Latest revision as of 20:13, 4 October 2021

William Graham Scroggie, known commonly as Graham Scroggie, was a Baptist pastor and author, as well as a global itinerant, and popular at the Keswick Conferences.

He was born in 1877 in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, England, one of nine children. His parents were James Johnston Scroggie (b. 1843 Scotland), and Jane Mitchell Scroggie (b. 1846 Foveran, Aberdeen, Scotland). His mother was the daughter of Thomas Mitchell and Margaret Thomson Mitchell, and was saved under PB revivalists (John Smith, Donald Ross, etc.]] who later were credited with planting many of the earliest assemblies in Canada.

Jane was from Newburgh, near Aberdeen, and James moved there in 1866 to engage in evangelistic work, and they were married in 1868. The family relocated in 1871 to Streatham, in London, where James became the resident evangelist at a mission hall run by Sir Arthur Stevenson Blackwood, who was senior exec of the post office from 1880, and chairman of the Mildmay devotional conferences. After Streatham, the Scroggies spent awhile in Buckinghamshire, then in the north of England, where James Scroggie labored alongside James Carr of Carlisle. Then they returned to Scotland, to Annan, where three of their children died of scarlet fever in 1875. They then spent time in the Isle of Wight before returning to evangelistic activity in the north of Scotland.

Graham studied at Spurgeon's College at the age of nineteen. In 1900 he married Florence Hudson, and they had one son, Marcus, who later became a deacon of Elm Road Baptist Church, Beckenham, Kent, England. Graham's first pastorate was in Leytonstone, Essex, and ended prematurely after two years after "a decisive period of inner conflict... when he felt personally broken". He gave up his first pastorate since he had "been a middleman between his books and his people but not of the Book... I was spiritually bankrupt, and I well nigh became a spiritual casualty", according to Ian Randall's treatise on Graham's life.

His next pastorate was in Halifax, beginning in 1902, but was also short-lived, in this case being strong convictions towards a "questionable form of entertainment" in the church. In 1907, he accepted a call to a "very active" Bethesda Free Church in Sunderland, a church that "claimed to have a hundred lay preachers", and in 1916 he moved to Charlotte Chapel, where his ministry attracted over a thousand every Sunday, with hundreds to his mid-week Bible school, and he baptized 650. He resigned in 1933 due to ill health, and spent six months in New Zealand at the Auckland Tabernacle, then had nearly five years of itinerant ministry in the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa.

Graham's final pastorate was at Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, where he served 1938-1944, while serving as an "extra-mural" lecturer at Spurgeon's College. His first wife died, and in 1941, he married Joan Hooker, whose mother had been the first principal of Ridgelands College in Wimbledon, which trained missionaries.

He continued pastorates in New Zealand, Australia (including Tasmania), the United States, Canada, and his final pastorate was at Charles Haddon Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle. His best known book is The Unfolding Dawn of Redemption, online in three volumes.

Also See

• Revival in Rose Street by William Whyte
• The Story of the Life in the Love of God, edited by Graham, and based on the diaries of his mother. It was first published in 1938 from Pickering and Inglis, and reprinted in 1948 and 1957.

Sources

• Graham Scroggie and Evangelical Spirituality by Ian Randall
• Ancestry.com
• Christian Hall of Fame
• J.B. Nicholson, Jr. in Oct. 2021 with regard to Graham's mother's salvation