| Biography | W E Sangster was born in 1900 into a humble home in Shoreditch, London, the son of Anglican parents. In a fragment of autobiography he wrote: I believe that I was born to be a minister. I cannot recall a time in my life when I was without a sense of holy vocation."
In my teens, seeking what I came to regard as a deeper and more personal experience of God I drifted from the church of my baptism and early training and associated with the people called Methodist, and when the time came for me to join the army on my eighteenth birthday I was already a local preacher."
Army life tested me and deepened me. The strange Man upon the Cross haunted and held me all the time. I came out of the army convinced that His was the only way and I offered myself for the Methodist ministry. I had four years training in college and was put on sound lines of scholarship.
He ministered in Bognor, Colwyn Bay, Liverpool and Scarborough, attracting large congregations in each place. In 1936 he was called to succeed Leslie Weatherhead at Brunswick Church, Leeds. It is a sufficient tribute to his power as a preacher that he should have been selected as the successor of the most popular preacher in the Methodist Church.
His longest ministry was at the Central Hall, Westminster, where he succeeded the veteran Dinsdale T Young. He remained there until 1955, when he was appointed as head of the Home Mission Department of the Methodist Church. He died on May 24, 1960, after two years of suffering from progressive muscular atrophy. |