The Banner of Truth Trust: with John Rawlinson | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratia, and I'm here in usually beautiful and sunny Los Angeles, California at the Shepherds Conference 2019, and I'm joined by my good friend, general manager of the Banner of Truth Trust, John Rawlinson.

John, thanks for sitting down for a few minutes. No problem. Good to see you. Thanks. You know, on the podcast, our listeners know the Banner of Truth because we're always recommending books to them that the Banner publishes, and we love to just sit down when we get the opportunity and let people have the same experience that I've had, which is when you meet the people who work for the Banner, you are very encouraged to find out that these folks are not, there's not a disconnect between the books that are on the shelf, so to speak, and the men who are working in really every aspect of your operation.

John Rawlinson’s Background and the Banner of Truth’s Work

So I just wanted to introduce our listeners to the general manager of the Banner of Truth. Tell us a little bit about yourself, where do you live, and what do you do? Okay.

Well, I live just outside of Edinburgh, and the head office of the Banner, as you probably know, is in Edinburgh. We're in a place called Murrayfield, and anybody who's, you know, if you have any Americans watching this who are rugby fans, then Murrayfield is the home of the Scottish rugby, the national rugby side, so we're just across the road from the stadium.

So I live just outside of Edinburgh, I'm married, I have four children, three of whom are married, we have two grandchildren, so we're very blessed. All of our children, it amazes me, our children are all believers, I have a son who is training for the ministry, so we feel very blessed.

God has been very gracious towards us. Those of you who've got a keen eye for an accent, or keen ear for an accent, will notice that I'm not Scottish, I live in Scotland, but I'm originally from England.

And we moved, in fact it's nearly 20 years ago, that our family moved north to Scotland, and I took up the responsibility as General Manager of the Banner of Truth.

So you've been doing this job now for almost 20 years? Yeah, it'll be 20 years in May. Wow, we need to have you at a party. Maybe I shouldn't be talking about that, there's probably one already planned.

I don't think so. So, tell me how you came to know that the Banner of Truth existed.

Well, my connections with the Banner of Truth, in a sense, go back through my father. So my father was a minister, and I have memories, really from a very young age. My dad used to have, in his study, he had these chairs that had sort of wings to them, and as a sort of, I guess, probably six-year-old boy, I would go into a study and at times I would sort of curl up in this chair, it was a really comfortable place to be as a child, you know.

And I have a memory at the time of looking at his bookshelves, and my dad had a lot of books, as most ministers do, and I can still remember seeing this little man on the back of some books, and they had numbers on.

And there were two things that struck me as a young child. One was that on the back of the book, the author of the book was a John. So that was interesting to me, because that was my name, I could read that, that was John.

And then this little man, along with a number, and I would count these things up, and it would perhaps be number two and three, and then perhaps number eight and nine, and then another week might go by and there was an extra number there.

And that was very interesting to me. Well, that was the works of John Owen. Back in the 60s, the Banner of Truth were publishing the works of John Owen, they weren't done all in one go. And so as the next volume came out, my father would buy that and that would be added to his bookshelf.

And I have distinct memories of seeing that set of Owen kind of building on the bookshelf. So that would be really my first memory of the Banner. But then, and obviously my father in terms of his ministry, he owed a lot to the Banner of Truth because of the books, and also the Minister's Conference.

My dad was at some of the early conferences in the early 1960s when the Minister's Conference first started. But then as I grew a little bit older, and my first Banner of Truth book was the volume one of Spurgeon's autobiography.

I bought that at a, it was a small church in a little village near where we lived. And they used to have a preaching convention every year. And my dad took me along one time, and they had a bookstore there, and this man Spurgeon who I'd heard a lot about, and my father would talk about people like that.

And there was this book, and I was like, oh, I'd like to get that. So that was the first Banner of Truth book. I think I was about 12 or 13 at the time. And then the next year we were at the convention again, and I bought volume two.

So that was my second Banner of Truth book. But then as I grew up, the Banner of Truth, we still do run a youth conference. I mean, you've been to the youth conference, you've experienced that.

Youth Conferences and Ministerial Conferences

Yeah, tell the listeners, what is that?

Well, it's a conference. It runs from a Friday evening through to Sunday night or Monday morning. It's for young people, by which we mean the age of, roughly speaking, 16 through to about 25. That's the kind of age range.

And the youngsters gather. We have sessions of preaching primarily, and obviously times of some free time on a Saturday afternoon. A lot of them go out and play a game of soccer or something. And it's a time of fellowship together, time of getting to know one another, but sitting under God's word and the teaching of God's word.

As a young person, I went along. As an old person now, I get the privilege of being able to go along again, because with the organizers. And it's a great blessing to see young people who are serious about the word of God gathering together and just soaking up the preaching of the word.

Yeah. So the youth minister, the youth conference is one of the things that the Banner does. What else do you do?

Well, directly after the youth conference, we have the minister's conference. So the youth runs sort of Friday night to Monday morning, then the ministers come in Monday afternoon, and that runs through to Thursday.

That's in the UK.

Yeah. And you have a U .S. minister's conference as well.

We do, yeah. We have a U .S. minister's conference that's usually around about the last week of May on the East Coast. This year, we're actually doing a new conference in the U .S., which is exciting.

Not very far from here. Hopefully the weather will be better than it is in the Shepherds Conference this year. So not very far from here at Marietta Springs, and that's in October. So that's an exciting new venture for us.

I've met a number of people here at the conference who have sort of indicated they're hoping to be with us. So that's good.

Yeah. And I'll put a plug in for our listeners, especially you ministers who are listening. Make it happen. Get to a Banner of Truth conference. It is, there are a lot of things that I could say about it, but I'll say this.

It is the most economical conference that you can attend because your registration actually pays for your board and your food. It's not a lot of different factions going off to this restaurant and that restaurant and in this hotel and that hotel.

You're together. You're on a college campus. You eat your meals together. And that's really where so much fellowship around the word. You find out that you have a lot of mutual friends on your bookshelves.

So these, you love John Owen. Here's a man who loves John Owen. You've been helped by Sibs. Here's a man who's been helped by Sibs. And so it's, it's really an instant fraternal bond. And so I would just, I would urge you if you're listening, go to a Banner Ministers Conference.

And now that there's one on the East Coast and the West Coast, just go to both of them or pick which side of the Mississippi River you're on and go to that one. Yeah.

I mean, they're, they're always encouraging times and, uh, you know, just as in the youth conference, you know, I, I, around the UK now, um, you know, I have people all over the UK who I know through the youth conference back when I was a young person.

And the same would be true of the ministers who come along the, there will be friendships that develop and, you know, all over the States, there are people who would meet together and, and they'd stay in contact after the conference.

And the same thing will be true in the UK, you know, people meeting, uh, and staying in touch after the conference, uh, and bonds of fellowship that grow. And it's not just between the individuals too, because it becomes church contacts as well.

Um, you know, we're, we're not a denominational organization. Um, and so you find that these bonds of friendship cut right across denominational lines and that's wonderful to see. Um, and that again, that will be true both sides of the Atlantic.

The Book Fund and the Global Distribution of Books

So yeah. So we know that you, uh, you do, uh, conferences, we know the publishing, that's probably what people are most familiar with. You also have a book fund that you operate. So tell us just a little bit about that.

Okay. Yeah, it would have been the early sixties. Um, and one of our employees at the time was reading about Susanna Spurgeon. Uh, in fact, in, I think it's volume two of the, uh, autobiography, there's a little section in there, uh, where Spurgeon writes about, um, Susanna Spurgeon and some of the work that she did.

And what, what our employee discovered was that Susanna Spurgeon, uh, started a book fund where she was sending books out to pastor, primarily pastors who couldn't necessarily afford the books themselves.

And she sent out tens of thousands of books over the period of her lifetime that she was doing this. And this member of staff felt, well, that was very interesting. Um, this is something that we should be doing as well.

And so the Banner of Truth book fund was established. We have people who donate to the book fund, uh, and then, you know, when we sell books, any profits that we're making, we're a nonprofit organization.

Um, so profits that we would make get plowed back into the ministry and some of that will go back into the book fund activities. So we, we supply books, uh, to colleges, uh, to seminaries, to individual ministers, to perhaps students who are studying, uh, particularly with an aim to the ministry.

A lot of, a lot of the work of the banner is focused really towards people in ministry. Um, and that would be true too of the book fund and, and the books go all over the world. Now, sometimes we charge, sometimes we send them for free.

Um, so it depends on the circumstances. So we might have a situation where, um, we have a seminary somewhere in Africa and somebody has donated some funds towards buying some books for the library. Um, so we would then send them books, but at a very high discount, um, other situations, we might get a contact from somebody and they've got no money whatsoever.

Uh, and we might send them, um, again, if it was a library for a seminary or something, we would send them some books there, but individuals too. So, you know, we, we sometimes get people writing to us and asking for something that can be difficult because within some parts of the world, there are black markets for Christian books.

So you have to be careful. You have to try and qualify some of these things. And sometimes we would try and develop a contact, almost a relationship with people and we would send them something and then hear back from them, you know, how they, how they were helped by that book.

And you might send them some, you know, a little bit, something else. Um, but you know, one of the things that has, I think has been remarkable really is that certainly in my time at the Banner of Truth, and as far as I understand it, in my predecessors time, and he was there for probably, um, what I guess 27 years or so, I think he started in about 1972, retired in 99.

Um, I don't think we've ever found ourselves in a situation where somebody has requested help from the book fund and we haven't been able to supply help because of lack of funds. Um, God has been very gracious.

We've had some donors who have been selfless in donating funds to help with the book fund and the Banner has been blessed too in terms of its sort of more commercial work in selling books. So we've been able to supply books when we've been requested.

I was recently at a conference in the Philippines and meeting men there who'd received books through the book fund. And some of the stories are just remarkable of the way that literature has affected people's lives and affected their ministries.

Um, I, you know, I sometimes, we have a time of Bible reading or book reading sometimes and prayer every morning in the office in Edinburgh, uh, and the staff will all gather and we'll have a short reading and a short prayer, uh, just to sort of set the day going.

And I sometimes say to them, you know, we get these stories back from some of the book fund activities and I say, guys, this is why we come to work in the morning, um, you know, and, and you hear perhaps a story may not be book fund, it might be, maybe something from the first world of how literature has revolutionized a man's ministry, um, has changed people's lives in the pews.

Uh, and you know, this is why we do what we do. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and it's, it's just super encouraging to hear these stories. I think sometimes actually, I wish people would tell us, um, I met a man, it must be 15 years ago now, uh, a gentleman who told me he'd been converted through reading of all things, um, volume one of the Lloyd Jones biography.

Huh. Yeah. Um, and, and I said to him, you know, why, why have you not written to tell us, you know, you should write and tell us, you know, the author is Ian Murray's, you know, um, the author would be super encouraged by that to hear that something he'd written had been, you know, in God's hands, the instrument of conversion of this man.

And I sometimes think we don't know the half of what goes on with books. That's exactly right. And the day we'll make it known. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's very encouraging to be involved in, in the work of books.

It's encouraging to be involved in the work of the book fund. I just see it as a tremendous privilege.

Evangelical Change, Puritan Literature, and Revival

So you've been there for 20 years, 1999, the evangelical landscape has changed significantly, would you say, in the last 20 years? Um, how have you traced that change through, uh, being sort of the, the printer, the supplier of Puritan literature to that?

I mean, certainly that has been part of the fuel that has fueled the change in the last 20 years. So I'd be interested to hear your perspective on that.

It's actually quite a difficult, um, well, you're not quite asking me a question as such, but it's a difficult thing because in different parts of the world, different things have happened. So here in the States, the situation is quite different to say it is in the, in the UK.

Um, and then the situation in the UK will be quite different to say somewhere in the middle of Africa. Sure. So there isn't a sort of monolithic view as what's gone on in the last 20 years. I would say, you know, here in America, as I'm sure most of your viewers will know, there've been movements that have taken place probably in the last, I guess, 10 to 15 years.

You've had the sort of Young Russell's Reforms, you've got the T4G, the TG together for the Gospel Coalition, um, you know, some of these movements that have been very influential in the evangelical scene.

And I think we've seen some encouragements through those, um, you know, people have an interest in the sort of thing that we do as an organization, the kind of books that we produce. We've seen perhaps, uh, an upsurge of interest in, in the Puritans, um, which maybe wasn't quite, you know, I think America has always had an interest in the Puritans, um, ever since we've been in existence really.

Um, but I think we've seen perhaps an upsurge in the last 15 years or so. I trust that that continues. I don't know that it will, and we can't presume that it will, um, but certainly in the last 10 to 15 years here in the States, we've seen an increasing interest in, in the Puritans.

That wouldn't necessarily be the case in other countries. So as I say, the situation is, is quite different in different places.

Um, so yeah. So we're here and you know, there are 4 ,500 at least, uh, pastors, mostly pastors. Um, I helped set a table of Banner of Truth books up in there, uh, four days ago. It's almost empty now.

Um, it was, it was stacked as high as you could go and they were, they were stuffed under the table and now we're down to almost nothing. So I mean, there is an undeniable hunger for the kinds of things that you guys are putting out and that shows up in, in conferences like this that, you know, continue to swell each year.

That's encouraging. Um, you know, we would be rebuked by more careful men if we said that that was revival, but it is, as a student of history, would you agree that the Lord does tend to put these kinds of doctrines into the pulpits as a predecessor of revival in, in some cases?

Yeah. I mean, you have to be careful how you interpret events and I think, you know, there's a truth to the saying that, you know, God's providence is best interpreted from a long distance. Um, so, you know, it's very hard to interpret the events of today when you're in the middle of it and there today.

Um, and I would give you an example, for instance, I, you know, I, I lived, um, I, I'm a bit older than you. Um, so I, you know, I lived through the 60s, 70s, 80s in Britain and the part of the country that I spent most of my life in, uh, I guess sort of teenage years, that kind of period of time, um, was the East Midlands.

So, uh, if people know the geography of Britain, about a hundred miles north of London, you've got places like Leicester, Nottingham, uh, Coventry, that sort of region. And you know, at the time, uh, there were churches being planted in the late 70s, early 80s.

Uh, and looking back now, I, I think there were things happening at the time, which when we were living through it, perhaps we didn't really realize there was a real work of God taking place in that part of Britain.

I think it was true in other parts of Britain too, but you know, that was my, my experience because that's where I lived. Uh, you know, as an example, I can remember, uh, as a 13 year old being allowed to join the young people's group.

It was a teenage group. So when you were 12, you couldn't join, 13. Um, the church that I was, I was a part of, my father was a minister of, uh, it, it wasn't very old at that point. Um, it was quite a young church.

Um, it had really had started off with just a handful of people. Uh, in fact, I, I'm, I'm kind of a bit weird in some ways, I suppose. I like numbers and, you know, I like numbers and graphs and things.

I can, I used to always count the congregation on a Sunday morning. I can remember the day when, you know, we hit 20. I can remember the day coming home over lunch and, you know, announcing with great glee as a youngster, Oh, there are 40 people there this morning at church.

You know, um, there was a growth. There was a growth. Yeah. And, and as a young person, so at the age of 13, I joined the young people's group. Now the young people's group was me, my sister, the son and daughter of one of the elders in the church.

That's four and one other person, there were five of us. Now, by the time I left that, you know, went off to university, um, so 18, 19, 20 years of age, that young people's group was, was busting out of the homes that we met it.

You know, we, the, the growth was phenomenal and it wasn't all just, uh, youngsters from church families. There were, there were young people who'd been converted who had really no church contact before that.

And I look back now and I think, you know, that, that's only what, five, seven years and we saw amazing growth in young people's work. And the church had gone from, you know, 20, 30, 40 people by the time I was away from home in my early twenties, congregations were over 200.

And I look at that now and I say, that's not a very long timeframe. That's that's a real work of God that was taking place. And we weren't the only church like that. Um, but at the time you can't see it.

And I think the same, you know, I would say the same today when you look at what's happening, you look at the men here and so on, it's hard to interpret these things when you're right in the middle of it.

And, you know, maybe in 20 years time we'll look back and say, okay, we've got a better idea now of exactly what's going on. But I think your point though, of, you know, the sort of doctrinal stance, the preaching of the word, the importance of understanding, the importance of scripture, all those sorts of things.

Yeah. I think often these things do precede a work of God and certainly when God is at work, these things have to be central.

Sure. It's not like he would employ some other means to bring about revival. Absolutely. Yeah.

Um, and whether, whether you talk revival or whether you talk blessing of God at a level that perhaps we wouldn't necessarily, you know, so this is a reviving of the church. It's always the case, isn't it, that, um, you know, scripture has to be central, preaching will be central.

Um, there'll be a commitment to the doctrines of scripture, there'll be a commitment to the inerrancy of scripture, um, commitment to the authority of scripture. These sorts of things are going to be central because that's how God works.

That's how God blesses and ultimately, um, you know, God has given us his word and if that word isn't, you know, the word and the spirit are not central, then why would we expect God's blessing? So yeah, it has to be.

Stories of Impact from Behold Your God

At every conference we attend these days, people stop by our booth to tell us how one of our studies or our films has helped or influenced them, their families or their churches. Eventually we started asking if they'd let us record those stories and share them with you.

This is Jordan. Anthony Mathenia, one of the contributors to the Behold Your God series, gave him a copy of Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty.

What it does I think very well is explains clearly the attributes of God while at the same time connecting them to these great men in history that we look up to and how they were held up by the attributes of God, by the knowledge of God and then at the same time applying that to your own life in a practical way.

So it's not just scholarly, it's not just historical, it's also practical and it pulls them all together, you know, through the stories that Pastor John tells, through the workbook, through the sermons and then through the application, it does it all very well.

I would say the Behold Your God series is the best series on the attributes of God as far as contemporary series go, especially with all the materials that they have. No one's going to take you to the text more consistently, no one's going to connect it to history more consistently and no one's going to apply it to your life more practically than Behold Your God.

For more information about Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty, visit TheMeansOfGrace .org. John, I wanted you to tell our viewers and listeners a little bit about three books that you guys publish that you've read and that have been helpful to you.

Okay.

The Art of Prophesying and the Puritan Method of Preaching

Yeah, I've just picked up three titles off the table here, which hopefully give a bit of a flavor of the kind of thing we do as well. So that's part of the reason I've chosen them. So thank you. The first one is a Puritan paperback.

I'm just wiping the rain off here, it's just started to rain here. If you look really close, you might see me shivering, I'm not sure, but anyway. It's The Art of Prophesying, which is William Perkins, so it's a Puritan paperback.

We have in print around about 54 Puritan paperbacks. And the whole aim of the Puritan paperbacks is to get small parts of the Puritan works, to make them accessible. They're very affordable. Some of them we modernize, some of them we don't.

So the works of Owen, for instance, some of the selections that we have of Owen in the Puritan paperbacks, they've been abridged and modified. Other things we don't, they're just as is, so to speak. But this one, The Art of Prophesying, I just think is a wonderful book.

There's a section, it's actually in two sections, but the primary section on preaching that I like, it talks about the Puritan method of preaching. And it's the simple Puritan method of preaching. And I think that's a commitment that as an organization we have.

We look to produce resources that will help ministers with their preaching. We look to encourage preaching. Now we're not saying the only way to preach is the way the Puritans did, because at times perhaps the Puritan method of preaching is not perhaps quite how we'd want to model ourselves.

You know, with the point, the sub-point, the sub-sub-point, the sub-sub-sub-point kind of thing. And you see that in their writings. And it was exhaustive, and that's great. But Perkins had this simple method of preaching.

And I just found it a really helpful book. And as I say, it's a good example of a Puritan paperback, the kind of thing that we're doing.

So for clarity's sake, the art of prophesying. Someone might hear that in 2019 and say, oh, this means I need to learn how to exercise my spiritual gift of prophecy. What's William Perkins talking about?

Well, he's talking about preaching. Yeah. Speaking God's Word. Speaking God's Word, yeah. And so just to, I was going to quote you a little bit out of the foreword to the book, which was written by Sinclair Ferguson.

Perkins' preaching was marked by the so-called plain style, the description self-explanatory. I believe preaching should conform to the apostolic touchstone of being the open manifestation of the truth.

And this is what the book is all about. It's how to preach in the way the apostles preached, in the way that the prophets in the Old Testament preached, preaching God's plain truth. There's actually quite a helpful section at the back, which is to do with the call to the ministry.

So there's sort of two books in one, in a sense. So it's the calling of the ministry, and as a gospel minister, what you should be doing. So you get kind of two books in one, in a sense. But it's a very helpful book, you know, there's a chapter here, rightly handling the Word of God.

How should you deal with the Word of God? And that's an example of, as I say, of a Puritan paperback. Now, we also produce books by modern-day authors. So we started off back in the late 1950s. What we were doing then was essentially reprinting Puritan works.

Now we do a combination, there's a mixture of titles that we do. So, you know, you'll find in here, as I just quoted, the chapter there to do with the right handling of the Word of God. But then, you know, we also have Sinclair Ferguson's From the Mouth of God, which is a modern-day book, and that is about the authority of Scripture.

It has got sections in there about how to study Scripture, it's got sections in there about how to handle the Word of God as a preacher. So you know, we've got the Puritans, and we've got the modern-day authors, and when we're looking at those two things, we're seeing a linking together.

You know, the modern-day authors who are publishing are not saying anything different to the Puritans that we're publishing. You know, there's a stream through there, a theological stream, there's an experiential stream that runs right through from the Puritans into the modern-day things that we're producing.

So that's a good example of a Puritan paperback. Then another one I picked up is this one here, which is by Iain Murray. It's The Forgotten Spurgeon. In many ways, I think Iain wrote this to, you know, the title says it all, it's to recover Spurgeon.

So one of the things you find is that in the early 1900s, sort of 1910 to 1920, that kind of period of time, you're after the downgrade controversy that I'm sure many of your viewers and listeners will be familiar with.

And what happened was you found a lot of people, Baptists obviously, who were claiming Spurgeon, you know, Spurgeon the mighty preacher. But what they did was to excise his Calvinism. And so they're presenting and they're claiming Spurgeon as their man and this wonderful preacher, but they're missing why it was that Spurgeon was such a wonderful preacher, why it was that Spurgeon was a gospel preacher, why it was that Spurgeon, you know, pleaded with people to, you know, get right with God.

And it was his Calvinism and it was his Calvinism that drove him to that gospel preaching. And so you actually find that there are sermons that were published in that kind of period of time of Spurgeon's and they literally edited out his Calvinism.

So, you know, if you get hold of those and you read them, you're like, oh, this is kind of strange. It's not the Spurgeon that we recognize. Now, what happened was in that period of time, you know, through into the sort of 50s, 60s in Britain, that became the Spurgeon everybody knew.

And so Ian writes this book and The Forgotten Spurgeon, you know, recovering Spurgeon. What did Spurgeon really believe? What did he really preach? And I think one of the things with Ian Murray, if your listeners know much of Ian's writings, they will know that Ian writes theology when he writes history.

And so in this book, The Forgotten Spurgeon, you get biographical insights, you get history of Spurgeon, but you have theology just woven right into it. And there are many, many people. In fact, one of my colleagues who I know you know, Jonathan Watson, who's our general editor.

I know he was very much struck when he first read this as a young man. It really affected his views. It changed his understanding of the doctrines of grace and so on. And I've met countless numbers of men who have really had their eyes opened by this book and come to a new understanding of the doctrines of grace.

So you get history and biography and the doctrine just woven through it.

Holiness, Sin, and the Need for Spiritual Maturity

Yeah, you know, I can see that being so helpful for people who have, I mean, where I live in Mississippi, Calvinism is a curse word. I mean, if you call someone a Calvinist, you don't mean anything good by that.

And sometimes it's based on someone that they've met who gives a very, almost a devilish interpretation or view, their view of what Calvinism is. And so the forgotten Calvinism of Spurgeon would be, you know, a very helpful thing for someone to come along and say, what is this that this guy believed?

I mean, I trust that Spurgeon loved Jesus and I trust that he preached the gospel. What was it that he did believe? What is it about this stuff? That would be, in my context, why I would commend that book to someone.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a tremendously helpful book, I think. There's another book actually that Ian wrote, which is very interesting, and that is a biography of Archibald Brown. Archibald Brown was a contemporary of Spurgeon's.

They were kind of the other side of the river, the Thames. And again, the story of what happened under his ministry is remarkable, really is quite something. And yet, most people know of Spurgeon, but they don't know of Archibald Brown.

You know, Archibald Brown was very much a forgotten character in church history. And Ian wrote the biography. I think actually Ian would probably say that he himself didn't really know an awful lot about Archibald Brown until a friend of his drew his attention to him and said, you know, I've got some material, you perhaps are interested in this.

And as Ian started to look at this material, I think he started to get excited by it, and I've got to write about this man. And so the product was then the Archibald Brown book. But it is fascinating, because I think in many ways that one of the reasons that Brown was neglected was the fact he lived longer.

So you know, he lived beyond Spurgeon. So he isn't, I think it was in the mid 1920s or so that he passed away. I might be wrong with that, but it's around that sort of period. But you see, what had happened at that point was, you know, think back what we said about Spurgeon's sermons being, has Calvinism been excised?

Well, Brown was still preaching the old paths. Brown is still preaching the old truths. But by that point in British church history, those are no longer acceptable. So just as they could claim Spurgeon, because he's dead, so you can't say anything against it, and they can excise his Calvinism by editing his sermons, that they ignored Archibald Brown.

This man is still preaching the old stuff, and we're not interested in that anymore. And I think that's part of the explanation why his life and work was forgotten in Britain. People kind of sidelined him.

You know, this is the old theology that we're editing out from Spurgeon, and we don't want to know about that.

So all you young guys out there who are wearing your Charles Spurgeon t-shirts, that's church history 101. You need to get, you need to level up, you need to get your Archibald Brown t-shirts.

Instantly, learn about this. And actually, we did, after we did Ian's biography on Brown, we did a couple of books of his sermons as well. They're gems. So the face of Jesus Christ being one of them, they're gems, absolute gems, and I think a lot of people perhaps don't even know they exist.

My oldest son actually did a little bit of work for us during a vacation from university when I was at college. And one of the things that he did was to scan the works, the particular book of sermons of Archibald Brown.

So I can remember coming home and just, you know, saying, Dad, you need to read this stuff. This is just amazing. And actually going through the work of scanning it, proofing it, getting it ready for typesetting for print, it was affecting him.