Charlie Simpson was one of the cheeriest human beings I’ve ever met. An old school Baptist minister, complete with deep dog collar, black stock, striped trousers and black jacket. He trained for the Baptist ministry just after the Second War and did much of it by correspondence with the London Bible College. Like many people going into ministry after the war when there was an acute shortage, he was fast-tracked in, and most of his life he felt the lack of a formal academic training. I met him when he was minister at Carluke Baptist, and he was the one who led me to faith in Christ. He guided my first hesitant enquiries about ministry, (less than a year after my conversion), he lent me several of his books (one of them Spurgeon’s "nae messin aboot’" approach to baptism, called Much Water and Believers Only!). He was also one of the first Christians who modelled a love for learning, a passion for books, and the importance of continuing personal development. Remember this was in 1967 he had no degree – no diploma – just a man in love with God, and determined to serve God with the best he could be.
Two further early memories of Charlie Simpson the lover of God who happened also to be a book-lover, which have influenced me subtly but permanently. The year I was converted (1967 – forty years ago), he persuaded me to go to Filey Christian Holiday Camp. I still remember the embarrassment, the strange world of big gatherings and having to drink bucketsful of Christian devotional cordial concentrate. BUT – I also remember Charlie took me into the humungous Book Tent and I stood there like Moses gazing at the promised land – except in my case I’ve been allowed to go in and possess it. I wandered around, picked up what I think was the first commentary I’d ever handled, and Charlie bought it for me. It was John Stott’s Tyndale Commentary on John’s Epistles, hardback. I still have it. He told me that he always had a commentary on his desk that he was slowly working through, and he encouraged me to read my bible using a well informed guide. And so, from then till now, I have been a commentary reader.
And then there was the time, near the end of my ministry training, I went into Charlie and Nettie’s house in Knightswood, Glasgow, and Charlie came to gloat over his new purchase. It was the Baker Dictionary of Christian Ethics. It was 500 pages of double column text covering loadsa stuff. I was impressed and, by now as bad (or as good) as he was, decided I needed to get one as soon as I could afford the £6 – which by the way was expensive in 1975. Then Charlie said something which ever since, I’ve refused to forget, and which probably contributes to my ongoing love for learning and desire for God. This wonderfully cheerful, spiritually serious man of curious intellect, hefted the book in both hands and said, ‘I’m going to read this. I’m going to start at A and work my way through to Z’. It turned out that Charlie read reference books. Oh, he knew they were for consulting. That they were the quick route to the essential information. But he also knew, that if you want an overview of a subject, if you want to know where your gaps are, if you want to have a mind stored with the salient issues, the varied perspectives, and the relevant arguments, then there was nothing to beat a systematic browse through a recognised reference book. The New Bible Dictionary, and the New Bible Commentary, and the Baker’s Dictionary of Practical Theology, and the New International Dictionary of the Christian Church were amongst the goodly land he traversed from Ararat to Zion, from Agape to Zeal, from Abelard to Zwingli.
Charlie Simpson raised my intellectual awareness and nurtured my love for books. But more than that; the gleam in the eye and the heft of a heavy book, and the anticipated hour or two at the desk with a book it would take a long time to finish, but which would feed his faith and increase his mind’s capacity for the truth of God, showed a 17 year old retro ned, that study is a way of loving God. From that first Spurgeon book on baptism, and Stott’s Tyndale Commentary, and Baker’s Dictionary of Christian Ethics, Charlie, that self-taught, well read, disciplined scholar (he would have laughed at the word scholar predicated of himself, but I reckon I’m now qualified enough to recognise one when I see one), who was my pastor and friend, has been a quiet presence in my memory. He is in the front row of that section of the great crowd of witnesses nearest where I am on the track. And if the communion of saints means anything at all, then he is likely to be cheering cheerfully and wanting to know what commentary I’m reading.
I tell you all this for two reasons. First, people like Charlie Simpson shouldn’t be forgotten. Through an honest ministry conducted with a total absence of self-advertisement, who knows how many souls were touched, lives turned and minds made up for following Jesus? He is a central loved presence in my testimony. Second, in the 40th year since Charlie led and guided me to Jesus, and just under 30 years since he died, I am going to do something in his memory. I’m going to read a reference book, from A to Z, Abelard to Zwingli. The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought is a mega-book – 808 pages, 27.7 x 22.6 x 5.8 cm (that’s big!). Now and again, I’ll use one of the articles to blog – just to map my progress from relative ignorance to the promised land of knowing some stuff! Hope my wanderings won’t take forty years.
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