Pastor Martin preached as if he was dying to have you either converted or sanctified. And supporting his preaching was the scrupulous consistency of a man determined to keep a clear conscience before God and men. By God’s grace he was enabled to finish his race well and keep that clear conscience to the end.

He was raised in a Christian home, the second of eleven children born to George and Mildred Martin. Although he always gave intellectual assent to the truths of Scripture taught faithfully by his parents and made repeated professions of faith in childhood (the result, he said, of a sensitive conscience and a fear of God’s judgment), it was not until his late teens that he was converted. His considerable native intelligence, zeal and energy—devoted till then to schoolwork, football and baseball—were now and for the rest of his long life to be harnessed for the cause of Christ. Knowing God through knowing Scripture and telling others about this God from his Word became his all-consuming passion. He spent endless hours reading his newly-purchased Thomson Chain Reference Bible, wearing it out within three years, preaching at the local Mission Hall and on the street corner in Stamford CT, and praying with other newly converted friends. He studied at Bob Jones University and Columbia Bible College, graduating Magna Cum Laude in 1956.

He married Marilyn Hart in June 1956 and they enjoyed 48 years of happy marriage and were blessed with three children. Mrs Martin was called home in 2004 after a six-year battle with cancer. In 2006 Pastor Martin married Dorothy Chanski, a great support and blessing to him in retirement, who predeceased him in 2020.

Pastor Martin exercised an itinerant ministry from 1957 until the birth of the Martins’ first child, Joel, in 1961. This change in circumstances persuaded him that he needed to be at home much more than his itinerant ministry allowed. In September 1962 he received a call to be the pastor of a Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in North Caldwell, NJ, about an hour from New York City. During these years he was discovering the doctrines of grace as he preached consecutively through books of Scripture. An instrumental figure in Pastor Martin’s developing understanding of biblical doctrine at this time was Ernest Reisinger (who was to become the first U.S. Trustee of the Banner of Truth Trust in 1967). Through Mr Reisinger, Pastor Martin read such books as The Sovereignty of God by A.W. Pink and The Death of Death in the Death of Christ by John Owen. After about a decade of reading, preaching, praying and thinking, Pastor Martin became unshakeably convinced that Reformed Christianity is nothing less than biblical Christianity and that it ought to bear the fruit of a deep and genuine piety. One of the texts that has informed Pastor Martin’s ministry is 1 Timothy 4.16: Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers. He has preached and lectured and written on this verse countless times, but his own life and ministry stands as a living sermon on the text, as anyone who had the privilege of knowing him can testify.

Pastor Martin faithfully served the CMA church in North Caldwell from 1962 until 1966, but as his convictions developed in an increasingly Reformed direction he realised that he could no longer pastor in a denomination whose beliefs were so different from his own and so offered his resignation. The congregation however, refused his resignation! They loved and esteemed him and his teaching so much that they disbanded as a CMA church, leaving behind the buildings and parsonage. In September 1967 the church reconstituted with the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith as its subordinate standard and the name Trinity Baptist Church. This congregation was to become Pastor Martin’s life’s work, into which he poured every ounce of his strength and abilities for another forty-six years, seeing the church grow from small beginnings in the little rented building affectionately known as the ‘Cracker Box’ in Caldwell, NJ to the present large suite of buildings (incorporating a Christian School) in Montville, NJ. The name of Trinity Baptist Church and Albert Martin came to be inseparable in the minds of innumerable believers throughout the world who (like the present writer) owe an incalculable debt to the ministry of this servant of Christ and the church he shepherded so faithfully.

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