- He Goes Out and Comes In

The Christian and Missionary Alliance looms so large in the life of A. B. Simpson that we dare not pass it over with a few paragraphs if we are to get even a fair picture of the man himself. It was movement first—an organization second, an organization at all only because some kind of track was necessary to determine which direction the movement should take. It was loosely constructed, with “just enough executive machinery to hold it together and make it effective.” But it had movement first, motion. Indeed these had to be wherever Simpson was. He never knew the meaning of static Christianity.
His society is himself grown large. It is the child of his heart, and it resembles its father as all good children should. The same humility is seen in it to this day, the same distrust of the flesh, the same preoccupation with the person of Christ. And his faults appear in it too, his impatience with details, his lack of organizational ability, his unwillingness to face things squarely and fight them through. He would always rather pray and trust that everything would come out all right—and usually it did.
For thirty years he continued to lead the society which he had formed, and never for the least division of a moment did he forget or permit the society to forget the purpose for which it was brought into being. Always, everywhere, through his writings and his public utterances he kept driving home its objectives. “It is to hold up Jesus in His fullness, ‘the same yesterday, and today, and forever!’ It is to lead God’s hungry children to know their full inheritance of privilege and blessing for spirit, soul and body. It is to encourage and incite the people of God to do the neglected work of our age and time among the unchurched classes at home and the perishing heathen abroad.”
He never intended his society to become a denomination. Whether this proves superior insight or the total lack of it, history will decide. He sought to provide a fellowship only, and looked with suspicion upon anything like rigid organization. He wanted the Alliance to be a spiritual association of believers who hungered to know the fullness of the blessing of the Gospel of Christ, working concertedly for the speedy evangelization of the world.
Thus conceived the whole thing was simple. But the law of growth is always from the simple to the complex. The society hadn’t been long in existence before normal developments within it began to upset the idyllic simplicity of the original plan. “There were cases constantly arising,” admitted Mr. Simpson, “where it was necessary to provide special and permanent religious privileges for little bands of Christians who had either been converted in some evangelistic meeting or pushed out of their churches by false teaching and harsh pressure and prejudice.” Necessity forced the society to care for these orphans. They would not be put off with idealistic sentiments. They wanted a church home in which to bring up their families. They wanted to be baptized, to enjoy the privilege of the Lord’s Supper, to have a place where they could be married, and from which they might be buried when their summons came. The society had to meet these demands or go out of business. This put Mr. Simpson and his people in a tough spot. After much consultation they at last saw light. They would not leave their first love. They would continue as they had begun, no denomination, but a spiritual fellowship merely. However, in order that the various orphan flocks throughout the country might enjoy the Christian privileges which were rightfully theirs, gifted men should be appointed to care for them, and they would call them not pastors, but Local Superintendents. So it was done. These groups were placed under the care of qualified shepherds—not pastors, be it remembered—they merely assumed all the duties, enjoyed all the privileges and performed all the labors of pastors! They were Local Superintendents!
After half a century the society remains substantially as it was first created—a growing, aggressive, dynamic movement for world evangelization, the only such body on the face of the earth that does not know what it is. It gently but persistently declares that it is not a denomination, and yet it exercises every spiritual and ecclesiastical function of any Protestant body in the world—without one exception. Sweet ignorance that can be entrusted with individual responsibility for the evangelization of 79 million heathen souls, that can command over one million dollars a year in cold cash toward the work of foreign missions, that can continue each year to preach the Gospel in over one hundred languages on twenty pioneer fields of the world, that turns out from its Bible schools an ever increasing stream of trained and gifted missionary candidates for work in the regions beyond! Maybe there is a Biblical explanation for all this: “For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause. For the love of Christ constraineth us.”
Mr. Simpson was a premillenarian, but the doctrine would not lie quiet in his heart. Like the other tenets of his creed it would take hands and feet and go to work at the one mighty job of winning men to God. He held that the return of Christ depended upon a world-wide proclamation of the Gospel. This belief was not merely incidental. It became one of the great motivating forces in his missionary endeavors. He preached it constantly and even set it to music and sang it:
The Master’s coming draweth near,
The Son of Man will soon appear,
His kingdom is at hand.
But ere that glorious day can be,
This gospel of the kingdom, we
Must preach in every land.
The teaching expressed in the closing lines of this stanza is open to question. Careful exegetes will probably deny its correctness, and some may, as a consequence, reject the whole missionary program with which it is associated. But cutting through the pro and con arguments and stripping away all fancy exegesis we come to two simple truths: First, Jesus Christ is absent from the earth, and will return again in glory when His present work is accomplished. Second, it is the imperative obligation of the Church to preach the Gospel to every creature, and to keep on preaching it till He does return. That is what it means to his society today, and that is all it ever meant in practice to Mr. Simpson himself. And almost every premillenarian will agree with this position.
While the work of foreign missions was always Mr. Simpson’s first love, it did not by any means absorb all the amazing energies of the man. There was his Tabernacle, a great central factory, sending out its conveyor belts in all directions. For all its activities he was almost wholly responsible. Then, he usually had a new project brewing, a school or an orphanage or another mission. Some of his plans succeeded, other failed, but win or lose he was sure to be back the next week with another plan, patiently talking his board into sponsoring it. Or, if they could not see it, he would be likely to launch out alone, trusting God to help him through with it.
The need for special training for missionaries and home workers early led to the establishing of a Bible and missionary training school. Under various names and in different locations this school operated from 1883 on, ultimately settling down at Nyack, New York, in a beautiful spot along the Hudson River, twenty-five miles above New York City. There for forty-six years it has continued to flourish, turning out every year a large class of trained workers for service at home as well as on the foreign field.
Another Project arose directly out of Mr. Simpson’s teaching on healing for the physical body. He felt the need of some quiet place where sick and discouraged persons might find a sympathetic atmosphere and opportunity to wait on God for deliverance from their bodily ails. The burden became so great that he finally turned his own home over for this purpose. This was done over the protests of his wife. There were children in the Simpson household, and she argued that they should be raised in a home, not in an institution. She was undoubtedly right in her position. The difficulties Mr. Simpson later experienced in bringing his children to Christ may be attributed in part to the fact that they had been sacrificed altogether too far in the interest of their father’s public ministry. We have every right to sacrifice ourselves, but that we have any right to sacrifice our children without their consent may, with reason, be vigorously denied. That he encountered bitter opposition from his family at times must be admitted if we are to tell the whole truth. The idea that he may have brought some of this upon himself by unwise acts cannot be wholly ruled out. He may have sometimes forgotten that God had called him to be a husband and a father as well as a minister of the Gospel.
This Home for Prayer and Physical Healing, as it was called, after it had been moved to several different locations and its name had been changed to Berachah, was finally settled at Nyack. There it proved to be a rare blessing to hundreds of suffering persons for many years to come.
We dare not pass over one project which, fortunately, we believe, turned out to be a failure. Mr. Simpson at one time fathered a plan to create near Nyack an Alliance center where persons in sympathy with the doctrines and practices of The Christian and Missionary Alliance might buy property, build homes, and live sequestered from the contaminating influences of the world. A company was formed consisting of A.B. Simpson, A.E. Funk, and David Crear. A large square of real estate was purchased, lots were laid out and offered for sale to the members of the society. Everything looked rosy except for one minor difficulty—nobody would buy! Alliance people simply were not interested. After trying vainly to make the plan work they at last abandoned it altogether. The conscientious Mr. Simpson, scrupulously honest and self-sacrificing, as be always was, shouldered the blame, bought out his partners, and took the loss himself.
The failure of this project was a great kindness from God to his servant. Love and zeal had inspired the idea, but it had been a mistake, nevertheless. An honest mistake it had been, but a big one. When Simpson succeeded it was in a big way. When he failed he made great failures. It had to be so. Men of his caliber do not make little mistakes. They fly too high and too far to steer their courses by city maps. They ask not, “What street is that?” but “What continent?” And when they get off of the course for a moment they will be sure to pull up a long way from their goal. Their range and speed make this inevitable. Little men who never get outside of their own yards point to these mistakes with great satisfaction. But history has a way of disposing of these critics by filing them away in quiet anonymity. She cannot be bothered to preserve their names. She is too busy chalking up the great successes and huge failures of her favorites.
All the while that he was launching his various projects—and watching them sink in the harbor or sweep out triumphantly on the bosom of the deep—he was promoting by means of his conventions a highly successful continuous campaign of missionary evangelism throughout the United States and Canada. At the same time he was directing a growing army of missionaries on an ever increasing number of foreign mission fields. The work was booming. No one could question that. Fortunately the society preserved its flexibility under the strain of growth, and by means of some nice footwork it managed to cope with every emergency that arose with the years and the expanding work.
Add to all this the editing of a top-flight missionary magazine (which shuttled through a series of changes and became at last The Alliance Weekly, as which it still flourishes), the managing of a publishing concern, and the writing of innumerable songs, books and magazine articles, and you get some idea of how much work A. B. Simpson managed to turn out. And this, the emaciated, “cadaverous-looking” minister upon whom science had tacked the death sentence a few years before! It is so, verily, explain it as we may. Mr. Simpson never doubted what the explanation was. “It is the Lord,” he had said after that pine forest experience, and the passing of the years never brought him reason to change his mind about it.