Gospel-haters Opposed Rowland Hill but His Preaching Prevailed
Plain-talking Rowland Hill led many to Christ.
IN HIS FIRST PARISH, Rowland Hill offended some farmers by comparing them to their pigs. Just as their pigs never gave a single look at the oak tree that dropped acorns for them, he said, so they never gave a look to the One who provided their blessings. Plain talk like this earned him a reputation as an eccentric, but, as the famous preacher C.H. Spurgeon posited, “Men called him eccentric [literally “out of the center”] because they themselves were out of center.”
Hill became a pastor at a time when there were few evangelicals in the Church of England. Many of the state-paid clergy neglected their duties or lived blatantly immoral lives. The common folk had little knowledge of Christian doctrine and national morals were suffering.
Evangelists like Whitefield, Berridge, and Wesley were changing the culture by preaching out of doors. With Whitefield’s example before him, Hill decided to carry the gospel where it was most needed. Even while at school, he preached in fields and visited the sick. Church leaders, however, were scandalized by this behavior and refused to ordain him as a priest for many years.
Hill’s conversion had come from reading Isaac Watts’ hymns for children. An older brother, Richard, encouraged him. However, when Hill, who had been educated at some of England’s best-known schools (Shrewsbury, Eton, and Cambridge), decided to preach evangelical sermons, his angry father cut his allowance in half. He sent Richard to silence the younger Rowland, but instead Rowland persuaded Richard to preach.
A shrewd judge of character, he once turned the tables on a boxer who was hired to assault him. Sizing up the man, Hill motioned him forward, saying he had come to preach to the people in the hope of doing them some good; he had heard he was to be opposed, but had been told of the boxer’s strength and skill and believed it. He told the man he was placing himself in his hands for protection, and asked him to join him in his carriage after the service to go to dinner. Flattered, the boxer promised to protect him and boasted afterward of the honor done him.
Some young men who set out in a boat swearing they would drag Hill behind it did not fare so well. They capsized and all of them drowned.
Hill inherited some money and built Surry Chapel in London, where he preached when not on the road. He founded many Sunday schools and was a leader in forming the British and Foreign Bible Society, the London Missionary Society, and the Religious Tract Society. Despite the opposition of the established church and hostile gentry, he preached 23,000 sermons all over England, Scotland, and Wales. Many people who came to heckle him or to hear his wit became Christians.
Shortly before Hill’s death, two elderly men asked to have the privilege of shaking his hand. Fifty years earlier, they said, as young sailors, they had filled their pockets with stones and come to a service prepared to have some “fun” pelting him. However, his opening prayer and the message that followed had cut them so close to the heart they went home afraid to go to bed for fear they would drop into hell in their sleep. They traced the transformation of their lives to that encounter.
Hill’s last illness was brief and he was conscious almost to the last moment. “I have no rapturous joys, but peace—a good hope through grace, all through grace,” he said. On this day, Thursday, 11 April 1833, at the age of eighty-nine, he died. He was buried a few days later in front of the pulpit in Surrey Chapel, which had been his base of operations for fifty years.
—Dan Graves
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Rowland Hill used tactics similar to the Methodists active in his day especially John Wesley, whose movement is covered in Wesley: the Faith that Sparked the Methodist Movement. Watch at RedeemTV
John Wesley: The Faith That Sparked the Methodist Movement can be purchased at Vision Video