Who Was F. B. Meyer? Baptist Pastor, Keswick Speaker, Bible Writer
BiographyChristian LifeHolinessBible Study
Frederick Brotherton Meyer was an English Baptist pastor who lived from 1847 to 1929. He served churches in Liverpool, York, Leicester and London, spoke for years at the Keswick Convention and at D. L. Moody's conferences in America, and wrote more than seventy-five books. He's best remembered for his devotional lives of Bible characters, such as Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Elijah, David and Paul, and for his warm, simple teaching on surrender to Christ and the filling of the Holy Spirit. Meyer liked to describe himself as "just God's errand boy."
Here's a fuller look at his life, what he taught, and which of his books to start with.
Early years in London
Meyer was born in London on April 8, 1847, the son of a London merchant. He grew up in a Christian home and went to Brighton College. He felt called to preach while still young, studied for the ministry at Regent's Park College, a Baptist school in London, and graduated from the University of London in 1869.
Liverpool and York, and meeting Moody
His first post, in 1870, was as assistant pastor at Pembroke Chapel in Liverpool. In 1872 he moved to Priory Street Baptist Church in York.
The next year, 1873, two Americans arrived in York almost unknown: the evangelist D. L. Moody and his singer Ira Sankey. Meyer opened his church to them. Watching Moody preach the gospel simply and directly, and seeing ordinary people come to Christ, changed the young minister. Accounts of his life say Moody showed him a freer, more personal way of ministry than the careful style he'd been trained in. The two men stayed friends for the rest of Moody's life, and Meyer often crossed the Atlantic to speak at Moody's summer conferences in Northfield, Massachusetts.
Leicester and the prisoners
In 1874 Meyer became pastor of Victoria Road Church in Leicester. After a few years he left to start a new work aimed at people who never came to church, and Melbourne Hall was built for it, opening in 1880.
Leicester is where his care for the poor became well known. He's remembered for meeting men at the prison gate in the early morning as they were released, and for helping them find honest work. He started a firewood business and a window-cleaning team to give jobs to men and boys who would otherwise have drifted into crime.
London and the wider world
In 1888 Meyer moved to London, first to Regent's Park Chapel and then, in 1892, to Christ Church on Westminster Bridge Road in Lambeth, a crowded, poor district south of the Thames. He worked there among the poor and among women on the streets, and he preached against drink and vice. He later went back to each church for a second term.
From 1887 he was a regular speaker at the Keswick Convention, the yearly gathering in the English Lake District for the deepening of the Christian life. He traveled widely, preaching in America, Canada, South Africa and Asia. He also took a leading part in the life of the Free Churches and the Baptists of Britain. After his death, a London newspaper called him "the Archbishop of the Free Churches."
His own Keswick experience
Meyer often told how, at one Keswick convention, he went out alone onto the hills at night, tired and low in spirit, longing for the fullness of the Spirit that others seemed to be enjoying. He came to see that he could receive it by faith, the same way he'd received forgiveness, without waiting for feelings:
I took from the hands of the living Christ my share, or as much of it as I could then receive, of the fullness of the Spirit, which the Father had entrusted to Him on my behalf; and as I turned to retrace my steps to the town I dared to reckon that it was mine as never before.
Steps Into the Blessed Life, A Keswick Experience
That pattern, surrender to Christ and then taking God's gift by faith, runs all through his books.
What he taught
Meyer's message was simple: give yourself wholly to Christ, let Him live His life in you, and trust the Holy Spirit to make it real. In Steps Into the Blessed Life he wrote:
Our Lord Jesus is a perfect reservoir of everything the soul of man requires for a blessed and holy life.
Steps Into the Blessed Life, Where Am I Wrong?
He wrote often about guidance, and his counsel on knowing God's will has helped many readers. God leads, he said, by the inward prompting of the Spirit, the Word of God and the shape of our circumstances, when all three agree:
The circumstances of our daily life are to us an infallible indication of God's will, when they concur with the inward promptings of the Spirit and with the Word of God.
Steps Into the Blessed Life, The Secret of Guidance
He was a warm, practical comforter of people in trouble. In Christ in Isaiah he wrote:
God's people are not saved from trial, but in it.
Christ in Isaiah, Ye Are My Witnesses
And he believed that the heart of the preacher's work was to open the Bible itself. In his lectures on Expository Preaching he wrote:
The one supreme object of the Christian ministry is to preach Christ, and Him crucified.
Expository Preaching: Plans and Methods, A Plea for the Expository Method in Preaching
The Bible biographies
Meyer's most loved books are his lives of Bible characters. Each takes one person and walks through the Scripture story in short chapters, showing how God dealt with a real man or woman and what that means for us. He wrote on Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul. They're devotional more than scholarly, and they read easily.
His aim with Moses, for example, was to show a man like us, made great by faith:
His faith sufficed to do what all his other qualities, without his faith, must have failed in doing.
Moses: The Servant of God, Our Standpoint
His last years
Meyer kept preaching into his eighties and was still traveling to North America near the end. It was estimated at his death that millions of copies of his books and tracts had been sold. He died at Bournemouth on March 28, 1929, shortly before his eighty-second birthday. Near the end he sent a friend a note saying he'd "raced you to Heaven."
Why he's still read
Meyer is easy to read and hard to forget. He takes a Bible story you think you know and makes you see your own heart in it. He's gentle with the weak and honest about sin, and he always points to Christ as the answer. People pick him up for comfort and find themselves called to a deeper surrender.
Where to start
TheWay Library has thirty-two of Meyer's books, all free to read. If you're new to him, start with one of the Bible biographies: Joseph, Moses or Elijah. For a short book of comfort, read The Shepherd Psalm, his walk through Psalm 23. For his teaching on the deeper Christian life, try Steps Into the Blessed Life. New believers will be helped by Saved and Kept.
Our guide to F. B. Meyer's books sorts all of them, and our collection of F. B. Meyer quotes gathers his best lines with their sources. You'll find every book on the F. B. Meyer author page.