Matt Carter - Steal Away Home: Charles Spurgeon and Thomas Johnson, Unlikely Friends on the Passage to Freedom?

Copyright 2017 by Matt Carter and Aaron Ivey

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-4336-9065-5

Published by B&H Publishing Group

Nashville, Tennessee

Cover design and illustration by Abe Goolsby, Officina Abrahae.

Dewey Decimal Classification: 233.7

Subject Heading: SPURGEON, CHARLES \ JOHNSON, THOMAS \ FREEDOM

All Scripture is taken from the King James Version. Public domain.

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Dedication

From Matt

For my son, Samuel Haddon Carter

I love you more than youll know until you have children of your own. And I pray that your faithfulness exceeds that of the three men after whom you were named.

From Aaron

For Jamiemy best friend on this blessed pilgrimage

Introduction

T he idea for this book came years ago when I was reading a novel by author Michael Shaara called The Killer Angels . The Pulitzer Prize-winning book was written in a unique way. Its a novel about the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War, but it was written from the perspective of the historical characters themselves. The beautiful thing about the novel was that it made these men, who through the fog and time of history had become larger than life, seem real and accessible in a way that I had never experienced.

I often wondered through the reading of The Killer Angels what it would be like to write in a similar way, bringing to life some men who had a profound impact on church history as a whole and my life in particular. I thought of Charles H. Spurgeon, the man who pastored the Metropolitan Tabernacle of London, England, in the late 1800s.

Untold volumes of Spurgeons writings and sermons have been published throughout the decades. Scores of biographies and books lauding the praises of the great Prince of Preachers have been written, uncovering every rock and nuance of the man who accomplished so much in the name of Christ. As a result of the sheer volume of academic attention Mr. Spurgeon has received, I fear, for many, that he has become larger than life. His oratory ability and obvious passion and skill in the pulpit tend to overshadow the stark reality that he was a mortal man and a sinner, just like the rest of us. Charles struggled with doubt, pride, fear of failure, and poor health in the same way that every man does. For many of his admirers, the sheer magnitude of this mans gifting has unfortunately hidden that, above all else, he was a flawed man, trying to make it, day by day with the help of Gods grace.

How This Book Came to Life

My coauthor, Aaron Ivey, and I spent nearly two years reading everything we could get our hands on with the attempt to better know the main characters of this story. While recognizing that you can never truly know someone who lived two hundred years ago, we nonetheless spent untold hours poring over journals, sermons, and autobiographies of the men in this book, not only learning the facts about their lives, but attempting to understand how they thought, spoke, and felt.

During the course of our research, we spent a few days at Midwestern Seminary, giddy as school boys, looking through Charles Spurgeons personal library, hoping for direction as to what part of his life we might focus on. During our time at Midwestern, in an interview with Dr. Christian George (one of Americas top Spurgeon scholars), we first heard the name Thomas Johnson. Dr. George mentioned a former slave that had been trained at Spurgeons college in England and commissioned by Spurgeon as a missionary to Africa. After further investigation, we found the out-of-print autobiography of Thomas Johnson titled Twenty-Eight Years a Slave . The real-life story of the friendship between the former slave and Charles Spurgeon is the subject of this book.

Telling a Different Kind of Story

Its important to understand that what you hold in your hands is not a biography, and its not a history book, but a story, based on real events that occurred in history. Many passages in the book are word-for-word quotations from Spurgeons or Johnsons own writing. While my coauthor and I, in several instances for the sake of flow and continuity, were forced to fill in the blanks, take literary license, and deviate slightly from the historical record, the overwhelming majority of the persons, places, dates, and even the dialogue of this book are based on real events. While the line between fiction and history is blurred, our hope is that you walk away from the reading of this story with a better glimpse of the heart and life of Charles Spurgeon than you have ever had before. It is also our hope that you enjoy meeting Thomas Johnson. His is a story the world needs to hear. Its important to note that Aaron and I are very aware of our limitations in giving life to the voice of an African-American from the 1800s. We approached this task with reverence and an understanding that Thomas Johnson experienced a reality that, even through the most ardent research, we could never fully understand. Through counsel and much discussion with trusted friends from the African-American community, we have attempted to present him in a way that is both historically accurate and honoring to the legacy of this brilliant man of God.

After years of research and writing, setting down the pen and walking away from these two men that Aaron and I have lived with for so long was harder than we expected. We felt like we came to know them in such intimate ways that the last sentence was like a farewell note to two dear friends. Im looking forward to seeing them one day in Heaven and asking them both what parts of the story we got wrong. Until then, it is our pleasure to introduce you to these two wonderful men of God and it is our hope you enjoy getting to know them as much as we did.

Dr. Matt Carter, Austin, Texas

Section 1

Chapter 1

Waking Up

Essex, England 1841

T here was not a village in the world more pleasant than Stambourne, and although London was only forty miles southward, there was rarely a need to leave. Quilted patchworks of lush gardens and orchards surrounded the entire village, neatly tucking the good people of Stambourne inside fences of leafy hedges and fruit trees. Here, the rural beauty of Essex was at its finest. Only a few homes sat alongside Church Road, the tiny dirt road that meandered through the town, but from his grandfathers front porch, Charles could see every single one.

The covered porch sat a few feet above the ground and wrapped along the front of the Gentlemans Mansion, as his grandfather cleverly referred to it. Although it had many charms, it was quite simple. Eight large windows lined the front of the white brick home, but almost all of these were covered with cement, painted black, then marked with white squares to mimic glass window panes. Since the ridiculous window tax swept through Essex a few years ago, homeowners were forced to brick up their windows. The tax was meant to help estimate the size of a house based on how many windows it contained, but sadly, it left unwealthy homeowners with darkened houses, completely shut off from the sunlight that they were not fortunate enough to afford.

No tax could keep seven-year-old Charles from enjoying the light his grandfather couldnt buy, so the porch became a morning haven, an outpost of tranquility and deep pondering. It wasnt normal for a boy to wake before anyone else in Stambourne, much less before the nightingales and roosters in the farm across the road, but Charles was no ordinary boy. There was a hardly a day in Stambourne that didnt begin with Charles on his grandfathers porch waiting for the drowsy village to stretch and yawn, and wipe the sleep from its eyes.