Riches in Christ

To the Barbican Conference Centre in the City of London for the annual Evangelical Ministry Assembly (below) - my twenty-ninth year at the excellent EMA.

This year's conference theme was: 'The Unsearchable Riches: Preaching Christ from all Scripture.' 

As well as providing a great opportunity to meet up with old friends, the EMA is especially designed to build up and encourage ministers in the vital task of teaching and preaching God's word.

Highlights this year included Vaughan Roberts, from St Ebbe's, Oxford, in two sessions entitled 'From Study to Pulpit,' showing how he prepared messages from the Old Testament book, Habbakuk, and James Hamilton, from the southern USA, speaking on biblical theology - tracing the storyline of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

We also heard a fascinating talk on Charles Spurgeon, the great Victorian Baptist preacher at the Metropolitan Tabernacle at the Elephant, particularly focussing on his conversion as a 15 year old, driven to attend a small country Methodist chapel by a fierce snowstorm, that led to a life changing encounter with Jesus Christ.

The 'apostle to the grocers' at the Elephant & Castle

In time crowds flocked to the Elephant to hear Spurgeon, the prince of preachers.

Some high churchmen mockingly called him the 'apostle to the grocers' as they snobbishly  sneered at Spurgeon's congregation of tradespeople and ordinary working people - but Spurgeon with his powerful down to earth biblical messages could reach the very people the established church struggled to reach.

When he died, thousands lined the street, and on his coffin was a Bible opened at the verse from Isaiah that had changed the course of Spurgeon's life when he had heard it expounded in that country chapel by an unlearned preacher who was filling in for the minister who was stuck in the same snowstorm that, in the providence of God, had led the young Charles himself to be there.

The Barbican Centre