*F. W. Boreham: The Public Theologian***

*© Geoff Pound *

/Geoff Pound is Principal of Whitley College, The Baptist College of Victoria and secretary of the BWA Heritage and Identity Commission. A former New Zealander, he is also Director of Leadership Training for the Baptist Union of Victoria./

*My Interest*

I came to be interested in F W Boreham when I was serving as a pastor in Dunedin, New Zealand. The Knox Theological College was in my parish and when I raided their library I came across many books by F W Boreham. I discovered that he had also had his first pastorate in the region of Otago although 80 years earlier and I was drawn in by his way with words and his magnificent gift as a storyteller.

When I came to Victoria, Australia in 1992 to be a superintendent of churches, I bumped into so many people who said that they’d met Boreham. He had been their pastor at the Armadale Church or at the Kew Baptist church. I have met hundreds of people from different branches of the church and from no church who said: “I used to listen to Boreham’s Wednesday lunch hour sermons at Scots Church in Melbourne’s inner city in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.” It was an institution. What amazed me was the number of people who could remember parts of his sermons that were preached 50 or 60 years ago! When I quizzed them more deeply, what they remembered was usually some truth that was wrapped up in a colourful story.

Then when I came to Whitley College, I was rummaging through the archives one day when I stumbled across two cartons of books that happened to contain Boreham’s personal copy of his 55 books. For a historian, this was like discovering The Shroud of Turin! They had been donated by the Boreham family to the College soon after F W Boreham died and they had been sitting in the darkness and the dust for 30 years. They are now displayed in our College library.

I also found in these boxes of memorabilia, five scrapbooks containing many of the 3,000 editorials that Boreham wrote for the Hobart Mercury and the Melbourne Age, every week, for 47 years between 1912-1959. In those boxes I also found the plan in Boreham’s handwriting of the structure of the book he was compiling at the time of his death, in which he was drawing together one of these editorials that was connected to each day of the year. 365 chapters.

I want to come back later to these editorials because they represent the focus of my enquiry and this paper but it is impossible to understand his writings without some knowledge of the person.

Boreham’s Life

His life story is told in his autobiography—My Pilgrimage. It was Leslie Weatherhead who wrote to Boreham and said that his autobiography, My Pilgrimage, was one of the most helpful biographies for young pastors. His story is amplified in the biography or hagiography by Howard Crago whose dust cover states, “The story of F W Boreham by his close friend T Howard Crago.” A reviewer for the Mercury wrote of this book, “It is admiring, sincere, and, if Dr Boreham had weaknesses the reader would not know it.”

More… http://www.bwa-baptist-heritage.org/sl-borhm.htm