The Haldane Brothers

Probably the most famous brothers in church history are John and Charles Wesley, but there are other brothers throughout church history, and among them are the Haldane brothers. Robert Haldane was born in 1764 and died in 1842. And the younger brother is James Alexander Haldane, born in 1768 and died in 1851. Their father was Captain James Haldane, a man of means from Scotland. And in 1774, when James was only six and Robert was 10, both their parents died, and they were raised by their grandparents. They’d both be off to studies in the Scottish universities. Robert studied at Edinburgh, and then he joined the Royal Navy. At one point, he came under the influence of an Independent Scottish minister. He finished off his tour of duty where he returned to Edinburgh, finished off his studies, and then he settled in at the family estate and took to running it. But the year 1795 changed all that.

That was the year that he was converted, and he immediately devoted himself to the cause of missions. He concocted a plan to go to India, but it was blocked by the East India company, and so he took to itinerant preaching around Scotland. In 1797, his younger brother, James, joined forces with him, and the two of them crisscross Scotland and even into Ireland planting churches. They were officially ministers of the Church of Scotland, but they had contacts with both the Church of England through Charles Simeon, and James met Charles Simeon while he was a student at Cambridge, and they also had contacts with the Independent Church and the Independent ministers throughout Scotland. In 1800, they used a significant portion of their wealth to fund evangelistic and church planting efforts. And when all was said and done, nearly 100 churches were planted across Scotland and Ireland.

The hub was in Edinburgh, and there Robert routinely preached to almost 4,000 people in what was easily the most spacious church in all of Scotland. They quickly recognized that they needed young ministers, and ministers who were just as devoted to the proclamation of the gospel, to meet this new movement in this widespread awakening. So, they also founded a number of academies that would fund and train ministers and then send them on their way to be itinerants and to plant churches. It’s estimated that somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 ministers were trained by these academies founded by the Haldane brothers. In 1816, Robert went to Geneva to be a missionary, and he had an extensive ministry among the students at the University of Geneva. Yes, the very institution that was founded by John Calvin. And from Geneva, well, we have John Knox and the Reformation coming to Scotland, and now one who grew up in that Scottish Protestantism was coming back to Geneva to bring the gospel to that place.

While in France, Robert also paid for and published and distributed somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 Bibles in French. Both brothers were authors. They wrote books on apologetics and evangelism and they wrote commentaries. Most notably, Robert wrote a commentary on Romans, and James wrote a commentary on Galatians. Robert for a number of years was the director of the British and Foreign Bible Society, but he wanted the apocrypha totally removed from the Bibles they published, and for that stand, he was removed. They both spent their final years in Scotland. Robert died in 1842. James died a few years later in 1851, but together they spent their lives and their considerable resources seeing that the gospel spread across Scotland and across Ireland. Well, that is the Haldane Brothers. And I’m Steve Nichols, and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.