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

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. Immed

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 bu

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, t

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.