God’s Building

This issue contains an edited transcription of a series of talks by T. Austin-Sparks on the subject of God’s Building. The venue and date are unknown.

The Golden Candlestick

The ministry of T. Austin-Sparks and his team at Honor Oak Christian Fellowship Centre in London between 1930 and 1970 can be summed up by ‘a witness and a testimony’. It was meant to strengthen the Church of Jesus Christ. A Witness and a Testimony was the title of the magazine that they published. Some of its content was transcriptions of conference messages. These conferences were often based on a theme which the organizers felt to be urgent for the Church of Jesus Christ in its particular time and circumstances. As the articles in A Witness and a Testimony resonated with a group of Christians in Vorden, the Netherlands, they started to translate them into Dutch from around 1985 in a publication called De Gouden Kandelaar. Later on an English version was added, The Golden Candlestick, with the original articles, albeit in a slightly edited form (to improve readability). Around the year 2000 the publishers decided to dedicate The Golden Candlestick to material that had been left with one of T. Austin-Sparks’ daughters, most of which had not been selected for A Witness and a Testimony. Most of this material has now been published. The editors of The Golden Candlestick are left with the question, what next?
The answer depends on the purpose of the publication of The Golden Candlestick. The current statement of the publishers is (see back cover), ‘… to encourage God’s people to lay hold on eternal life, the hope set before them, knowing that Jesus Christ, their Saviour, will soon return to establish His eternal Kingdom, “so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 1:12)’. This implies that the publishers do not have a particular message to the Church of Jesus Christ, as A Witness and a Testimony had.
The publishers of The Golden Candlestick website realize that the designated place for this encouragement is amongst local believers (see Heb. 10:25), whether at their regular Church gatherings or through informal fellowship. The publishers do not have any pretensions to have anything to add to that. What they will do in the coming time, God willing, is to keep on publishing Austin-Sparks material and work on the archive page of the website. Apart from that they will write editorials and keep the forum page open for interaction, so that the website is kept ‘alive’.

Please feel free to share your comments on the Forum page, via the Contact form or email.

March 2024
On behalf of The Golden Candlestick team,
Hugo de Jong