A. C. Dixon

Who was A. C. Dixon?

Amzi Clarence Dixon was a Baptist pastor, Bible expositor, and evangelist, popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With R.A. Torrey he edited an influential series of essays, published as the The Fundamentals, which gave fundamentalist Christianity its name. A. C. Dixon was the brother of minister, playwright, and influential racist Thomas Dixon.

Dixon was born on a plantation near Shelby, North Carolina, on July 6, 1854 to a Baptist preacher. While still young, Dixon believed he was called to preach the gospel.

In 1875, Dixon graduated from Wake Forest College in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He was ordained in 1876 and immediately began serving as pastor of two country churches. He also pastored in Chapel Hill and Asheville before attending Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he was a student of John A. Broadus.

Thereafter, he filled the pulpits of Immanuel Church, Baltimore, the Hanson Place Baptist Church in Brooklyn, the Ruggles Street Church, Boston, the Moody Church, Chicago, and the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. Because of the popularity of his speaking, he often rented the Brooklyn Opera House for Sunday afternoon evangelistic services. After leaving Brooklyn, he moved to Roxbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston and became the pastor of Ruggles Street Baptist Church. While holding down the pulpit there, he also taught at the Gordon Bible and Missionary Training School, and turned his passion to writing, publishing Old and New, an attack on the liberal Social Gospel movement.