The Untrained Preacher Who Shook London

In 1854, a nineteen-year-old with no seminary degree and no formal ordination stepped into the pulpit of London's New Park Street Chapel. The deacons who invited Charles Haddon Spurgeon expected a temporary fill-in. The religious establishment expected embarrassment. Here was a boy from the rural fenlands of Essex, educated in a one-room school, with a thick country accent and no academic credentials to speak of. The learned clergy of London regarded him as a curiosity at best, a joke at worst.

Within months, the chapel overflowed. Within years, the Metropolitan Tabernacle was built to hold the crowds — six thousand seats filled twice every Sunday. Spurgeon never earned a degree, never attended a single day of seminary. Oxford and Cambridge trained men wrote scathing reviews of his preaching. One prominent journal called him "an ignorant young man." He kept preaching. Millions kept listening. His printed sermons eventually filled sixty-three volumes, and missionaries carried them to every continent on earth.

The Almighty has always delighted in this kind of reversal. Paul told the Corinthians that God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, the weak things to shame the strong. Not many of you were influential, he wrote. Not many were of noble birth. Yet here you stand, called and chosen. God reaches past the credentialed and the connected to pick up the unlikely — then uses them to shake the world, so that no human being might boast in His presence.