by Doug Kutilek
Frank W. Boreham (1871-1959), a native of England and raised by devout Christian parents, attended school through age 14, worked for wages for several years, and then went to London hoping to secure a career position at 17 (he was accomplished at short-hand). He was converted while in that metropolis.
After a brief and unpleasant association with the Plymouth Brethren, he eventually became a Baptist, submitting to believer’s immersion. Experiencing God’s call into the ministry, he sought admission to Spurgeon’s Pastors’ College —reportedly being the last student personally interviewed and admitted by Spurgeon before his own death in January 1892. Boreham spent two and a half years studying at the college.
During his days in London, Boreham heard and was influenced by Charles Spurgeon, D. L. Moody, F. B. Meyer, but especially A. T. Pierson. Burdened for missions, Boreham applied to J. Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission, but was not accepted due to a pronounced and painful limp he had because of a nearly fatal leg injury in his teens. Ultimately, Boreham went out to pastor a small congregation — in New Zealand, as remote from England as any inhabited spot on earth! Unmarried at his departure at age 24, he left behind Stella, a 17-year-old who would, as soon as she turned 18, sail unaccompanied to New Zealand to be married to the young pastor.
Boreham spent about a decade in each of three pastorates, first in New Zealand, then on the island of Tasmania, and finally in Australia proper. During his first pastorate, he became a religious columnist in a local New Zealand newspaper, the beginning of a half-century writing career, during which his multiplied essays (more than 3,000) and some 46 books (often compiled from the essays, though several of them originated as sermons) were written. Among his books of sermons is A Bunch of Everlastings, or Texts that Made History (1920) which is perhaps the most famous of his many published books. It is part of a series of 125 sermons on Biblical texts that transformed individual lives. In it Boreham discusses notable names from Christian history such as Martin Luther, John Bunyan, David Livingstone, Charles Spurgeon, William Carey, and Andrew Fuller, and particular Biblical texts that had a dramatic and transforming effect on their lives, sometimes in conversion, sometimes in directing them toward their life’s work as servants of Christ.
Boreham was a voluminous reader. He recognized that to write much and well, he had to study much, in order to have something worthwhile to say. He resolved to buy and read at least one book per week (biographies and autobiographies were areas of special interest to him), a practice he continued for decades, accumulating a great wealth of information in the process. He incorporated his accumulated stores of knowledge into his Sunday sermons and his weekly newspaper essays.
He retired from the pastorate at age 57 in 1928, devoting the rest of his life to writing and preaching.
The chatty, familiar, and engaging style in his essays and books, in conjunction with the diverse and interesting information they contained, made Boreham’s writings a delight to read, and he became an internationally famous author during his lifetime. Once he was introduced by another preacher to an audience of preachers as “the man whose name is on all of our lips, whose books are on all our shelves, and whose illustrations are in all our sermons”!
Nearly all Boreham’s books have quaint titles: Arrows of Desire, The Luggage of Life, A Casket of Cameos, and Mushrooms on the Moor are typical examples (a complete list of his books, with the dates of original publication, can be found on p. 257 of The Story of F. W. Boreham by T. Howard Crago). While Boreham’s writings are generally far from rare in the used book trade, the original English and American editions fetch somewhat above average prices. Many of his writings have been reprinted in recent years, mostly in paperback, some with altered titles; some never-before-issued-in-book-form new compilations have also appeared. All these are easily acquired through internet booksellers. These literary gems will most assuredly repay the trouble to obtain and read them.
A brief account and appreciation of Boreham’s life and labors was included by Warren Wiersbe in his book Walking with the Giants (Baker, 1976), pp. 152-160. The Wikipedia article on Boreham is an adequate short survey. There are two full-length biographies of Boreham: My Pilgrimage: An Autobiography (1940); and T. Howard Crago’s, The Story of F. W. Boreham (Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1961), written with Boreham’s cooperation, and published not long after Boreham’s death.