You Did Not Come to Worship Henry Beecher

A Story About an Empty Pulpit

The story goes like this. Henry Ward Beecher was supposed to preach at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and he did not appear. A substitute stood up. Word went round the pews, as it does, and people began to leave, in no great hurry to hide it. The substitute let them go for a moment, and then said something close to this. “All who came to worship Henry Ward Beecher may now leave.”

It turns up in devotional pieces and sermon illustrations, and it is a good one. But I want to be straight with you about what I found when I went looking for where it comes from. I could not trace it to a first source. The versions I found do not agree with one another. In one, the substitute is Beecher’s brother. In another, Beecher is sick, and the substitute is an unnamed minister. One devotional page, dated 2019, gives the line as “All who came to worship Henry Ward Beecher may now leave. All who came to worship God, keep your seats!” and cites no source for it (Noland, n.d.). None of the other pages I found gives one either. Another page breaks off the sentence at “Dr.” and leaves the rest to dots. I also searched the long family biography of Beecher on Project Gutenberg, and in the portion I could search it does not appear.

So I will not tell you it happened. It might have, in some form. Beecher was a real man, born in 1813 and dead in 1887, and he became the first pastor of Plymouth Church in 1847 and one of the most popular speakers in America (Henry Ward Beecher, n.d.). A crowd that came to hear a famous voice is exactly what you would expect. But a story with no author and no date, passed from one sermon to the next, is a story, and I will treat it as one. Stories like this one survive because they are true to something, even when they are not true to a particular Sunday in Brooklyn. What it is true to is what the rest of this essay is about.

The Corinthians Had the Same Habit

You do not need Brooklyn to find that habit. It is in the New Testament, and Paul meets it head on. Writing to the church in Corinth, he reports what he has heard from Chloe’s people, which is that the church had split into camps. He puts it in their own words. Each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” and the others say the same about Apollos, about Cephas, and about Christ (1 Corinthians 1:12, ESV). Then he asks, with some irritation, whether Christ has been divided up and whether Paul was crucified for them.

Notice that nobody in Corinth had been caught in anything scandalous. They liked their teachers. They had favourites, as people do, and the favourites had become badges. A church can be full of gifts and gratitude and still have quietly changed the object of its loyalty.

What the Father Is Looking For

Jesus meets the same problem in a different shape at a well in Samaria. A woman raises what sounds like a theological question and is really a question about addresses. Her people worship on this mountain, she says, and the Jews say that the right place is Jerusalem. She wants to know which building is the proper one.

His answer closes the argument.

“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.”

— John 4:23 (ESV)

And the next verse gives the reason.

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

— John 4:24 (ESV)

Look at the verb in verse 23. The Father is seeking. It is the language of someone looking through a crowd for a particular person. God is not hunting for an audience, or for people who admire the choir. He is looking for people who have come for him. And the reason the mountain and the city no longer matter is that God is spirit, which means he cannot be pinned to an address, a building or a famous voice. Worship follows him wherever he is, and he is not more present where the better preacher stands.

C. S. Lewis, who thought about worship more honestly than most, saw how simple this is. Praise, he wrote in Reflections on the Psalms, “completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation” (Lewis, as cited in Taylor, n.d.). We praise what we have been enjoying, and the enjoyment is not finished until we say so. In another book he gave his picture of the best church service. “The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God” (Lewis, as cited in Taylor, n.d.). Read that slowly, and picture a service where the sermon is good and the singing is fine and you find, afterwards, that you forgot to notice either.

When the Gifted Person Falls or Leaves

The trouble with a church built around a face is that faces get tired, and fall ill, and sometimes fail. Anyone who has attended a large Nigerian convention knows the small change in the hall when the announcer says the guest minister’s flight has been delayed. Nobody is angry, but the mood shifts, and you can feel that a good many people had come to meet the man and were not planning to meet anyone else.

I am not describing a particular church, and I’d be unfair to any pastor if I did. I am describing a temptation that every large gathering faces. Often the poster for a programme carries the speaker’s face larger than any other thing on it. We wouldn’t dream of a banner that said, “Come, because God is here,” because that would not fill the hall, and halls do have to be filled. And so, little by little, the person who was meant to point at the door becomes the door.

Beecher himself, as it happens, is a sober warning about what happens to a church that rests on one reputation. In January 1875 the civil trial brought against him by Theodore Tilton, on a charge of adultery, began, and after six days of deliberation in July the jury could not reach a verdict (Henry Ward Beecher, n.d.). I am not saying he was guilty, and the jury was not able to say so either. My point is smaller. A church that rests on one famous name has put a great deal on the outcome of a case like that, and when your worship rests on someone’s name, you have handed a stranger the keys to it.

The Christians of North Africa knew this question long before the rest of us did. In the Donatist dispute that divided Augustine’s day, some argued that a minister’s sin could spoil what he handed on. Augustine, preaching from John’s Gospel, would not have it. “And that which was given by Paul, and that which was given by Peter, is Christ’s; and if baptism was given by Judas it was Christ’s” (Augustine, n.d., Tractate 5). That is a very freeing sentence. It says that what we receive in the church belongs to Christ and not to the person who hands it over, which means the failure of the person need not be the failure of the faith. It also means we have no business making the person the point.

A Fair Defence of Wanting a Good Preacher

I should give the other side its due, because it is not a foolish one. Someone will say that wanting a gifted preacher is not idolatry. People who are hungry go where the food is good. Scripture itself honours teaching. If you leave a church where the sermons are thin and go to one where the Bible is opened with care, you have done nothing wrong, and a pastor who says otherwise has probably not noticed how little he has been feeding people. Beecher’s crowd, if the story is true, was not wicked. They were hungry and they knew who fed them.

I agree with all of that. There is nothing wrong with preferring a better meal. Still, there is a difference between choosing a church because its teaching is faithful and moving every few months to wherever the sound and the atmosphere are best, the way a phone user hops between networks for a stronger signal. The first is care for your soul. The second is shopping, and it leaves you nowhere long enough to be known, corrected or needed. A church is also a place where other people need you to turn up.

The question the story raises is a different one, and it is about what happens when the meal is taken away. Would you stay, and if you did, who would you be staying for?

That is the test, and it is one you can run on yourself without anybody watching. Think about the last time the person you most enjoy hearing was not there. A visiting speaker, a youth leader, a man you didn’t know. What did you do with that Sunday? Did you sit through it with folded arms, composing your review for the drive home, or did you find that God was still in the room? The substitute at Plymouth was not rude, if the story is true. He was asking the people who stayed whether they had come for the one they had been told about.

What Peter Said When the Crowd Left

John 6 gives us a crowd that did leave. Jesus had said something so hard that many of his followers walked away, and he turned to the twelve and asked whether they wished to go too. Peter’s answer is one of the plainest in the Bible.

“Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’”

— John 6:68 (ESV)

Peter does not say that the teaching was easy, or that the atmosphere was good that week. He had thought about where else he might go and found nowhere. That is what staying for God looks like. It doesn’t depend on how the morning went. It is a decision made again after the other options have been weighed.

And there is Mary, in Luke’s account, at the feet of Jesus while her sister Martha rushes about with the arrangements. Martha asks him to make Mary help, and he answers, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41 to 42, ESV). He doesn’t scold Martha for serving. He says the portion Mary chose cannot be taken from her, which is a remarkable thing to say about a Sunday morning. A sound system can fail and a preacher can be absent, and the portion is still there.

Staying in the Room

If I could speak to one reader, it would be somebody who has begun, quietly, to feel that church is something they judge. You walk in with a score card in your head. The worship went on too long, the sermon had no ending, the welcome team looked bored, the generator kicked in during the prayer. Some of it may even be fair. But a critic and a worshipper can sit in the same chair and sing the same songs, and only one of them goes home having met anyone.

So here is an invitation, and it is a small one. This Sunday, before the service begins, ask yourself one question. If the person I most like to hear were not here, would I still have come, and for whom? Then go in, and see what happens when you aren’t keeping score. If the answer to the question turns out to be uncomfortable, you’ve learned something useful, and it is better to learn it in a pew than in a crisis.

I have told you a story I cannot prove. What I can say is that the Father is still looking through the crowd, as he was at the well in Samaria, for the people who have come for him. Whether or not anyone ever said it from a pulpit in Brooklyn, the sentence is worth hearing as though it were said to us. Anyone who came for something else may go. The rest of us will stay and worship God.