Many people today serve, write, or teach without seeing the fruit of their labor in their own lifetime. So it was with Arthur Pink: he died nearly forgotten on a Scottish island, and only after his death did his writings reach readers around the world.
Born in Nottingham, England, on April 1, 1886, Arthur Walkington Pink grew up in a nonconformist household, but while still young he drifted away from the Christian faith and even joined the Theosophical Society, gaining enough prominence to receive a leadership invitation from Annie Besant herself.
In 1908, a challenge from his father, quoting a biblical proverb about the way that seems right but leads to death, marked his conversion to evangelical Christianity. Pink abandoned the occult and began devoting himself to the study of Scripture with the same intensity as before.
After a brief time at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, he took up his first pastorate in Silverton, Colorado, in 1910. Over the following two decades he pastored churches in the United States and Australia, but his increasingly firm Calvinist preaching drew resistance from Baptists and dispensational fundamentalists.
Pink was a reserved and difficult man by temperament. He withdrew for hours of study, avoided visitors, and, once in Scotland, even distanced himself from fellowship with the local church, preferring to minister by correspondence. His principal biographer acknowledges that this reclusiveness, partly chosen, cost him friendships and limited his pastoral reach during his lifetime.
In 1922, he launched the monthly magazine Studies in the Scriptures, which would carry the bulk of his work for the next thirty years. From it came books such as The Sovereignty of God and Gleanings in Genesis, marked by meticulous, nearly verse by verse exposition of Scripture.
Settled permanently in Stornoway, Scotland, from 1940 onward, he lived a simple and secluded life until his death on July 15, 1952, practically unknown outside a small circle of readers.
Only after his death, through publishers such as the Banner of Truth Trust, did his books reach a worldwide audience and help rekindle, in the twentieth century, interest in the doctrines of grace and in expository preaching faithful to the biblical text.
