W. E. Sangster was born in 1900 into a humble home in Shoreditch, London, the son of Anglican parents. In a fragment of autobiography he wrote: "I believe that I was born to be a minister. I cannot recall a time in my life when I was without a sense of holy vocation. It did not derive from any conviction in the mind of my parents, who had never so much as entertained the thought. But I felt the pressure of a directing hand upon me from my tenderest years.

"In my teens, seeking what I came to regard as a deeper and more personal experience of God I drifted from the church of my baptism and early training and associated with the people called Methodist, and when the time came for me to join the army on my eighteenth birthday I was already a local preacher.

"Army life tested me and deepened me. The strange Man upon the Cross haunted and held me all the time. I came out of the army convinced that His was the only way and I offered myself for the Methodist ministry. I had four years training in college and was put on sound lines of scholarship."

He ministered in Bognor, Colwyn Bay, Liverpool and Scarborough, attracting large congregations in each place. In 1936 he was called to succeed Leslie Weatherhead at Brunswick Church, Leeds. It is a sufficient tribute to his power as a preacher that he should have been selected as the successor of the most popular preacher in the Methodist Church.

His longest and most memorable ministry was at the Central Hall, Westminster, where he succeeded the veteran Dinsdale T. Young. He remained there until 1955, when he was appointed as head of the Home Mission Department of the Methodist Church. He died on May 24, 1960, after two years of suffering -- with extraordinary courage -- from progressive muscular atrophy.

Before he began his ministry in London he wrote an article for The Christian Herald expressing his ideals of ministry. "I shall aim to maintain an expression of the Christian religion which shall be (1) intellectually honest and satisfying, (2) a witness emotionally warm, (3) a witness dignified and worthy in Church services, (4) a witness earnestly evangelical in method, (5) a witness social and international in its redemptive consequences."

During the War, when the bombing began, he threw open the vast basement of the Hall to the homeless and for five years he and his family made their home there and ministered to those who came there nightly for shelter.

Sangster had the largest Sunday evening congregation in London, filling the 2,500 seats in the Hall. His style and emphasis were all his own.

He represented the traditional evangelical intensity of a Methodist but with the distinctive coloring of a man who had a vivid personal experience of religion and was gifted with a singular power of persuasive and picturesque speech. In his sermons you find the short staccato sentence, the pointed exclamation, the direct thrust of personal application, the mastery of illustration, especially those drawn from his own acute powers of observation and his understanding of human beings.