William Greenhill was probably the son of John Greenhill, husbandman of Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex. He entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, at the age of sev­enteen. In 1619, he earned a bachelor’s degree and, in 1622, a master’s degree, having attained proficiency in the classical languages and history. He was ordained in 1628 and the fol­lowing year became rector of Oakley, Suffolk. John Preston (b. 1587), with whom he remained friends until Preston’s death in 1628, was the primary influence in shaping his Puri­tan convictions. In the early 1630s, Greenhill participated in lectureships at Mendlesham, Suffolk, and at St. George’s Tombland, Norwich, together with Jeremiah Burroughs and other Puritans. All of this came to a sudden halt in 1636, when Bishop Matthew Wren of Norwich deprived Greenhill for refusing to read the Book of Sports.

Greenhill and Burroughs took refuge in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where they worshipped in the Independent church pastured by William Bridge. By 1641, Greenhill and Burroughs had returned to England, and settled in London, where they became lecturers at Stepney, Middlesex. Bur­roughs lectured at 7 A.M. and Greenhill at 3 P.M. Due to their preaching gifts, the two became known respectively as “the morning star” and “the evening star.”

After civil war erupted in England, Greenhill preached several fast sermons before Parliament, urging the enforce­ment of justice and the implementation of reforms. He defended the Magna Carta and parliamentary privileges. When the breakdown of royal authority promoted more Separatist congregations, Greenhill joined several Presbyterians and Independents in writing Certain Considerations to Dis­suade Men from Furthering Gathering Churches (1643), yet the following year he accepted the pastorate of a newly gathered congregation in Stepney, becoming its first minister.

Greenhill served as a divine at the Westminster Assembly. He opposed the Presbyterian majority and sided with the minority of Independents, though, unlike Burroughs, Bridge, Thomas Goodwin, and others, he did not sign the Apologetical Narration (1643). He did join the Independents the following year, however, when they published A Copy of a Remonstrance Lately Delivered in to the Assembly, which, as Richard Greaves writes, “explained why they would not provide an alternative model of congregational church government. Not only had parliament by this time already implemented a form of Pres­byterian polity, but the Remonstrants also felt the assembly had not seriously considered their previous reports” (Oxford DNB, 23:601-602).

Greenhill was involved in numerous kinds of activities in the late 1640s and throughout the 1650s. To mention only a few: he and others, including Goodwin and Simpson, urged Parliament in writing to support mission work among Native Americans. The letter was later published as The Day Breaking, if not the Sun Rising of the Gospel with the Indians in New England. In 1652, Greenhill was involved with nine other divines, including Owen and Bridge, in drafting a statement on behalf of Parliament condemning the Racovian catechism, a Socinian document. That same year, Cromwell made Greenhill a commissioner, or trier, for the approba­tion of preachers, and also appointed him as vicar of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, the old parish church of Stepney. Meanwhile, Greenhill continued to serve as pastor for the Independent congregation. With Owen, Goodwin, Nye, Caryl, and Bridge, Greenhill drafted the document of faith and order that the Savoy Conference approved in 1658.

Greenhill was an excellent writer. He dedicated the first volume of his massive commentary on Ezekiel to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Charles I and queen of Bohemia, in 1645. After Charles’s execution in 1649, Parliament appointed Greenhill chaplain to three of the royal children: James, Duke of York (later James II); Henry, Duke of Gloucester; and Henrietta Maria. The remaining four volumes of Greenhill’s magnum opus on Ezekiel appeared between 1649 and 1662. Reprinted in one volume by Banner of Truth Trust in 1995, Greenhill’s Exposition of Ezekiel is one of the foremost Puritan works in Old Testament exposition and is still one of the most helpful commentaries on Ezekiel in English. Here Greenhill shows his skill both as an exegete and a popular preacher. Spurgeon said about this work,

We always get something out of Greenhill whenever we refer to him. He had not, of course, the critical skill of the present day, but his spiritual insight was keen.Commenting and Commentaries, p. 125

In 1999, Soli Deo Gloria reprinted a slightly edited ver­sion of Greenhill’s Christ’s Last Disclosure of Himself. This work, based on Revelation 22:16-17, examines the last invita­tion of the Bible in twelve sermons. Greenhill shows Christ as the root and offspring of David as well as the bright morning star. He clearly reveals the heart of Christ towards sinners. These sermons offer some of the finest material ever printed on spiritual thirsting, the willingness of Christ to save sinners, and the free offer of the gospel.

Greenhill’s The Sound-Hearted Christian, originally sub­titled, A Treatise of Soundness of Heart, with Several Other Ser­mons, was printed in London for Nathanael Crouch in 1670. Greenhill’s exposition of sound-heartedness is superlative. The Christ-centered sermons on our need as believers to be “of Christ’s mind” and to do all “in Christ’s name” are simul­taneously convicting, sobering, enlightening, and thrilling. And the two closing sermons that underscore the preciousness and sweetness of the Scriptures are sorely needed in our day when the Bible is analyzed more often than absorbed with reverence and submission.

Taken together, The Sound-Hearted Christian and the appended sermons form an outstanding, practical summary of how to live coram Deo (in the presence of God) from the inside out. If you are a Christian who yearns to walk before God with biblical, Christ-centered, spiritual vitality and practical reality, I know of no book more valuable than this one. If believers strove, in dependency on the Spirit, to put Greenhill’s advice into practice, Christian families and the Christian church would be transformed, and the unbelieving world could not avoid noticing and respecting a Christian soundness that would truly function in every sphere of life as the salt of the earth and the light on the world (Matt. 5:13-14).

Being a lover of Reformed literature, Greenhill also wrote numerous commendations of treatises for colleagues in the ministry, such as Burroughs, Bridge, and Thomas Shepard. In prefacing Burroughs’s The Excellency of a Gracious Spirit (1657), he says that books “are more needful than arms; the one defends the body, the other the soul.”

Greenhill was ejected from his parish church in 1660 after the Restoration, but managed to continue to serve his gathered Independent church at Stepney – sometimes meeting in his house adjacent to the church and sometimes in a concealed attic – until his death. In 1669, when the congregation numbered five hundred, he took on Matthew Mead as his assistant. Mead became his successor upon Greenhill’s death in 1671. By that time, the two preachers were also serving a conventicle of three hundred in Meet­inghouse Alley, Wapping.

Having established a large network of ministerial contacts over the decades, Greenhill’s loss was mourned throughout England and even in America. A few years before his death, he was still in active correspondence with the governor of Massachusetts, urging him to stop persecuting Baptists. He worked hard even until the end. Only weeks before Greenhill died, a group of magistrates and ministers in Massachusetts wrote to him requesting assistance for Harvard College.

John Howe referred to Greenhill as “that eminent servant of God whose praise is still in the churches.” James Reid, in Memoirs of the Westminster Divines, described Greenhill as “a zealous Puritan, greatly against the Prelates, the superstitious ceremonies, and corruptions, of the Church of England.”