Archibald G. Brown

[1] Brown, the son of a wealthy, evangelical London banker, was converted at age 16 through the influence of his Sunday school teacher at Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle, Ann Bigg (whom he later married), and a Church of England lay preacher, Stevenson Arthur Blackwood.

[2] After the superintendent at the Union Chapel in Brixton Hill rejected his offer to teach at Sunday school, Brown rousted up his own group of boys and began holding a Bible class.

(Eventually authorities called a halt to shoppers crowding the aisles with their purchases during Saturday night prayer meetings.

"[8] In 1880 Brown established his own mission and employed two missionaries, later increased to nine, who visited thousands of houses, including some in which the occupants had pulled down banisters to burn for warmth and had sold their cast iron stoves for food.

[13] More significantly, in 1887, Brown agreed with Spurgeon in deciding to withdraw from the Baptist Union during what was called the "down grade controversy" over the presence of clergymen who did not believe that the Bible was inspired or was a final divine revelation, foundational to truth.

[15] After a preaching tour of the United States (including a month spent in Denver, Colorado) and a visit to Palestine, Brown returned to London and, in June 1897, married Hannah Gearing Hetherington, a former hospital matron.

The co-pastorate was dissolved in 1908 when Thomas Spurgeon resigned for reasons of health, and Brown accepted the role of sole pastor.

By 1910 Brown himself was ill, and he resigned at the end of the year, though he continued to preach occasionally even after the American, A. C. Dixon, had been called as pastor.

[19] At the end of World War I, Brown returned to England and "after many months of weakness and suffering," he died on 2 April 1922, nine days after his fourth wife.