Salisbury, Frank William Reuben (1899-1962)

Transcription of Obituary in Minutes of Methodist Conference

Born in Cambridge in 1899. He received his call while preparing for a business career, and this training enriched his whole ministry.

He served at Horwich before entering Hartley College. was then appointed to Edinburgh, and left there for Wales, where he ministered in the Cwm and Rhosymedre Circuits. In 1935 he returned to Scotland, where he laboured for the rest of his life, serving at Greenock and Glasgow.

His gifts as a preacher were evidenced by the fact that the Glasgow appointments covered over twenty years ; all the qualities required for such sustained pulpit work were present in him, and were continually enriched and replenished by disciplined study and systematic pastoral care, especially of the wayward and indifferent.

He was an outstanding administrator, and his business training was brilliantly used in the last four  years of his life, when he served the Synod of the Methodist Church in Scotland as its secretary. No detail was overlooked or disregarded.

An outstanding quality in all his work was the capacity to live in the two worlds of today and tomorrow; when one winter’s work was over he was already planning for the year to come, and as one Synod ended he was thinking of the next.

His untimely death removed from Scottish Methodism one of her outstanding characters. From the circulating of duplicated minutes of staff meetings to pastoral caring, from organizing a ministers’ retreat to preparing a sermon, the zeal of the Lord was upon him.

He died suddenly at the height of his power and influence, while still in the active work, on 3 July 1962, in the sixty-third year of his life and the thirty-seventh of his ministry.

©Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes 1962

Family

Frank was born in 1899 at Cambridge to parents William, a railway engine driver, and Annie.

Before entering the ministry Frank worked as a clerk. He saw service in WW1 before candidating.

He married Olive Griffiths in late 1929 at Bolton, Lancashire.

Frank died on 3 July 1962 at Glasgow, Scotland.

Circuits

  • 1923 Horwich
  • 1925 Hartley
  • 1927 Edinburgh
  • 1929 Cwm
  • 1930 Rhosymedre
  • 1935 Greenock
  • 1940 Glasgow Cath
  • 1951 Glasgow St Thomas

References

Methodist Minutes 1962/220

W Leary, Directory of Primitive Methodist Ministers and their Circuits, 1990

Census Returns and Births, Marriages & Deaths Registers

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