Heroes of the Faith: with J.John and Killy

This series on Christian heroes has made me think about how the idea of heroism applies to you and me. I think that when we use the word hero, even in the Christian context, we can blur two kinds of people. The first are those who we admire as heroes because of their supreme ability: those remarkable scientists, doctors, painters, musicians and athletes who let their skills be guided and guarded by God. Great, but the problem is that most of us don't have that sort of incredible ability.

Billy Graham was a man who towered over twentieth-century Christianity and, if I may say so, I had the wonderful privilege of meeting.

Jarena Lee overcame many struggles and much opposition to become the first black woman preacher in the United States.

Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved black woman who became one of the first published writers in North America, was a Christian who fought the horror of slavery.

Tom Rees was an evangelist who proclaimed the gospel, and here I should declare a personal interest: he was my wife's great-uncle, the brother of Dick Rees, her grandfather, who was also an evangelist.Thomas Rees was born in 1911 and grew up in Watford. His brother Dick became a Christian, prayed for his brother's conversion, and Tom received Christ at the age of fifteen. Immediately, Tom became involved in evangelistic activities, soon bringing friends to Christ. He left school to work but soon became convinced that he was to be an evangelist. He took on youth work in a parish church for three years but resigned when criticised for being involved with other churches. Tom then refused to be tied to any one denomination and was happy to work with any church that believed in preaching the gospel.

Lillian Trasher spent a lifetime in Egypt, where she created one of the world's largest orphanages with small resources but enormous faith.Born in Florida in 1887, Lillian came to a living experience of Christ in her teens. She worked briefly at an orphanage where she found a love for children and learned how to care for them. She became engaged to a Christian minister in 1910 but, just days before the marriage, decided she was called to the mission field. When her fiancé refused to share that call, she ended the engagement.

Although Bede, the great Anglo-Saxon monk, scholar and historian, spent all his life in north-east England, his influence spread across Europe and gained him the title the ‘Venerable Bede'.Bede was born in 673 in what is now Tyne and Wear in north-east England. At the age of seven he was sent to the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, that he would ultimately become a monk. There, the Anglo-Saxon-speaking Bede learned Latin and Greek. In fact, he was to spend all his life at the monastery, which although isolated, was an outstanding centre of learning with a priceless library of over 200 books. There he became a deacon at the unusually early age of nineteen, a priest at thirty and, over the years, an increasingly renowned scholar and teacher.

There is no more outstanding example of a Christian dynasty than the Scudder family, of whom it could be written in 1959 that ‘forty-two members through four generations had given a total of 1,100 years to missionary service in India'. Amongst that remarkable lineage, the most striking figure is Ida Scudder.

When in September 2022 the Dutchman Andy van der Bijl, better known as Brother Andrew, died, many obituaries emphasised his dramatic role in the Fifties and Sixties as ‘God's Smuggler'. Yet Andrew was a man who did far more than merely take Bibles to closed lands.

Through her long life, Darlene Deibler Rose was a witness for Christ to people in the furthest parts of the world. Yet through her unforgettable memoir, Evidence Not Seen, of her brutal imprisonment by the Japanese during the Second World War, she has become a witness to many more people across the world.

Katharina von Bora, the nun who married the former monk Martin Luther, continues to be an inspiring figure after nearly five hundred years.Katharina was born into a family of nobility in Saxony, near Leipzig in Germany, in 1499. At the age of five she was sent away to a convent for education, with the intention that she should become a nun; a common strategy to avoid the expense of a daughter and a dowry. There, Katharina would have been educated not just in religion, but in writing, singing and practical skills such as farm management. At the age of sixteen she took her vows as a nun.

One of the leading Christians of twentieth-century China was Wang Mingdao, a man who at enormous cost helped grow the house church movement that has kept biblical Christianity alive there.

Few Christians have had as much impact as the 17th-century French monk Brother Lawrence with his little book The Practice of the Presence of God. It's a book that transformed my own prayer life and has done the same for many others.

The arrival of Europeans in Australia from 1788 was catastrophic for the continent's Aboriginal peoples as they soon found it brought disease, slavery and land seizure. Yet the settlers also carried the gospel and the result was a number of remarkable native Christians. The most notable of these was the extraordinary David Unaipon, a man who, in difficult times, played a key role in finding a way forward for his people.

The history of global Christianity is full of little-known heroes who have been overlooked. One of these is Rasalama, the woman who was Madagascar's first Christian martyr.

The name Tyndale, borne by many organisations, buildings and initiatives in the Christian world, honours the pioneer Bible translator and martyr William Tyndale.

The story of John Hus is both one of tragedy and triumph. It is tragedy because had the church of his day listened to him instead of sending him to the stake, then the tragic split of the Reformation might have been unnecessary. It is a triumph because Hus, as a man of God and a preacher of the truth, stood firm on his principles. May we do the same!

Betty Greene, called to be a pilot, lived a life in which, in every way, she flew for the Lord.

While most of us acknowledge that mathematics is useful, it's not a subject we appreciate. How many of us could name a famous mathematician? Here's one: Leonhard Euler (pronounced oiler), a towering mathematical genius and a committed Christian.

Through evangelism, writing and social action, Kagawa won respect for Christianity in Japan.

Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson defied every convention of the Victorian era to make remarkable contributions to biblical scholarship.

The 18th-century missionary David Brainerd was a man who had a brief life but an astonishing influence. Brainerd was born in 1718 to a prosperous local administrator in a New England still influenced by the Puritans. Orphaned early and lacking any relationship with God, Brainerd decided to enter the newly created Yale College. In 1739, after an intense spiritual search, he underwent a conversion to Christ.

Anyone travelling through the United States will come across schools, colleges and universities that carry the name of Asbury. They bear witness to a remarkable hero of the faith.

Nee was born in 1903 in Fuzhou, south-east China. His grandfather had been one of the first pastors in China and his mother dedicated him to God before his birth. Despite this, and an education in a school run by a missionary society, Nee grew up without a personal faith. However, at the age of 17 he accepted Jesus in a powerful conversion experience. Totally dedicating his life to God, he immediately started witnessing to those around him.

Catherine was born to a cloth dyer in Siena, Italy, in 1347, the twenty-third of twenty-six children, most of whom didn't survive infancy. It was a tough time and place to be born: the Black Death, which was to kill a third of Europe, was spreading; much of what we now know as Italy was a mosaic of warring factions; and the Catholic church, which had brought some measure of stability to Europe, was in disarray with the Pope exiled at Avignon in France.

One Christian hero who I am privileged to have met is Richard Wurmbrand. His story, told in Tortured for Christ, impacted me deeply as a young student.

Watts' hymns were of such quality and so rich in spiritual insight that objections to hymn singing in churches faded away for good.

Phoebe Palmer was one the foremost Christian leaders of the 19th century and someone whose influence continues to the present day. She stepped out from her comfortable New York home to do whatever the Lord demanded of her.

Two figures dominated the evangelical church of Britain in the late nineteenth century: the nonconformist preacher Charles Spurgeon and the Anglican preacher, writer and bishop, John Charles Ryle.

Few people have achieved as much for the kingdom of God in as little time as Henry Martyn, missionary and Bible translator, whose life ended when he was only thirty-one.

Running a beauty salon during the week, Mahalia began to sing professionally at weekends. She began to sing in secular theatres and bars, with jazz or blues bands, but she made the decision – sacrificial at the time – that she would only sing gospel and only where God's music was appropriate and appreciated.

Although well read in the Bible, Roberts had only minimal education and, at the age of eleven, began work in the coal mines. Always something of a contemplative, Roberts lived in a world where God, heaven and spiritual powers were very real to him and he spent hours in prayer, enjoying fellowship with God. For eleven years he prayed for a new revival and spoke of how, in a vision, he had seen a piece of paper with the figure of 100,000 written on it; the number of souls who would be saved.

The injustices that Wycliffe attacked are gone but what he stood for, an idealistic, individual and instructed faith, is something that every age should value.

Helen was a woman endowed with intelligence, skill and determination but with a tendency to be impatient, domineering and a perfectionist. 

Athlete and missionary Eric Liddell had been largely forgotten until the 1981 film Chariots of Fire reminded the world of him.

One winter's night he learned that one of his boys had no home to go to and, led by him, was appalled to discover that homelessness among children was far worse than he had imagined. Barnardo now realised his calling lay not in China but among London's poor.

Denominations, churches and even individual Christians always risk stagnation; a situation in which everybody is busy doing nothing. At such times, God often sends someone to shake things up. A man who did just that was David Wilkerson, the American evangelist who took the gospel from the comfort of the pulpit down into the ugliest of streets.

Benedict of Nursia was born in AD 480 just at the time when the Roman Empire was ending and the Middle Ages beginning. That Christianity and learning were kept alive during the troubled millennium between Rome's fall and the Renaissance was something that Benedict played a significant part in.

John Wesley was one of the most influential Christian preachers in history and a man who had an enormous and lasting impact on his nation and the world.

Charlotte Moon was born in 1840 to a plantation-owning family in Virginia, in the pre-Civil War southern culture depicted in Gone with the Wind. After a youthful rebellion against Christianity, she was converted in 1859. A woman well under five-foot in height, Lottie spent the Civil War helping her widowed mother manage the estate and teaching in schools. Lottie felt called to be an evangelist and church planter. However, her mission's policy prohibited a woman from preaching to groups which included men. Never one to suffer quietly, Lottie began writing letters and articles, many of which found their way back to the United States. Pointing out the shortage of missionaries and the extraordinary evangelistic opportunities available in China, Lottie pressed for women to be allowed to use any gifting they had for evangelism or preaching.

One of the most powerful American preachers was Charles Finney, who had an influential ministry in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The seventeenth century in England was a time of constant and often violent controversies over religion and politics. Despite finding himself cruelly vulnerable at the centre of many of these, Richard Baxter managed, as both pastor and writer, to proclaim Christ in a remarkable way.

The story of Adoniram Judson, the first overseas missionary from the United States of America and the man who founded the church in Burma, is one of the most challenging in Christian history.

It's always inspiring to hear of encounters with Christ that utterly transform a life. The case of Mitsuo Fuchida is a spectacular example of just such a conversion.

Helen Cadbury was born in 1877 into the Quaker family who ran the famous Birmingham chocolate firm. Helen's father Richard was committed not just to the social work that was a Quaker distinctive but also to enthusiastically sharing the gospel.

Samuel Zwemer was a remarkable missionary, traveller and teacher, and a man who became known as the ‘Apostle to Islam'.

In the eighteenth century the transatlantic slave trade had reached a level where, every year, tens of thousands of African people were transported under appalling conditions to the New World. Many Christians fought against slavery and the names of William Wilberforce, John Newton and Hannah More are widely remembered. Less well-known is the name of Olaudah Equiano, a man whose witness was particularly powerful because he himself had been a slave.

Polycarp – whose name means ‘much fruit' – was born in Smyrna, today's port of Izmir in Turkey. He was born in AD 69 and grew up at a time when some of those who had seen and heard Jesus were still alive. Converted at an early age he knew the apostle John, who in old age lived not far away from Smyrna in Ephesus. Throughout his long life, Polycarp was able to recount what he had heard from John and others who had been with Jesus. Living on to the middle of the second century, he became known as the last living link with the apostles.

Heroism isn't about achievements; in my view it's about what you attempt to achieve and how you attempt it. And that makes seventeenth-century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet a hero.

Andrew Murray was not only one of the most gifted church leaders in nineteenth-century South Africa but also a writer who continues to inspire Christians across the world today. 

Thomas Cranmer lived in a difficult time and was often forced to make hard and sometimes questionable decisions. Nevertheless, he remains a hero; let me share three things that I admire about him.