Described by Billy Graham as ‘the world’s greatest living evangelist’ and by the local press as ‘a modern Apostle Paul’, Canon Bryan Green was an international evangelist, writer and broadcaster, Rector of Birmingham and co-founder of The College of Preachers. I often heard him preach at St Martin’s in the Bull Ring during his 22 years during the 50s and 60s and the non-believing work colleagues I goaded into joining me in his packed church were mesmerised by the experience. When I went to St John’s College, Durham, I discovered that the Principal had been Bryan’s curate; when I became curate at Bradford Cathedral, I realised that my boss had come to faith through Bryan’s preaching and that Bryan had inspired in him the relentless work regime that was expected of us curates. While I was vicar in Nuneaton Bryan Green came to preach, already in his 87th year, at the morning and evening services, giving a Bible study for most of the afternoon, before departing next day for commitments in Bermuda.

Bryan Green embodied Phillips Brooks’ famous definition of preaching as ‘truth through personality’. He had a presence of Churchillian proportions, was quick-witted, had prodigious energy, was compelling, outspoken, a man of action with a taste for controversy. His ministry was sustained by his gifts – a brilliant organiser, superb team leader, financial wizard and he had a persuasive charm to make things happen. His detractors would say that he was a showman, but he always put his natural gifts and his flair for publicity at the service of the gospel. As Billy Graham said of him; ‘he loved Christ with all his heart and soul and mind. Christ was the centre of his life, the heart of his preaching’. Preaching, as Brooks’ definition implies, is the dynamic communication of a message from God conveyed, enriched and made credible by the distinctive character, voice and spirit of the preacher themselves.

Bryan was the youngest speaker at the Keswick Convention aged 31. But even at that time he was finding its style of evangelicalism too confining and moved to a ‘more questioning and more widely catholic’ stance, while losing none of his deep evangelicalism. The transition was painful, but it enabled him to work with Anglo-Catholics and others, while his capacity to question and doubt equipped him to exercise a big ministry to thoughtful people in hundreds of schools and universities. Bryan made 120 preaching tours in America alone, right up to his 92nd year, 1992. He travelled for three months every year, conducting missions across the world. The credibility of his overseas work, he insisted, was rooted in his parish ministry. He described himself as a ‘Parson-Evangelist’. It is unimaginable that hundreds of thousands of people would now be prepared to wait in a queue a mile long to hear a Christian preacher or that one could persuade 300-400 students due to attend school on a Saturday morning to come first to hear a Bible study. Bryan would, doubtless, have developed fresh means of communication in the modern age. But there are, I believe, still insights and ideas from Green’s ministry worth considering for preachers in today’s culture.

Bryan followed P.T. Forsyth’s dictum: ‘Biblical preaching preaches the Gospel and uses the Bible – it does not preach the Bible and use the Gospel’. Much contemporary preaching, which is either loosely linked to the main text or is mired in the complexity and muddle of juggling one or two more texts, might wish to reflect Forsyth’s words and Bryan Green’s practice. No one listening to Bryan would leave without being given the opportunity to hear the gospel of unconditional love and the grace of God that accepts us as we are. Many times I heard the central truths of the Gospel expounded: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. They always came to me with fresh power, challenge and excitement. Bryan’s preaching was direct, lucid, credible and completely free of cliches and religious jargon. He would anticipate and address directly issues that might get in the way of hearing. ‘Bryan liked to surprise, sometimes shock and often shake his hearers out of complacency’, as Lord Coggan noted. He began one sermon; ‘The first thing I want to say to you is that I am not interested in your nasty little sins. In fact, most of you don’t have enough adventure in you to be really big sinners. But what I am interested in is The sin – which is separation from God’.

Expectancy in public worship was for Bryan an essential ingredient for hearing the good news. It requires the preacher to discern the mood and have the confidence, freedom and daring to seize the moment. He describes some audacious interventions in his autobiography, one of which in the USA was to intervene just as the bishop was about to pronounce the blessing, discerning that something was seriously wrong in the church. The bishop was angry. However it subsequently emerged that this intervention led to much soul searching which, in turn, brought amazing healing and renewal. Bryan was welcomed at that church on many future visits. 

Preaching cannot be immune to major theological and intellectual challenges. The Honest to God debate was such a one, ignited by Bishop John Robinson in his book of that name, which attracted headline media coverage in the 1960s. Bryan duly invited him to preach and debated with the bishop, whose provocative style belied a person of profound faith. This led Bryan Green to a fresh examination of the way he needed to communicate in the light of the questions that emerged. The Easter Sunday service at St Martins televised in April 1965, when the preacher was a leading Cambridge theologian and priest, itself led to a more limited debate among churches. A dialogue between the theologian and Bryan Green was broadcast on BBC television the same evening.

Preaching calls for regular, short-term changes to keep it fresh and the hearers alert. For Bryan a change of hymn or new start to a service that had become perfunctory could rescue the worship and imbue it with a sense of expectancy and purposefulness. Different approaches were introduced, including talk-back sermons that could work for a large congregation. Bryan spent his first evening service in Birmingham wondering how he could get a grip on the hundreds who had turned up in the wake of news of his ‘successful’ New York mission. He acknowledged that his mind was not fully on the worship. Instead, he got ideas for two short sermon series and scribbled down topical themes for both the morning and evening services. When he got up to preach, he announced them and as a series urged the congregation to come and hear them all, which by all accounts they did. By the next Sunday, fliers were available to pass on to friends and a special congregational role was initiated for those rightly committed to their own local churches but who were keen to attend St Martin’s monthly and strengthen the Christian presence at the heart of the city; 1000 signed up.

Bryan saw that other opportunities for sharing the good news were required. On a Saturday afternoon thousands of shoppers were jostling in the open-air market stalls in Birmingham. His response was a Shoppers Service for 15 minutes. Several hundred people heard his invitation amplified across the Bull Ring and filed into the church each week to see the decorations, say a prayer, sing a couple of hymns and hear a Bible reading and Gospel message.

The written word can, of course, serve and support the preached word. This opportunity is often lost by bland, predictable churchy writing that suggests we have nothing to say to those outside the shrinking number of faithful Christians. Writing accessible, direct and arresting regular columns for a women’s magazine and the Saturday edition of the Birmingham Post communicated the Gospel to people who might otherwise not hear it. There was even a Bryan Green calendar with pertinent Christian comments on homely issues of faith and ethics, which sold at all good newsagents and proved so popular that they were still being published in 2014, 11 years after his death! Newspapers are often willing, in my experience, to publish a regular down-to-earth Christian message.

No authentic and faithful preacher can be unaware of the temptation to collude and temporise when speaking ‘truth to power’. Bryan described how he could have lost his soul ‘in the affluence, intelligence and aristocratic surroundings’ at Holy Trinity, Brompton when he was vicar. A single sermon challenging appeasement lost him 100 members of the congregation; not even Bryan’s legendary charm and warmth could rescue the situation. But he saw the church congregation being rebuilt again and again with a more committed membership. In Birmingham, too, he took on the management of car manufacturers and the market traders with their barrows and stalls around the Bull Ring, who inflated the price of flowers for Mothering Sunday. No one was to be left in any doubt as to the cost of Christian faith and all were shown how it was to be lived.

Bryan believed it was important to give people an opportunity to express their faith publicly to the rest of the congregation. He abhorred any use of pressure or manipulation, always giving space after the sermon for people to make their own silent responses to God. But sometimes, such as when he was coming to the end of his ministry in London, he invited all who had responded to Christ’s call to move out in full view of the rest of the congregation. It galvanised 200 or so people to make their commitment and was a powerful witness to the rest of the congregation.

As a visiting preacher Bryan Green sought to form a relationship with his hearers but how was this to be achieved at his first large mission in New York’s massive Cathedral of St John the Divine? He began the practice of walking up and down the aisle before the service, chatting, joking, greeting people and quipping in a loud voice to much laughter: ‘I’m just out here inspecting the sinners’. This personal contact enabled him to speak to individuals and not a mass audience. On his first visit to my church, I was leading him to the back of the church to introduce him to the choir; instead, he slipped away to chat to the congregation and announced to them, to peals of laughter, that he wanted to check that they were not brain dead!

Few have the personality and attributes of a Bryan Green, but every other committed person is no less crucial in the service of the Gospel. The conditions of the harvest that Bryan Green so diligently reaped is far less evident in these days. But the memory and reputation of this remarkable man can provoke, challenge and inspire faithful preachers working in this time of drought.

A suggestion for further reading is Bryan Green & Timothy Yates (ed.), Bryan Green: Parson-Evangelist (1994), from which some of the information in this article has been drawn.