John Stanford 1754-1834

John Stanford (1754-1834) was an English-born pastor from Wandsworth who, after being ordained in 1781 and serving a church and academy in Hammersmith, went to America in 1786. Beginning as an Anglican he came to Baptist convictions in which he was grounded by Wallin in the Maze Pond church, before leaving these shores. It was in America that he found a calling ministering to society’s outcasts. He became known as “a Son of Consolation” to thousands of the sick and suffering poor, and the victims of vice and crime, to whom he preached the gospel of the grace of God. Credited with originating “perhaps the best penitentiary institution which had ever been devised,” he was eventually visited in one of his ministries by the President of the United States. In addition, governors sought his advice on implementing his institutional reforms. By 1817, Stanford had organised seven schools in the New York State Prison. Education was obviously fundamental to all phases of his ministry and life, yet all was done within the context of sharing the love of Christ and the salvation to be found only in Him. Pastor, teacher, leader and chaplain to New York’s poor and imprisoned, his life might be summed up by the statement, “He lived and died in the noble cause of Christian benevolence.”