Well-known American Reformed Baptist minister Al Martin has died.
Scottish-born Calvinist theologian John Murray once described him as “one of the ablest and moving preachers I have ever heard”.
Martin was born in Virginia on 11 April 1934. From 1962 to 2008, he was pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey. He was also an author, and among his writings was Preaching in the Holy Spirit (2011). In this, he declared that signs of the Holy Spirit in preaching were “a heightened sense, unfettered liberty, an enlarged heart, and a heightened confidence in the Word.”
He also taught at the Trinity Ministerial Academy in Montville, New Jersey, and wrote a three-volume Pastoral Theology.
Writing on social media, Ligon Duncan, Chancellor of the US-based Reformed Theological Seminary, shared a tribute written by Geoff Thomas, who previously served at Alfred Place Baptist Church, Aberystwyth.
Thomas wrote: “He [had] a mighty evangelistic gift. I remember him preaching in Sandfields, Port Talbot, in the former pulpit of Dr Lloyd-Jones, on the words of Jesus Christ, ‘Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”’ (Matt25v41), under the title ‘The Most Fearful Words a Man Can Hear’. I believe it to be one of the greatest searching sermons I have ever heard, causing me to regret that I could not preach with the authority and convicting power of this preacher.
“Or again I chaired the final Friday night session of the Evangelical Movement of Wales conference in Aberystwyth when Al Martin preached on John 3 and the new birth to a packed congregation. What a listening! The sermon had exegesis, context, application, edification of the Christian and saving power for those in the congregation who were not yet believers.”
A tribute on the Banner of Truth website said: “It was as a preacher, that Pastor Martin was most used, both in Montville and throughout the world. In the pulpit all his gifts and character were at full stretch – his hard-won understanding of whatever passage of Scripture he was expounding, through a lifetime of prayer and laborious study, his natural rhetorical powers reinforced by decades of reading the masters of preaching, the lucidity of his mind, the powerful logic of his argument, the passionate zeal for the truth, devotion to his Lord and love for those to whom he preached.”
His first wife, Marilyn, died in 2004; Dorothy, who he subsequently married, died in 2020.
