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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.
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Billy Graham was a man who towered over twentieth-century Christianity and, if I may say so, I had the wonderful privilege of meeting.
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Jarena Lee overcame many struggles and much opposition to become the first black woman preacher in the United States.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The name Tyndale, borne by many organisations, buildings and initiatives in the Christian world, honours the pioneer Bible translator and martyr William Tyndale.
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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!
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Betty Greene, called to be a pilot, lived a life in which, in every way, she flew for the Lord.
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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.
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Through evangelism, writing and social action, Kagawa won respect for Christianity in Japan.
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