By Michael A.G. Haykin
When Andrew Fuller was serving as the secretary of the BMS he would be away from his pulpit up to three months a year. I have often wondered who supplied his pulpit before he had an unordained assistant by the name of John Keen Hall. In a publication entitled The Preacher; or Sketches of Original Sermons (Philadelphia: J. Whetham & Son, 1842), which contains an essay by Fuller on how to compose a sermon, it is mentioned that “several members of [Fuller’s] church were successfully employed in village preaching, and occasionally supplied destitute congregations in the neighbourhood” (“Preface”, p.iv). These men could have easily supplied Fuller’s pulpit.
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Michael A.G. Haykin is the director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. He also serves as Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Haykin and his wife Alison have two grown children, Victoria and Nigel.