City Temple

As I walked through Holborn last week, I found a place which was once a blessing of God, not just to one district, nor even to a large city in which it was located, but to an entire nation and its vast, sprawling empire. From the 1640s until 1900, this was a deep well of evangelical waters which refreshed thousands. Tragically, that well became poisoned, and from its bowels spewed all manner of effluent and filth, undoing much of the good it had previously done. I was at London’s City Temple.

City Temple traces its origins to Thomas Goodwin, one of Oliver Cromwell’s chaplains, and its first minister. For centuries, it was an Independent or Congregational Church. From 1869 to 1902, it was pastored by Joseph Parker, a faithful preacher whose hymns and words were quoted at this year’s Bible Week by our main speaker. He was famous across the nation and empire for his distinctive and noteless preaching style. The congregation increased significantly under his ministry, and the church moved to its grand, current site at Holborn as a consequence.

His successor, however, was not faithful to scripture, endued with the so-called ‘new theology’. This pleased to call itself ‘modernism’, but it was essentially rather old fashioned, first recorded in Eden coming from the serpent’s mouth. It doubted the historicity of the Old and New Testaments, and called into question Christ’s miracles and deity, as well as scoffing at His substitutionary death. Rev Reginald John Campbell therefore denied Christ’s divinity, eloquently telling his thousands of auditors that He was just a special man and that socialism was the authentic outworking if His teaching. Although he later abandoned this heresy and became an Anglo-Catholic priest in the Church of England, the poison was already administered, and the congregation’s evangelical fervour had seeped away.

It was therefore no controversial thing to ask Rev Leslie Weatherhead to minister there from 1936 to 1960. This arch-apostate denied the existence of the Holy Spirit and taught that Mary was a prostitute, who made up the story of her conception. City Temple was known as the Cathedral of Nonconformity, but it essentially became hell’s Public Relations Department, promulgating false teaching under the cover of a respected, British church.

Ironically, the church’s current position, while a United Reformed Church, looks rather good, possessing membership of the Evangelical Alliance and quoting scripture verses on its external noticeboards, a practice to which liberal churches seem strangely reticent. Perhaps there is life in the old girl yet. Remember, though, the lesson from City Temple: a church pulpit which publishes the gospel so well can also do the opposite within less than a decade.