People express surprise when they learn my family was in the brewing business for a hundred years. Making beer and delivering sermons don’t belong together to most people. Yet the connection between beer and preaching would not have been viewed so strangely to our spiritual forebears.
Henry Grattan Guinness (1835-1910) was born into a brewing family in Dublin, Ireland. He went to sea as a sailor and fell away from his childhood faith. He offered his life in full surrender to Christ at age twenty-one and became an itinerant evangelist, preaching the gospel in Scotland, Great Britain, Wales, France, Algeria, Egypt, Switzerland, China, Japan and the US. His wife, Fanny, joined the ministry and took up preaching also. Later, they founded a missionary training school in London.
Henry was the grandson of Arthur Guinness who started Guinness beer back in 1759. Author Os Guinness spoke at the church I served some years ago. Os hails from the same Guinness family and is Henry’s great-grandson. Small world!
When I read Henry’s sermons, I sensed his deep heart for evangelism. Every message in his collection of sermons ends with an appeal to come to Christ. He urges ministers to preach Christ and hearers to trust Christ. At the end of one sermon, he speaks about prayer, “Let your first prayer to Jesus, in the early childhood of your love to him, be, ‘Jesus, abide with me.’ And when your hairs have grown gray in his service and the daylight fades around you, through the falling shadows, let this last prayer ascend to heaven–‘Jesus abide with me.'” This is one prayer Jesus is surely to answer: