Martyn Lloyd-Jones was set for a life of privilege. He attended a London grammar school. He joined medical school with 81 other medical students. He showed promise, at age 22, he rose to the position of junior house physical to the renowned Sir Thomas Horder, doctor to the royal family. Within two years, he became Horder’s chief clinical assistant. He became a Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1926.
Many of his patients were from the top echelon of British society. He discovered that many of those patients, despite professing the Christian faith, led empty lives. As he worked among privileged, educated people in London, he felt increasingly burdened for the poor Welsh people among whom he’d lived in his early years, who, he felt, were living in spiritual darkness.
In 1927, he gave up his medical career in London to return to Wales, not as a physician but as a pastor. His move was so shocking that it made the national press. He settled in Sandfields in Aberavon, an area affected by unemployment, poverty, and alcoholism.
People told him that he would have to adapt to reach the people in Sandfields. “Everyone was telling him that he would have to try new things to reach modern man,” writes Jason Meyer. “The prevailing view was that people would no longer listen to preaching and so he needed to try more modern methods. Churches should give contemporary people more of what they want…”
Lloyd-Jones disagreed. “He suspended the drama society,” writes Meyer. “Musical evenings were canceled. He simply preached Christ.”
Lloyd-Jones even refused to dumb things down for his relatively uneducated congregation.
He treated the congregation with the same intellectual courtesy and respect that he would have given his socially eminent patients in London. He knew, as he would often boast, that the ordinary working men (though often unemployed) could, if taught properly, understand God’s truth and biblical theology every bit as well as a university professor. (Christopher Catherwood)
One writer estimates that over 500 people were converted and joined the church in the eleven years that Lloyd-Jones ministered at Sandfields.
Later on, Lloyd-Jones explained his approach to ministry. Some, he said, argue that the church is getting in the way of reaching people, and we have to abandon the church to be effective.
I am thinking here of those who say that we must, in a sense, make a clean break with all this tradition which we have inherited, and that if we really want to make people Christians, the way to do so is to mix with them, to live amongst them, to share our lives with them, to show the love of God to them by just bearing one another’s burdens and being one of them.
His response? He doubled down on the basics. “The primary task of the Church and of the Christian minister is the preaching of the Word of God.”
Lloyd-Jones did adapt. When in Wales, he spoke Welsh. But he also understood that people, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, modern or ancient, are more alike than not. He believed that we’re called to do the same things in every age and place, regardless of whether these things are in season or out, and regardless of whether people think they will work.
I think of Lloyd-Jones often as I read lists on how to adapt ministry for a new day and a new generation. I think there’s a place for reading books like Generations by Jean M. Twenge. (See this review by Paul Carter.) The differences between generations are real. But I’ve lived long enough to see books and articles come out every few years arguing that we have to change everything to meet changing needs and tastes. Often, they overstate the differences and understate that people of every generation fundamentally need the same thing.
How should we adapt to a new generation? Lightly, if at all. Learn about them. Know them. Love them. And then preach the Word, just as we did with the generation before.
