Who Was Joseph Parker? The Preacher of London's City Temple
Joseph Parker was an English Congregational preacher who lived from 1830 to 1902. For more than thirty years he preached at the City Temple in London, one of the best-known pulpits of the Victorian age, where crowds came on Sundays and at a Thursday noon service for working men and women in the City. He preached his way through the whole Bible and published those sermons as The People's Bible in twenty-five volumes. He was bold, dramatic and plain-spoken, and he always came back to one thing: salvation through Jesus Christ alone.
Here's a fuller look at where he came from, how he preached, what he believed, and which of his books to read first.
A stonemason's son from Hexham
Parker was born on April 9, 1830, in the market town of Hexham in Northumberland, in the north of England. He was the only child of Teasdale Parker, a stonemason, and his wife Elizabeth. He had little formal schooling past his early teens. He tried his father's trade for a while and then went back to his books, reading hard on his own.
As a boy he loved to hear the reformers and lecturers who came through town, and he began speaking at local debates. His first sermon was preached outdoors, on a village green, when he was about eighteen. In his autobiography, A Preacher's Life, he admits that he kept a secret for years:
The secret hidden in my heart was that one day I would become a preacher of the Gospel.
A Preacher's Life, London in Sight
In 1852 he wrote to Dr. John Campbell, the minister of Whitefield's Tabernacle in London, asking for advice. Campbell invited him to preach, liked what he heard, and kept him on as an assistant. Parker later wrote a warm and funny portrait of the old man in his book of counsel to young preachers.
Banbury, Manchester, London
His first church was a small Congregational chapel in Banbury, Oxfordshire, where he was ordained in 1853. The congregation outgrew its building, and Parker started open-air services and took on a well-known secularist in public debate. In 1858 he moved to Cavendish Street Chapel in Manchester, a large and wealthy church, and filled it.
In 1869 he came to London, to the old Poultry Chapel in the City. Before long that building was too small too, and the congregation built a new church on Holborn Viaduct in the 1870s. They called it the City Temple. Parker preached there for the rest of his life. When he took the London pulpit he said plainly what he meant to preach:
Casting myself upon the love of God, I trust to preach in the City Temple the Gospel of salvation by Jesus Christ alone.
A Preacher's Life, London Ministry
His Thursday noon service drew people of every church, and visitors from America made the City Temple a stop on their trips to London. He crossed the Atlantic several times himself and was a close friend of Henry Ward Beecher. Twice he was chosen to chair the Congregational Union of England and Wales.
How he preached
Parker preached without a manuscript, and he could be startling. People spoke of his big head of hair, his deep voice and his sudden turns from humor to thunder. But under the drama he had settled views about what a preacher is for. In Ad Clerum, his letters to a young man going into the ministry, he begged for plain, honest speech:
Be earnest, and you will be eloquent; let your soul speak, and your words will be wise and good.
Ad Clerum, Naturalness
Why preach at them, when it is your business to preach to them?
Ad Clerum, Delivery
He wanted preaching to come from a heart that had been with Christ, not from a performance:
Let us live very near the cross…
Ad Clerum, The Guarantees of a Successful Ministry
His great project was The People's Bible, sermons and comments on every book of Scripture, gathered from years of preaching. He wanted ordinary church members to read the whole Bible and see Christ in it.
What he taught
Parker lived through the years when higher criticism unsettled many British churches. He did not join the scholars who treated the Bible as a book that only contains God's word. In None Like It, subtitled A Plea for the Old Sword, he argued that a preacher who doubts his Bible has nothing to stand on. He put the Bible's purpose this way:
The Bible was not written to tell me what the Jews did, but to tell me what God did through the Jews.
None Like It, The Permanent Quantity
He wrote two books of doctrine that are still worth reading. The Priesthood of Christ asks what Jesus did for us that we could never do for ourselves, and answers with the cross. The Paraclete is about the Holy Spirit as a Person and as the One who makes Christ real inside the believer. Parker summed up his view of the gospel in one line:
The purpose of Jesus Christ was not to set an example, but to give life.
The Priesthood of Christ, Conclusion
His faith was warm and personal. He disliked religion that was all argument and no surrender. In the chapter on his inner life he wrote:
The Christian has no will; he has, by the Spirit of God, willed to have no will; he has surrendered his will to Christ.
A Preacher's Life, Inner Life
Sorrow at the end
Parker married twice. His first wife, Ann, died in 1863. The next year he married Emma Common, and they were together for thirty-four years. They had no children. Emma died in January 1899, and Parker never got over it. The chapter of his autobiography called "An Irreparable Loss," written soon after, is one of the most honest pieces of grief any Victorian preacher left behind. He doesn't pretend. He says his faith is going through a crucifixion, and he holds on anyway.
He kept preaching at the City Temple for nearly four more years. He died at his home in Hampstead on November 28, 1902.
Why he's still read
Parker isn't as widely read as Spurgeon, his neighbor across London. His style is big and sometimes overheated, and parts of his writing are tied to the debates of his day. But preachers still go to him for his freshness, his nerve and his feel for the Bible as a living book. And his short, sharp sentences stay with you. He could say in a line what other men took a page to say.
Where to start
TheWay Library has twelve of his books, all free to read, including the three volumes of his City Temple sermons on Matthew, The Inner Life of Christ. If you want the man himself, start with A Preacher's Life, his autobiography. If you preach or teach, read Ad Clerum next; it's practical, frank and often funny. For doctrine, begin with The Priesthood of Christ.
Our guide to Joseph Parker's books explains each of them, and our collection of Joseph Parker quotes gathers his best lines. For another great Victorian preacher's counsel to young ministers, see Spurgeon's advice to preachers. All his books are on the Joseph Parker author page.