David Nasmith of Glasgow, Scotland (1799-1838), along with
friends, founded over sixty Christian societies.[1] He
began life in manufacturing as an apprentice. Yet, he hoped to become a foreign
missionary and at times applied to go to Africa and the South Seas but was
turned down because of his lack of education. Instead, he became the “Apostle
of City Missions.” His evangelistic zeal was channeled first through outlets in
Glasgow where he devoted his time to evangelism and charitable work which
included visiting prisons. He once spent a whole night in a prison cell with
two men who were to be executed the following day.
At age fifteen, Nasmith and some of his friends founded
three youth societies to support foreign missions, tract distribution, and the
Bible Society. In 1821, he became secretary of the Religious Societies of
Glasgow. In 1824 he founded the Young Men’s Society for Religious Improvement.
In 1826, Nasmith founded the Glasgow City Mission which
took Chalmers’s pattern of district outreach further. Chalmers' experiment in
St. John’s, Glasgow, published in The
Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns (1821–26), provided a model of
urban mission based on lay visitation.[2] Thomas
Chalmers (1780-1843) had advocated “district visitation” for evangelism and
Sunday school at the time when the Industrial Revolution was leading to a rapid
urbanization of Scottish society.[3]
Nasmith made the work inter-denominational by enlisting
the support and involvement of all evangelical churches, and aiming to
encourage the unchurched to attend an evangelical church and recruited laypeople
fulltime instead of using volunteers to carry out the evangelistic work.[4]
Not only were the paid workers more dependable but several came from the
working class and were better-equipped to minister to the city’s poor.
When Nasmith founded Glasgow City Mission, the objective
of the society was “to promote the spiritual welfare of the poor of this city,
and its neighbourhood, by employing persons of approved piety, and who are
properly qualified to visit the poor in their houses.”[5] At
the society’s first annual meeting, the message to the missionaries was: “You will
convert the houses that [are] tenanted by men of the foulest passions, into
churches of the Redeemer, where the Lord the Spirit will dwell and the God of
Salvation will be loved and served. You will arrest the progress of vice and
promote the interest of virtue. You will make our poor, our ignorant, our
degraded population stand forth in all that freshness and fairness of moral and
of spiritual excellence.”[6]
Besides the Glasgow City Mission, Nasmith founded the
Edinburgh City Mission in 1832, and the London City Mission in 1835.[7]
With his vision for city missions, he toured Scotland, Ireland, the United
States, Canada, and France, addressing local church leaders and encouraging
them to form city missions and other societies.[8]
In this period of denominational rivalry, even among
evangelicals, the London City Mission was founded in 1835 as an
interdenominational organization. Nevertheless, it had a shaky start. While its
committee was drawn from eight denominations, some people in the Church of
England were suspicious, and even hostile toward the society. Therefore, Nasmith
stayed on as secretary for over a year to smooth over any suspicions or
feelings of rivalry.
Nasmith clearly possessed a remarkable ability to organize
mission work. A. G. Callant said, “As a founder of missions, it would be hard
to find his equal.”[9] However, Nasmith was not
simply keen at founding mission societies. In one occasion he stated his
conviction that “every church shall be a missionary body, and every member a
missionary.”[10] He called churches to
awaken from their slumber in order to evangelize their neighborhoods.
At the founding of the Manchester City Mission in 1837,
Nasmith said: “If we expected the poor to flood to our churches, we were
greatly mistaken, and if we wanted our places of worship to be crowded, we must
carry the Gospel to the homes of the poor.”[11] Moreover,
the object of this mission was “not to make people Protestants or Roman
Catholics, Baptist, Episcopalians, Methodists or any other sect,” but “to unite
all denominations of Christians, and by one strong effort, to pluck sinners as
brands from the burning.”[12]
Besides the city missions, Nasmith helped to train Sunday
school teachers in the United Kingdom, and in New York and Philadelphia. He
died at the age of forty in Guildford, Surrey, England. He was not merely
credited, however, with founding city missions but also the young men’s
Christian societies that came into an association of the YMCA under George
Williams.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpts from: John Campbell, Memoirs of David
Nasmith: His Labours and Travels in Great Britain, France, the United States
and Canada (London: J. Snow, 1844).
David [Nasmith] was the means of promoting inquiry into
the spiritual condition of the city population on the part of many who had
never previously thought a moment on the subject. The zeal of some sentimental
people promised, at first, to take a practical turn. “Some of the Lord’s people
here [in Ireland],” says David, “are speaking of forming a mission church with
a pastor, teachers and evangelists; whose object it shall be, not only to edify
those who may be associated in church fellowship, but to go forth and preach
the gospel and plant churches in the cities, towns, and villages of Ireland,
considering that every church is a missionary body. If this is of the Lord, it
will prosper; if not, may it come to nought. Christ Jesus to be the bond of
union, and not Presbyterianism, Independency, or Episcopacy. A union of saints
is exceedingly desirable into one church of Christ, and a striving together for
the advancement of the glory of God, and not our own opinion.” … David plainly
states that his missions were merely an artificial substitute for the churches
of Christ, which are the natural missionary societies, the proper instruments
for diffusing the Gospel, both at home and abroad. In a letter, about the same
time, written to Mrs. Connell, the valued relative of Mrs. Nasmith, David
reverts to this important principle. “I long,” says he, “for the period, when
the churches of Christ, instead of these voluntary associations, formed for
this purpose, shall become missionary bodies. There is a considerable shaking
in that respect, in this place, not amongst the churches, but amongst
individuals, as to the duty of churches. A church was formed yesterday week, of
which Mr. Pope is pastor, upon such a basis I mean, upon Scripture principles;
but the principle that every member is, in his or her sphere, to become a
missionary. Stir up your Christian friends to think of this!”[13] …
“These societies are of two classes, the natural and the artificial; the
former Christian Churches, and the latter voluntary associations of Christian
men. In the order of nature, conventional movements are first, and absolutely necessary.
There is no other means of operation in a district of country, or in a locality
of a town or city, where churches do not exist, or do not exist in number and
strength sufficient to act congregationally upon the population around them.
But these are only temporary expedients, which must ultimately give place to
measures based on other principles. In proportion as churches come to exist in
numbers and means adequate to the work of evangelizing their vicinities, the
necessity for artificial combinations will gradually subside, and may at length
be safely dispensed with. In them the Spirit of God resides; through them, as
the principal means, he will subdue the world, and complete the conquests of
the Head of the Heathen. Every church, like the glorious gospel, of which it is
the depository, may be likened unto fire and leaven, which operate by
assimilating to themselves their kindred elements, when such elements are
brought into contact. Churches ought, at all points, to act on surrounding
unbelievers, and at once to absorb the faithful into their several fellowships
; or, to change the figure, the armies of the cross, like other armies, require
their advanced guards, their spies, and pioneers, such as missionaries,
itinerants, and other classes of labourers; but the conquests of that cross are
to be completed, its authority and government established, and its empire
upheld, by its own organized masses that is, by Gospel Churches.”[14]
[1] John
Campbell, Memoirs of David Nasmith: His
Labours and Travels in Great Britain, France, the United States and Canada
(London: J. Snow, 1844).
[2] D. W.
Bebbington, "Missions at home" in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion
to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 422–3.
[3] C. G. Brown,
Religion and Society in Scotland Since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 97, 102-4.
[4] Bebbington, "Missions at home," 422–3.
[5] Delores
Burger, Practical Religion: David Nasmith
and the City Mission Movement, 1799 – 2000, 27.
[6] Burger, Practical Religion, 28.
[7] A. G.
Callant, Saint Mungo’s Bells; or Old
Glasgow Stories Rung Out Anew (David Bryce & Son, 1888).
[8] Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, 103.
[9] Phyllis
Thompson, To the Heart of the City
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1985).
[10]
Nasmith, 215-216; Cf. Scharpff, History
of Evangelism, 94.
[11] Manchester Guardian, May 3rd, 1837, in
Burger, Practical Religion: David Nasmith,
46.
[12] Manchester Guardian, May 3rd, 1837, in
Burger, Practical Religion: David Nasmith,
46.
[13] Campbell, Nasmith, 188-189; 190-191.
[14] Campbell, Nasmith, 449-450.
