D. Scott Meadows

In preparing lectures on William Perkins and his pastoral theology, I immersed myself in the thought of the man sometimes called the Father of the Puritans. As I worked through Perkins’s vision of what a minister of the gospel ought to be, I found myself returning again and again, almost involuntarily, to the example of Albert N. Martin. The portrait Perkins painted in the sixteenth century, I had beheld with my own eyes and heard with my own ears across decades of friendship and mentorship. To write about the ideal pastor in the abstract while saying nothing of the man who embodied that ideal so fully seemed to me a kind of ingratitude I could not afford. It is therefore a deep personal privilege to set this testimony down.

Albert N. Martin, who entered the presence of his Lord on April 7, 2026, was to me the dearest of friends and the most formative of mentors. Whatever I have become as a faithful minister of the gospel, his fingerprints are on it. Perkins insisted that the minister must be what he preaches to expect the greatest blessing upon his labors. Pastor Martin fulfilled this aim with a consistency that continues to provoke my wonder and my gratitude.

Scripture was in him and came from him in a degree I have not seen in any other man. He possessed an astonishing knowledge of the whole Bible together with extraordinary powers of recall, and he had the rare gift of bringing thousands of texts to bear on the actual circumstances of a person’s life, a pastor’s life, a family’s life, and a congregation’s life, with precision, warmth, and authority. He was equally at home standing at the back of the sanctuary, arms open to embrace the children who rushed to him after a service, and sitting quietly in his study, working with patient care to counsel a struggling young minister toward clarity and courage. In both settings he was entirely himself, and entirely for you.

His preaching was described by Edward Donnelly as powerful, impassioned, exegetically solid, balanced, clear in structure, and penetrating in application, attended by what Donnelly called a peculiar degree of unction from the Spirit. Those of us who sat under it, or who have returned to it in recordings made across half a century of ministry, know exactly what Donnelly meant. Yet Martin never permitted the weight of a global ministry to produce the distance or inaccessibility that so often accompanies ministerial fame.

He answered letters promptly, opened his home freely, gave himself generously to younger men who had no particular claim on his time, and year after year pressed upon pastors what Perkins would have recognized immediately as the right ordering of a life: that we are first Christians, then husbands and fathers, and only then ministers of the gospel. He did not merely teach this priority. He kept it.

Among the great privileges of my life was the opportunity to work closely with Pastor Martin as his editor in his retirement years, collaborating on several books in the kind of partnership that only deepens with time and trust. Each of those works bears the marks of the man, but his crowning achievement in print is the three-volume Pastoral Theology. By the time that work was being readied for the press, we had arrived at something I treasure beyond what I can easily say: an intimate like-mindedness as author and editor, the fruit of long friendship and shared labor in the Word.

He earnestly desired that he would finish well. By the grace of God, and to the wonder of all who watched, I am grateful to say that he did. In Albert Martin, Perkins’s vision of the godly, learned, and diligent pastor was not a theoretical construction but a flesh-and-blood reality, a gift of God to his generation, and a model now commended to this and every generation that follows.

I thank God with a full heart for the blessed memory of Pastor Albert N. Martin. May the Lord give us much grace to imitate him, as he imitated Christ.