and breaks down those verses and then gives you quotes from, you know, guys that you, some you have heard and some you haven't heard.

And he will point you in so many directions. You can go take those quotes that's from a

Wilcox or from a Edward Polehill, or for some of these guys that you might not know, take that quote, go search it up and then find a work that you didn't know existed.

You know, that you go, this is super material. So Spurgeon's just really unique in his capability to offer, you know, to offer not only sound preaching and teaching and doctrine, but he was well -read.

He can get, he gives you references. Thankfully, he actually offers you the references rather than kind of, you know, rather than burying the references in his sermons as his own words.

A lot of times he gives them to you. He points you and tells you, here's what I'm reading.

Here's what I've read. And so that's such a good thing today. I don't know if you've ever gone out and seen some of these quotation books.

And again, not trying to be overly critical. I'm very biased. I'm kind of an old fogey over here.

So I understand that. But you get some of the, there's still modern quotation books that are printed that don't give a reference for any of the quotations.

They just have the quotations in there. That's not new. That is only fractionally useful because then you can't go find where it comes from.

You can't go look at the context it was in. All these, Spurgeon was fantastic at that. And so, but the treasure of David was his magnum opus.

So as far as a literary work, that's the best. That's the most work that he put into one single thing.

If you don't include his sermons, because it's, you know, he didn't, those were just given every week and recorded.

That's the one thing he put the most time into. He actually stopped in the middle of it, in the middle.

So that was originally seven volumes. He actually stopped in the middle of it and produced the interpreter, which was kind of taking the

Bible and giving small commentary in two daily readings every day. He stopped in the middle of the treasure of David and said that that was like his reprieve from the treasure of David was to print this interpreter book, which

I've got them over here. They're huge. And he said, that was his break from the treasure of David.

So yeah, the treasure of David would probably be up there. I think, but if I had to recommend something to a believer or a non -believer, but a believer who might be new to the doctrines of grace or, you know, new to that kind of sound biblical teaching or someone who was doubting or someone who was not yet a true believer, but needed to understand

God's grace. I would say, All of Grace by Spurgeon, pound for pound is the best, it's gotta be one of the best books.

It's for how short it is and what it packs in there. It, that will point someone to the gospel.

And if they know the gospel, it will give them great assurance. Yeah, that's good. I'd recommend that too.

Very good. Very good. Well, thank you, brother, man. Thank you for your time. Thank you for what you're doing. I'll mention the website again, a pilgrimscoffer .com.

Reach out to Jared, contact him. He's a great brother. I love, if you see him at a conference, you got any conferences coming up?

I think we'll be at, plan to be down at G3's conference, their conference that they're having at their church in February.

And then we'll see, like I said, I'd love to go to a lot of them. It's all kind of a cost and time balance.

I'd love to get out to a lot of them. If there's any that we need to be at, somebody ping me and say, hey, get out here, or at least get some of your material out here.

Or if we just need to, you know. Hey, there's a conference in Arkansas in June, and I know a place you can stay.

Hey, hey, let's do it. I'm all up for that. I was gonna say, if there wasn't one up there in Arkansas that we could, you know, go down to Toadstuck and put us up a tent or something.

There you go, that's right, Toadstuck. I love it when, not only when listeners or when guests reference

Toadstuck, but when guys have actually been there. And so, well, thanks for coming on, brother.

Thank you guys for listening. Go visit a pilgrimscoffer .com. Check out what

Jared's doing. He's not just someone I've heard about. I know him, he's a friend, and I'm grateful for his labors in the

Lord. Thank you guys for listening, and we'll catch you next week on the Rural Church Podcast.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.