City Founder

Taylor is known in San Francisco history as the founding pastor of First Methodist Church, as the city's first hospital chaplain, and as the founder of the Seamen's Mission for those visiting from overseas. He met a large part of the debts incurred through his publication of two volumes Seven Years Street Preaching in San Francisco (1857), and California Life Illustrated (1858). As one of San Francisco's "founding fathers" his official portrait is included in the Pioneers mural in the Public Library of the city.

By 1851 Taylor and Isaac Owen of the Sacramento valley had enlisted over 500 members in twelve churches across Northern California and founded a religious periodical. When they saw that visiting sailors often got so drunk that they were kidnaped and sold out to sea, they started a Seamen's Mission with overnight accommodations and regular ministries for their needs.

World-Wide Ministry

During an 1856 visit back East revival blessings attended his evangelistic meetings in Brooklyn, Baltimore, New Jersey, and Maryland. He went on to preach in almost every Methodist pulpit in Philadelphia that year and in the fall went to New England and down to Richmond for the winter.

Sensing that the seven-year California experience of proclaiming the Gospel message effectively had prepared him so that God's hand for evangelism was evidently upon him Taylor then moved into a full-time itinerant evangelistic ministry. Serving between 1858 and 1860, he ministered across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa.

William Taylor is best known in Christian history as a world-wide evangelist who traveled and preached on all six continents -- his world journeys totaling 250,000 miles. At that time he probably had no equal as an evangelist apart from the Apostle Paul and John Wesley. He authored eighteen volumes, mainly about his ministries in various parts of the world, and sold tens of thousands of these books to generate income for his family and for his overseas missions programs.

While visiting Canada he heard stories of the Australian Gold Rush and its similarities to the California frontier. Feeling led to share his strong Gospel there, he preached for the Australian Methodist national organization for three years (after first spending seven months of itinerant evangelism in England and Ireland), adding thousands to the Methodist Churches of New Zealand and Australia. He followed these tasks with extensive preaching missions to Europeans in India and South Africa. Barbados and British Guiana were next, and then a six year return visit to the Australian cities.

After a return to England to help D. L. Moody with his 1875 London Campaign, he made multiple trips to South America and the West Indies, founding churches and self-supporting Christian schools. Taylor's South African visit became something of a watershed experience leading him in to a much broader ministry as one biography affirms: "In no small part Taylor's preaching was a catalyst that transformed the Wesleyan Church into one of South Africa's largest denominations. It also catapulted Taylor into an international evangelist" (Rousselow and Winquist, 1996:37).