There Is A Story Of The Congregational Pastor ...

There is a story of the Congregational Pastor Henry Ward Beecher who was a great Congregational pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York for several years. He was one of the greatest preachers of the 19th Century. People would travel for hundreds of miles just to hear him speak. Henry knew he was going to be out of town one particular week so he asked his brother Thomas to preach for him that particular Sunday morning. As usual there were a great number of visitors in the congregation that Sunday morning, but when they realized that the man that had come to hear wasn’t going to be preaching some of them began to get up and start to leave. At that point Thomas Beecher stepped up to the podium and said, “All of you who came here this morning to worship Henry Ward Beecher may now leave; all of you who came to worship God may remain.”