An All-Round Ministry

One of Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s most significant ministries was to the hundreds of preachers who were trained in the Pastors’ College which he founded. In 1865 he began an Annual Conference for these men at which he customarily delivered a presidential address. The most outstanding of these were reprinted after his death in the form of this book. While Spurgeon is always both stimulating and challenging, the context in which these addresses were given brought the best out of him and gave them a unique quality. Full of biblical exposition, they also sparkle with a delightful wit. Here is Spurgeon at his finest as a man with a pastoral heart par excellence. An All-Round Ministry is a work to which Christian ministers and leaders will return again and again for direction, wisdom, and encouragement.

‘As the Lord shall help us, let us lay our all upon the altar, and only breathe for him….Because we belong to Christ, the zeal of the Lord’s house must eat us up. I wish I could have spoken to you with all my strength, but it may be that my weakness may be used of God to greater purpose. My thoughts are few by reason of pain, which disorders my head; but they are all on fire, for my heart remains true to my Lord, to his gospel, and to you. May he use every man of us to the utmost of our capacity for being used, and glorify himself by our health and our sickness, our life and our death!’

— Spurgeon, in his address ‘What We Would Be’, delivered during illness at the Pastors’ College Annual Meeting in 1886.