Occupation Preacher Name A. Dixon | Siblings Thomas Dixon, Jr. Nieces Louise Dixon | |
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Born July 6, 1854 Shelby, North Carolina Relatives Thomas Dixon, Jr. (brother) Died June 14, 1925, Balti, Maryland, United States Parents Thomas Jeremiah Frederick Dixon Nephews Thomas Dixon, III, Gordon Dixon Education Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest University | ||
Amzi Clarence Dixon (July 6, 1854 – June 14, 1925) 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 Fundamentals (1910–15), which gave fundamentalist Christianity its name.
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Early life
Amzi Clarence Dixon was born on a farm near Shelby, North Carolina, on July 6, 1854, to Thomas Jeremiah Frederick Dixon, a Baptist preacher, and Amanda Elvira McAfee Dixon. His brother, Thomas Dixon, Jr., became a prominent novelist. While still young, Dixon believed he was called to preach the gospel; and in 1875, he graduated from Wake Forest College in Wake Forest, North Carolina
Career
Dixon was ordained in 1876 and immediately began serving as pastor of two country churches. He also pastored in Chapel Hill and Asheville before attending the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (then in Greenville, South Carolina), where he was a student of John A. Broadus.
Thereafter, he served at Immanuel Church, Baltimore (1883–90), Hanson Place Baptist Church, Brooklyn (1890-1900), Ruggles Street Church, Boston (1901–06), the Moody Church, Chicago (1906–11), and the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London (1911–19). While in Brooklyn he often rented the Brooklyn Opera House for Sunday afternoon evangelistic services. While in Boston, Dixon also taught at the Gordon Bible and Missionary Training School (today Gordon College, and published Old and New, an attack on the Social Gospel movement.
In 1906 he moved to Chicago's Chicago Avenue Church, founded by Dwight L. Moody. Two years later, the church changed its name to the Moody Church. In Chicago he also became a syndicated columnist, with his writings appearing in such newspapers as the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Herald and the Chicago Daily News. In 1911 he assumed the ministry of London's Metropolitan Tabernacle, formerly pastored by Charles Spurgeon, and often spoke at large Bible conferences. He retired in 1919 but, in 1922, he returned to the ministry as the first pastor of University Baptist Church, Baltimore, Maryland.
Dixon was a staunch advocate of Fundamentalist Christianity during that movement's developmental period. His preaching was often fiery and direct, confronting various forms of Protestant apostasy, Roman Catholicism, Henry Ward Beecher's liberalism, Robert Ingersoll's agnosticism, Christian Science, Unitarianism, and higher criticism of the Bible.
Several months prior to his death, he suffered chronic back pain and suspended his service at University Baptist Church. He died of a heart attack on June 14, 1925.