William Booth and the Broad Street Chapel
William Booth grew up with a heart for the hurting. While still an apprentice at a pawn shop in Nottingham in England, he spent his spare time and money on the poor. William led a group of young men into the slums to evangelise on the streets and in any homes that would open up to them.
There was soon a rag-tag group of converts. Few could read and so shied away from attending church. William decided to take them to his own church, the Broad Street Chapel. The service had just begun when they arrived. William swung the door open and beckoned his group to the front where some of the “rented pews” were empty. He watched as hundreds of pairs of eyes focused on the disheveled people filing in. Their clothes were ragged, dirty and torn, and a pungent odour followed them. One woman, a fishmonger’s wife, was still wearing her leather apron with blood and fish-scales smeared all over it. As she plunked herself down on a velvet cushioned pew, others in the same pew pulled out handkerchiefs to cover their noses as they slid as far up the other end as possible.
During the service there were no major incidents, just a few smelly children climbing on their mothers and one man with an intellectual disability yelling out every now and then.
After the meeting no one came near the visitors. The minister asked to speak to William and took him into his office. The deacons were already there. The minister, the Reverend Dunn, set the tone, “We all understand you have a passion for preaching on the streets, but it is not appropriate to bring the riffraff off the streets and seat them beside us in our pews. Rented pews no less.” “Here, here,” interjected the church secretary, “It’s going to take some time to get the smell out of the building, and I think all the drapes will have to be washed. That’s quite an expense just to have a few drunkards listen to a sermon.”
Reverend Dunn could see William looked crushed and offered a compromise. “Do you think you could bring them in the back door and have them sit behind the curtain? They couldn’t see the service but they could hear it. That would resolve the problem.” “Except for the smell” someone else chimed in.
When he could stand it no more William stood and chose his last words carefully, “You have made your wishes very plain. I am sorry you are troubled by new converts. I doubt you will see them again anyway. It was very difficult to convince them they would be welcome in a proper church and I see they were right and I was wrong. Good day to you, sirs.” These were William Booth’s people but not anybody else’s people. The hard lesson he had just learnt would change his thinking forever.
The clash of opposing values can create conflict and anger. No one wants that but God can still use these hard situations to fashion and mould our thinking toward His future direction for us. This might have already been your experience. God does this all the time.