F. B. Meyer

Frederick Brotherton Meyer (8 April 1847 – 28 March 1929), a contemporary and friend of D. L. Moody and A. C. Dixon, was a Baptist pastor and evangelist in England involved in ministry and inner city mission work on both sides of the Atlantic.

Author of numerous religious books and articles, many of which remain in print today, he was described in an obituary as The Archbishop of the Free Churches.

[1] In 1908, Meyer and his wife made a tour of South Africa, where they met Mohandas Gandhi spending several days with him in May.

[2] In June 1916, together with Hubert Peet, a Quaker, he visited British conscientious objectors in France, to report upon their position in the light of news that 42 resisting men had been forcibly transported there.

All sorts of people visited... it became, in fact, the Church of the Cordial Welcome, and as a consequence a place of pilgrimage and a centre of evangelical and missionary influence in Leicester and far beyond.

Christ Church, London : In 1892, Christopher Newman Hall was due to retire from the Christ Church complex in Lambeth, and invited Meyer to leave the Baptist's Regent's Park Chapel and its wealthy church-going district, to become his successor at the non-denominational institution, the successor to Rowland Hill and James Sherman's Surrey Chapel from where many welfare societies and services operated for the largely working class and slum district.

This being the year that Charles Spurgeon died, leading to unrest at the nearby baptist Metropolitan Tabernacle, Meyer was able to attract a considerable number of its former members to migrate to Christ Church.

Frederick Meyer stayed there until 1902, when Dr. A. T. Pierson was asked to undertake his duties during two prolonged periods of travel abroad.

Across the Atlantic, he had earlier been described in The New York Observer as a man of international fame whose services are constantly sought by churches over the wide and increasing empire of Christendom.