Wilson Carlile

Wilson Carlile was born in Brixton, in south London, on January 14, 1847, a sickly boy with weak eyes and poor hearing who would carry a hearing aid in his old age. He did not begin as a clergyman. He went into the silk trade, made money, and lost it all in the financial crash of the 1870s, a ruin that left him broken in body and spirit. Out of that low place he was converted, and the instrument was an unlikely one: the great American revival meetings of Moody and Sankey, then sweeping London, at which the recovering businessman sat down at the harmonium and played.

Carlile took orders and became a curate at St Mary Abbots in Kensington, a fashionable parish, but his heart was in the courts and alleys where the fashionable never went. He began preaching in the open air to the laboring poor, and he saw something the established church had been slow to grasp. The Salvation Army was reaching the slums that Anglican respectability could not, and reaching them with ordinary men and women as evangelists. Why, Carlile asked, could the Church of England not do the same, within its own order and under its own bishops?

In 1882 he founded the Church Army to do exactly that. He recruited working men and women, trained them as lay evangelists, and sent them into the streets, the prisons, the workhouses, and later the trenches, preaching conversion and carrying practical help, all of it bound to the parishes and the sacraments of the established church rather than set loose outside it. His officers called him simply "the Chief." He had answered, in his own communion, the old objection that catholic order and fervent evangelism could not share a house.

He never retired. Made a prebendary of St Paul's, deaf and frail but unstoppable, Carlile led the Church Army for sixty years, well into his nineties. He died peacefully on September 26, 1942, at the age of ninety-five, having put the laity to work for the gospel on a scale the English church had not seen since the friars.