John James Bonar
The oldest of the three Bonar brothers
Sunday 15th May 1881 was a memorable day for the congregation of St. Andrew’s Free Church, Greenock (a town on the south-west coast of Scotland). Almost two years had passed since they vacated the building that had housed them for the first forty years of their history and now, at last, their new building was ready for use. It had seating for over eight hundred, was full of light from its great windows, and was so constructed that speaking was an easy task. There were three services that day and the three preachers were brothers: John James Bonar, Free St. Andrew’s minister, Horatius Bonar, and Andrew Bonar. John preached from Acts 3:22-23 on Christ the Prophet, Horatius from Hebrews 5:1-2 on Christ the Priest, and Andrew from Revelation 19:16 on Christ the King. Two of these brothers are remembered to this day – Horatius for his hymns and Andrew for his biography of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. John, by contrast, has been largely forgotten. It is a pleasure to introduce him to you.
Early years
John James was the oldest of the three Bonar brothers and was born in Edinburgh on the 25th of March 1803. Some sixteen and a half years later, on the 30th of September 1819 to be precise, his father recorded the following in his diary: ‘My son John has expressed to-day his wish to become a minister – a determination with which I am well pleased, provided only I shall find it to be from motives of real love to God, and desire to be useful to others in their immortal concerns’. He would not be the first Bonar to serve the Scottish church in this way. An uncle, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, and a great-great grandfather were all ministers too (besides others!).
In April 1827 John was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Edinburgh and two years later became an assistant to Dr. George Brewster of Scoonie (or Leven) in Fife. ‘This day’, writes one of his relatives, ‘our much beloved John left us to enter on his work at Leven…Sincerely do I pray that he may be made useful in that station to which the Lord hath called him…O Lord, do Thou honour him to be successful in winning souls to Christ. Bless him, and make him a blessing’. After quoting these words in a sermon preached after John’s death, the preacher, the Rev. John G. Cunningham, added, ‘This prayer was very graciously answered. He knew much of the joy of harvest during the five years in which he laboured at Leven’.
Greenock
John’s connection with Greenock began in March 1834 when he was appointed assistant to Dr. John Scott, minister of the Middle Parish since 1793. A stroke in 1829 had disabled Dr. Scott for public ministry and when a search began for a colleague and successor John Bonar was named as a suitable candidate. He was on the eve of his appointment to Leven, however, so choice was made instead of one of John’s close friends, William Cunningham (afterwards Principal Cunningham of the Free Church’s New College). It was after Cunningham’s acceptance of a call to the Trinity College Church in Edinburgh in 1834 that attention turned again to John Bonar.
Some months after John’s ministry in Greenock began Dr. Scott wrote the following letter to the elders of the church: ‘I need not say how entire was my conviction of Mr. Bonar’s fitness for the post of assistant minister…at the time when he entered on its functions. Since that period all that I have learned of his manner of performing his various duties, the impression which he has left on the minds of others, and especially my ample opportunities of personal intercourse with him, have done more than confirm the estimate which I had then formed of his natural and spiritual qualifications for the ministry, and leave me at a loss to express with adequate force my persuasion that it is most desirable for your church and congregation that he should be their permanent instructor and spiritual overseer’.
It was not to be, however. Over John’s settlement as Dr. Scott’s successor there was a division of opinion in the congregation which continued for almost a year. It was a painful time and only ended with the decision being made by John’s supporters to separate from the church and form a new church and parish. Provost James Watt, one of those supporters, put it in this way: ‘Cordially approving…of Mr. Bonar, both as a minister and Christian, I have resolved, along with other friends, rather than make any contest or dispeace about his appointment…to aid in providing a separate church, where we may enjoy the benefit of his ministrations, and to leave those who think differently of Mr. Bonar’s qualifications to find…a pastor after their own mind’. The separation took place at the beginning of March 1835 and on August 20th of the same year John James Bonar was ordained as the first minister of the new St. Andrew’s Parish. It was the forming of a pastoral bond that remained unbroken until Bonar’s death fifty-six years later in July 1891.
In a speech given at his ordination dinner Bonar alludes to how difficult the division had been for him personally. The honour of being ‘enrolled a citizen’ of the Greenock community, and of being ‘admitted as a member of its clergy’, was ‘well fitted’, he said, ‘to compensate any annoyances I may for a season have sustained, and to supplant the recollection of every wrong by nobler and more grateful feelings’. It had been a hard time for Bonar’s mother too. ‘That day’, said John’s brother James, ‘had brought to her a relief from many a heavy burden, and had witnessed the removal of sorrows far too deep to be poured into any human ear’.
Looking forward, Bonar was determined to reciprocate the sympathy and affection shown to him by his congregation: ‘I now do make them offer of my undivided strength – my undivided heart!...[M]y own convictions would term it dark ingratitude were there one fibre of my power, one moment of my time, I refused to consecrate to their eternal interests. Such therefore as I have of talent or attainment I give it unto them. It is theirs without grudge and without deduction. It is theirs without reluctance and without reserve’.
William Cunningham also made a speech. ‘He rejoiced’, the report of it reads, ‘in the proceedings of that day, because he had seen one whom for many years he had most intimately known, most cordially loved, and most highly esteemed, and whom he loved and esteemed the more he had known him, ordained to the pastoral office and invested with the cure of souls’. He rejoiced, too, in anticipation of the blessing Bonar’s ministry would be both to Greenock itself and to the Church of Scotland within its borders.
A fruitful ministry
The first church building was opened on the 29th of May 1836, with seating for nine hundred and fifty. Here are some interesting statistics from the year 1841: seven hundred and ninety two seats were let, the number of communicants was seven hundred and forty, and the average attendance of worshippers on the Lord’s Day was about nine hundred. Unlike many congregations St Andrew’s was able to retain its building at the time of the disruption of the national church in May 1843. It also continued to engage in mission work in the area of Greenock in which it had been planted, employing a succession of missionaries or evangelists. Their work bore much fruit. At the Jubilee both of himself and his congregation in June 1885 Bonar could say of the mission, ‘when I think of [it], once all thistles and thorns choking every seed, but now a fair garden which the Lord hath blessed, I am as one that dreams’.
One of the principal sources for this article is the Jubilee Memorial of Saint Andrew’s Parish and Congregation, Greenock, and of their first minister, John James Bonar D.D. John G. Cunningham, in his funeral sermon, describes it as ‘one of the most concise, yet complete records of a faithful and successful ministry which exists in any language’. His summary of its contents gives us an invaluable insight into the kind of minister St. Andrew’s had in John Bonar: ‘There you will see’, says Cunningham, ‘how he loved the young, and received in their grateful life-long affection the recompense of his unwearied care for their spiritual interests. There you will see how he loved this congregation, and, cherishing no distracting ambitions to be known elsewhere, sought continually to approve himself as a minister of God among you; and how, in the prosperity and blessing which crowned his labours, he had his abundant reward. There you will see how much he loved his Bible as the pure Word of God…There you will see how worthily and fearlessly he bore his part in all that pertained to truth and righteousness in this community, as well as in all public questions which occupied or agitated the Church of Christ; and how diligently he sought to promote Christian missions, and to advance the circulation of the Scriptures amongst all nations, kindreds, and tongues’. An examination of the contents themselves (along with information from other contemporary sources) confirms the accuracy of Cunningham’s summary.
The Jubilee Memorial reports the speech that Bonar himself made on the occasion. Toward the close he made the following powerful appeal for prayer: ‘And now let us more than ever abound in all Christian zeal, in all gracious labour. Still it is neither by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord that we shall prosper. It is the Holy Ghost we need. Let us therefore lose no time in getting up to Carmel. Let us bend the knee with Elijah-like humility; let us cry aloud with Elijah-like fervour; let us watch upon our mountain-top with Elijah-like patience, and faint not, till we see the speck of cloud, till we see the entire sky overcast, and the rain coming down in plenteous showers’.
Among the tributes paid at the Jubilee was one by Greenock’s Congregational minister, J.M. Jarvie: ‘As a Christian citizen Dr. Bonar has honourably maintained his position from the beginning…As a Christian spirit Dr. Bonar has written his name imperishably on many a heart…But as a Christian minister who can say how much Dr. Bonar has done? No statement of the numbers can give us an idea of the silent, moulding, permeating, sanctifying power he has exercised upon successive generations, from the time he came here in his youth till his rich and ripe old age’.
The close
Like his two brothers, Horatius and Andrew, John was blessed with a strong constitution. He was able to continue on as sole pastor until early 1888 when his public ministry came abruptly to a close. He preached on the 12th of February from the words, ‘I am come a Light into the world, that whosoever believeth on Me should not abide in darkness’ (John 12:46). It proved to be his final sermon. A serious illness and the weakness with which it left him made a return to the pulpit impossible. ‘It was sometimes feared’, writes his son James, ‘that one so full of spirit as Dr. Bonar was, would murmur at seclusion; but, when it came, he yielded meekly to his Father’s will, and signalized his closing years, by patience, by tender consideration for others, and by habitual cheerfulness’. ‘You will bear me witness that I am not gloomy’, he said, on the day before his death.
He died on Tuesday 7th July 1891 at the age of eighty-eight. His wife, Isabella, whom he married in 1838, had died sixteen years earlier in 1875. Writing about his father’s funeral James says, ‘On Monday the 13th July a multitude of mourners followed their ancient friend to the grave; and, as they laid him down, and sang around him, while the leaves were rustling softly, and the breezes playing merrily, and the sunshine was brightening all things, one thought no more of death, but of that hour “when Christ, who is our life, shall appear”’.
A hymn
Horatius was the hymn-writer of the family but John composed a few as well. The following, written in December 1861, was suggested by the last words of his beloved friend, William Cunningham, ‘I am going quietly home’. It is a fitting note on which to close.
‘Going Home’
‘I’m going home!’ The Saint exclaimed;
Bright grew his closing eye;
He thought of Jesus and his rest,
And did not fear to die.
‘I’m going home! I’m winged for flight
To yonder peaceful clime;
Prepared to go, I only wait
My God’s appointed time.
‘I’m going home, to dwell with Him
Who bled and died for me;
For He hath said that where He is
There shall His servants be.
‘I’m going home, transporting thought!
Lord Jesus, quickly come,
And bear my ransomed soul away
To her celestial home!’
‘I’m going home!’ the Saint exclaimed;
Bright grew his closing eye;
He thought of Jesus and his rest,
And did not fear to die.