Luminescence, Volume 3. C. K. Barrett

      The first of these pictures is of one of the main churches Fred Barrett pastored, Katherine Road Methodist, which is in Essex. The second picture is of a preaching wagon used by Fred Barrett as an evangelist for Wesleyan Home Missions. And the third picture is of Fred doing what all good Methodist preachers are tempted to do when they go to Epworth where John Wesley was born and raised—namely, preach from the tomb of Samuel Wesley, as John once did when he was forbidden to enter his father’s former church and preach there, but could not be denied preaching from his father’s tomb, which technically belonged to the Wesley family. The last of these pictures is of C. K. Barrett as a young pastor and scholar with his parents.

      PREFACE

This volume is different from the previous two in this series in several respects. In the first place, Penelope and I must thank Jordan Stanley, one of Asbury’s doctoral students, for his help with the transcribing of the one hundred sermons in this volume which show that Fred Barrett was prepared to preach throughout the canon of both the Old Testament and the New Testament.1 I am responsible for the final editing and annotations of this volume, as with the previous two, but as you will notice in what follows, Penelope Barrett Hyslop has provided a fine introduction to this volume, giving us a sense of the relationship between Kingsley and his father, and the influence of the latter on the former, not least in regard to preaching.

      My task in what follows in this preface, and in the footnotes, is to present these sermons in clear English, annotate them where references can be found, and provide the occasional comparative comment in light of the previous two volumes in this series. We can say at the outset that the geographical scope of Fred Barrett’s ministry may have been more narrow than Kingsley’s (he did not, I think, travel abroad and minister in foreign countries), and he may have preached in fewer places in England than did Kingsley (e.g., he did not preach in universities and cathedrals as Kingsley not infrequently did), but we should not underestimate the impact Fred Barrett had in his various pastoral tenures at Katherine Road Methodist Church, or at Spring Head Mission, or at Bishop St., and elsewhere, including in many open-air services and revivals. The sheer list of chapels preached in does not tell the whole tale of the depth and impact of a person’s ministry.

      In terms of homiletical form, Kingsley follows rather closely the practice of his father. Sermons usually have three points, quotes from hymns are regularly cited, and the sentence that ends one section of the sermon leads to the next heading for the next point. In other words, the sermons are carefully crafted. But that is not all.

      Kingsley uses some of the same illustrations as his father, perhaps because he heard his father use them, or perhaps because he read the same sources, but probably it involves some of both. For example, the illustration Fred Barrett cites from Harold Begbie’s book in the sermon entitled “The Reconsecrations of Life” is also cited, more than once in Kingsley’s sermons. Or again, in the sermon entitled “Mount Moriah, the Hill of Testing,” Fred tells a bit of the story of the missionary Sam Pollard, who went to China, or alternately the story of David Livingstone in Africa. Kingsley also uses the same stories several times.

      Kingsley, it will be remembered, said of his father that he was one of the greatest preachers he had ever heard. Now it might be possible to take that as the natural utterance of a loving son who was proud of his father, except that when you read these sermons you realize they are often powerful and not infrequently eloquent. Fred Barrett had a way with words, and though he may not have been the scholar his son was, he was also no country preacher. This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that he had no formal education beyond the age of thirteen or fourteen. He was nonetheless thoughtful, with a good grasp of theology and ethics, not to mention a very considerable knowledge and understanding of the Bible. And one notable difference from his son’s preaching style is that Fred not merely loved poetry, and quoted it frequently, he had a penchant for looking for the poetic or “mystical” phrase in the text to preach on, and this sometimes led to something that bordered on allegory. Consider for example his exposition on dawn in his sermon on Matthew 28, entitled “Darkness and Dawn.” Kingsley does not go down that road.

      Fred gives a clue about how he went about composing his sermons in the sermon on 2 Peter 1:5, called “The Additions of Grace.” He says he has one Bible for his devotions, but uses a different Bible to compose his sermons. He adds, “It is very, very seldom that I use my personal devotional reading for sermonic purposes. Long ago I learned from Dr. Jowett the value of a preacher having literally a Bible never used for homiletical purposes, but reserved for the culture of his own soul.” This is not to say that his sermons don’t have devotional aspects and value to them. They do. But they focus on proclamation not devotional practices such as lectio divina.

      One of the significant differences in the preaching of Kingsley and Fred, as revealed in these sermons, is that while time and again Kingsley focuses on “Christ and him crucified” in his preaching, both during the Easter season and at other times, Fred wants to place at least equal if not more emphasis on the resurrection of Christ. It must be remembered that Kingsley owed much to the German theological tradition which indeed, from Luther right through to the twentieth century with scholars like Bultmann and Kasemann, focused on “Christ and him crucified” and saw this as the heart of the gospel. It would be hard to imagine Kingsley placing the same emphasis where his father does, in what we hear Fred Barrett say in his sermon “Christ Crucified and Risen” (Rom 8:34):

      “One asks if there is not a real point in Michelangelo’s indignant protest to his fellow painters, “Why do you keep filling gallery after gallery with endless pictures of the one ever reiterated theme, of Christ in weakness, Christ dying, most of all of Christ hanging dead?” The symbol of