Biographies
The lives behind the books — preachers, missionaries, and writers whose words still speak.
Canadian-born preacher and founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, whose "Fourfold Gospel" — Christ as Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King — called readers past every blessing to Christ Himself.
Read full biography →A. W. Tozer (1897–1963) was a self-taught American pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance whose books, above all The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy, and whose life of prostrate, worshipful prayer made him a prophetic voice calling the church back to the pursuit of God Himself. He pastored for over forty years, most famously at Southside Alliance Church in Chicago, and edited his denomination's magazine until his death.
Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) was a Scottish Baptist preacher who served Union Chapel, Manchester, for forty-five years — “the prince of expository preachers,” whose lifelong daily reading of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures fed the sermons gathered in his Expositions of Holy Scripture.
Amanda Berry Smith (1837–1915) was an African-American holiness evangelist who was born into slavery in Maryland and freed when her father bought his family's liberty. A washerwoman by trade, she became one of the most widely traveled preachers of the Wesleyan-Holiness movement, ministering across the United States, Britain, India, and for eight years in West Africa as an independent missionary. Widowed twice and having buried four of her five children, she later founded one of Illinois's first orphanages for Black children and died in Sebring, Florida.
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Amy Beatrice Carmichael, born in 1867 in Millisle, Ireland, was a Protestant missionary in India. She served for 55 years without furlough, founding the Dohnavur Fellowship to rescue children from temple prostitution. Known for her deep devotion and writings on prayer, she authored 35 books and remained in India until her death in 1951. Her work continues through the ongoing ministry she established. Carmichael's life demonstrated radical obedience to Christ's call and cultural adaptation.
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Andrew Murray Jr., born in 1828 in South Africa, served as a minister and theologian, influencing many through his teachings on prayer. He established educational institutions, authored over 240 works, and profoundly impacted Christian thought until his death in 1917. His books on deeper spiritual life continue to guide believers worldwide. Murray emphasized humility, absolute surrender to God, and the indwelling Christ. His classic works remain essential reading for Christians seeking deeper spiritual maturity.
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Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was a monk of Bec who became an unwilling archbishop and was exiled twice for refusing to treat the church's offices as the king's property. He is remembered for the argument at the heart of the Proslogion, but that book is a prayer from first line to last, written by a man who said he did not seek to understand in order to believe, but believed in order to understand. His private prayers changed how the medieval West prayed.
Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) was bishop of Alexandria for forty-five years and spent seventeen of them in exile, driven from his city five times by four emperors for refusing to concede that the Son of God was a creature. He wrote On the Incarnation and the Life of Antony, which carried the monastic ideal into the West, and his festal letter of 367 is the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.
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Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was born in Roman North Africa to a pagan father and a praying Christian mother, Monica, whose tears followed him through years of ambition, pleasure, and the Manichaean religion. In a Milan garden in 386 he heard a child chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letters, and was undone. Baptised by Ambrose, he returned to Africa and served some thirty-five years as bishop of Hippo, writing the Confessions and The City of God and contending for grace against the Donatists and Pelagians. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged his city.
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Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) entered a struggling new monastery at twenty-two bringing thirty companions with him, and was an abbot at twenty-five for the remaining thirty-eight years of his life. He made a pope, pursued Abelard to condemnation, preached a crusade that failed catastrophically, and in the same years wrote On Loving God and eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs. His answer to how much God should be loved was that there is no measure.
Read full biography →Bill Bright (1921–2003) was an Oklahoma-born businessman who gave up his career for ministry and, with his wife Vonette, founded Campus Crusade for Christ in 1951. He wrote the Four Spiritual Laws and originated the JESUS film, but devoted his later years to fasting and prayer for revival — undertaking a series of 40-day fasts and giving away his 1996 Templeton Prize to the cause.
Billy Graham (1918–2018) was an American evangelist and Southern Baptist minister who, by his organization's count, preached the gospel in person to some 215 million people across more than 185 countries, closing each crusade with the hymn “Just As I Am.” He founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, set the 1948 Modesto integrity safeguards that kept his ministry free of scandal, and — pastor to a line of U.S. presidents — both regretted his political entanglement with Nixon and publicly repented of antisemitic remarks caught on a 1972 White House tape.
Blasio Kigozi (c.1909–1936) was a Ugandan schoolmaster and evangelist, younger brother of the revival co-founder Simeoni Nsibambi, who preached repentance across the villages around Gahini and died of tick fever in January 1936 while carrying his “Zukuka” (“Awake”) call to the Church of Uganda synod. Remembered as the “John the Baptist of the East African Revival,” he was buried at Namirembe beneath a tombstone bearing the single word “Zukuka.”
C. T. Studd (1860–1931) was an England cricketer who, after his conversion, gave away a fortune and joined the “Cambridge Seven” as a missionary — serving in China, India, and finally the Congo, where he founded what became WEC. A man of fierce, uncompromising, and at times difficult zeal, he lived by the conviction that no sacrifice could be too great for Christ.
Catherine Booth, born in 1829 in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, England, was co-founder of The Salvation Army alongside her husband William Booth. A powerful preacher and advocate for women's rights, she challenged Victorian conventions by preaching publicly and advocating for women's ministry. Catherine authored "Female Ministry: Women's Right to Preach" and was instrumental in shaping The Salvation Army's theology and social programs. Her passionate preaching and compassionate heart for the poor made her a beloved figure.
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Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) was a lawyer turned evangelist whose preaching helped drive the Second Great Awakening across upstate New York and beyond. Convinced that revival was not a miracle to be waited for but the right use of God-given means, he pioneered the “new measures” of protracted meetings and direct appeal, saw whole towns transformed, and later became president of Oberlin College. His Lectures on Revivals of Religion has shaped how the English-speaking church has thought about revival ever since.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon, born in 1834 in Kelvedon, Essex, England, became known as the "Prince of Preachers." Converted at age 15, he began preaching at 16 and by age 20 became pastor of London's New Park Street Chapel, later the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Spurgeon authored over 3,500 sermons, numerous books, and founded a pastors' college, orphanage, and various Christian ministries. Despite battling depression and illness, he maintained a prolific ministry until his death in 1892. His biblical expository preaching and literary works continue to influence Christians worldwide.
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Christmas Evans (1766–1838) was the greatest of the Welsh preachers — a poor, self-taught farm laborer, blinded in one eye by an assault in his youth, who became known as the “Bunyan of Wales.” For more than thirty years he oversaw the scattered Baptist churches of Anglesey on a stipend of £17 a year, preaching to thousands in vivid, dramatic open-air sermons. His ministry was revived after a famous covenant with God on the mountain road below Cadair Idris, and his sermons passed into the memory of a whole nation.
Clement of Rome (c. 35 – c. 99) led the church at Rome in the generation after the apostles and wrote the earliest Christian document to survive outside the New Testament. His one surviving letter was sent to Corinth around AD 96, where a faction had deposed the church's elders, and it argues from Scripture for humility, order and love before closing in prayer for the sick, the imprisoned and the emperor. Three generations later it was still being read aloud in Corinthian worship.
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Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) was a Dutch watchmaker who, with her family, hid Jews from the Nazis in a secret room in their Haarlem home. Arrested and imprisoned in Ravensbrück, where her sister Betsie died, she survived to travel the world for decades preaching God’s forgiveness — even to a former guard of the camp.
Cyprian of Carthage (c. 200–258) was a celebrated North African rhetorician who was converted in middle age, gave away his fortune, and was made bishop within two years. In twelve crowded years he led his church through the Decian persecution and the great plague that still bears his name, organising relief for the pagans who had wanted him dead, and wrote the first Latin commentary on the Lord's Prayer. He was beheaded at Carthage on 14 September 258.
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David Brainerd (1718–1747) was a young missionary to the Native American peoples of colonial New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Expelled from Yale for his zeal, he gave his brief life to prayer and itinerant preaching among the Delaware and others, seeing a remarkable awakening shortly before dying of tuberculosis at twenty-nine. The diary he kept — published after his death by Jonathan Edwards — became one of the most influential missionary memoirs ever written, stirring generations that followed, from William Carey to Henry Martyn.
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David Livingstone (1813–1873) was a Scottish mill boy turned missionary-explorer of Africa who crossed the continent, exposed the East African slave trade as “the open sore of the world,” and died on his knees in what is now Zambia. Famous as an explorer, he counted almost no converts — and that honest tension is part of what makes his devotion so striking.
Derek Prince (1915–2003) was a Cambridge philosophy fellow and Plato scholar, converted in a WWII army barrack room, who became a systematic Bible teacher heard worldwide and a lifelong intercessor — especially in prayer and fasting for Israel and the Jewish people. He helped found the Shepherding movement in the 1970s and was the first of its leaders to publicly repudiate it.
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