Biographies
The lives behind the books — preachers, missionaries, and writers whose words still speak.
English Anglican cleric and evangelist who founded Methodism. A tireless itinerant preacher and organiser, he was a central figure of the 18th-century evangelical revival.
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American Congregationalist preacher and theologian, a central figure of the First Great Awakening. He pastored in Northampton, Massachusetts, and briefly served as president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton).
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English Anglican cleric and one of the founders of Methodism and the evangelical revival. A famed open-air preacher, he toured Britain and colonial America and became a leading figure of the Great Awakening.
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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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Abandoned as an infant and indentured until he was twenty-one, Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) taught himself Scripture, Latin, and Greek by firelight. He served as a Minuteman and marched to Ticonderoga, and in 1785 became the first Black man ordained by a mainstream Protestant denomination in America. He pastored mostly white congregations for nearly fifty years — thirty of them at West Rutland, Vermont — and wrote the early antislavery essay “Liberty Further Extended.” Dismissed in old age, he preached to the end, asking only that his gravestone call him a sinner trusting wholly in Christ.
Richard Allen (1760–1831) was born into slavery in Philadelphia, sold as a boy to a Delaware farmer, and converted to Christ as a teenager under Methodist preaching. After his master was himself converted and let him buy his freedom, Allen became a pioneering itinerant preacher; the humiliation of segregated seating at St. George's Methodist Church led him to found an independent Black church, Mother Bethel, in Philadelphia. In 1816 he organized and was consecrated first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first fully independent Black denomination in America.
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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