In February 1888, George MacGregor was asked to preach in Aberdeen East Free Church and made such an impression that a congregational meeting was immediately arranged and a decision made to call him as the colleague of the current minister who was in declining health. Among his predecessors as minister was James S. Candlish (son of Robert) who had been appointed Professor of Divinity in the Free Church College, Glasgow, in 1872. William Robertson Smith had been one of its elders, and one of the elders who welcomed George was William Alexander, the editor of Aberdeen Free Press. The involvement of James Candlish and Robertson Smith indicates the outlook of the congregation, and explains why it had no difficulty calling a person who did not belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible.
The days between Monday April 30 and Friday May 4 were very significant for George. On the Monday his father died, on the Tuesday he was licensed by the Edinburgh Presbytery, on the Thursday his father was buried, and on the Friday Aberdeen Free East elected him as their choice of minister. He was ordained on Thursday 28 June, but had another sore bereavement before then when his brother died at the age of 26. George himself was 24.
The congregation had been declining in numbers for several years, although it is a reminder of how church attendance in Scotland has changed when it is realised that the congregation numbered about 500. MacGregor set about recovering the church and engaged in earnest evangelistic preaching. Soon numbers increased: over 120 joined in his first year and by the time he left in 1894 the membership had doubled. George delighted in evangelistic work and was a strong supporter of the missions of D. L. Moody who came to Aberdeen during that period.
George married the daughter of one of his elders in 1891. Two other details are highlighted by his biographer as of importance and they indicate the outlook of MacGregor. The first was his initial attendance at the Keswick Convention in 1889 and the other was the death of William Robertson Smith in 1894. A tribute to Smith by George indicates that he accepted Smith’s higher critical ideas. Returning to 1889, George longed for fresh experience of the power of the Holy Spirit and taking the advice of several ministerial colleagues he went to the Keswick Convention. His visit to the Convention was a turning point in his life as he understood in a new way the place of faith in sanctification, the significance of union with Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit. The biggest change in his character as a result of what happened to him was the suppression of a bad temper, a feature of his character from childhood. Apparently, it seldom revealed itself after this convention experience.
MacGregor became a conference speaker during his Aberdeen ministry. His next visit to Keswick was in 1892, but he went back as a speaker and did so each year until 1900. In 1892 he published So Great Salvation, which had a preface by fellow Keswick speaker, Handley Moule, and which went through three editions.
George MacGregor has come a long way from the Ferintosh manse. Still denying the verbal inspiration of the Bible and commending the life of one of those who introduced such notions into the nineteenth-century Free Church (Robertson Smith), George has become an effective evangelist, a revitaliser (to use a modern concept) of a moribund church, an author, and a regular speaker at one of the biggest annual conferences in worldwide evangelicalism. This has all happened before he was thirty. It is not surprising that vacant congregations elsewhere are interested in calling him out of Aberdeen.
But what is happening in his denomination during his years in Aberdeen from 1888 to 1894? Conservative ministers and elders are trying to prevent doctrinal decline, and among them are the ministers of Ferintosh (Angus Galbraith who was there from 1890 to 1893 and Donald Munro who was inducted in 1894). I wonder what they thought of the journey taken by the son of their predecessor in the Ferintosh manse?
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