Biographies
The lives behind the books — preachers, missionaries, and writers whose words still speak.
Gladys Aylward (1902–1970) was an English parlourmaid, rejected by the missionary society, who spent her savings to travel overland alone to China in 1930. She ran an inn that told Bible stories and led about a hundred children over the mountains to safety during the Japanese invasion — insisting she was not God’s first choice, only a willing one.
Erica Sabiti (1903–1988) was the first African Archbishop of the Church of Uganda. Ordained in 1933, he met the balokole of the East African Revival in 1939 while travelling with his bishop in Rwanda and Burundi, and became one of the movement's leaders. His election as archbishop in 1966 was opposed on ethnic grounds and the division was healed only when the province's nine diocesan bishops confessed their own part in it and united behind him.
Watchman Nee, born in 1903 in Foochow, China, was a prominent figure in 20th-century Christianity and Chinese church leadership. He embraced Christianity at 17, dedicated his life to ministry, and authored numerous influential works like "The Normal Christian Life." Persecuted for his faith, he died in 1972 while imprisoned at 69. His legacy continues through the Local Church movement worldwide. Nee's teachings emphasized the spiritual realities of the church and the believer's position in Christ.
Yosiya Kinuka (c.1905–1981) was a hospital anaesthetist at Gahini in Rwanda who first led the medical staff’s resistance to Dr Joe Church, then — sent to Simeoni Nsibambi in 1931 — returned “an absolutely changed life” and became one of the earliest African leaders of the East African Revival. With Blasio Kigozi he formed the first Bible team around Gahini and stood at the heart of the 1933 convention often named as the Revival’s beginning.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who opposed Hitler from the first days of the regime, led the Confessing Church's illegal seminary at Finkenwalde, and wrote The Cost of Discipleship with its contrast of cheap and costly grace. Drawn into the resistance conspiracy against Hitler, he was arrested in 1943 and hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945, six days before its liberation.
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.”
William Nagenda (c.1912–1973) was a Ugandan lay evangelist and the most prominent preacher of the East African Revival. Expelled from theological college in 1941, he chose lifelong lay evangelism over ordination, carrying the revival’s message of brokenness at the Cross across Europe, the Americas, India and East Africa.
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.
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 and set the 1948 Modesto integrity safeguards that kept his ministry free of scandal.
Festo Kivengere (1919–1988) was a Ugandan Anglican bishop and evangelist of the East African Revival, often called “the Billy Graham of Africa.” Converted from nominal faith during the 1941 revival, he became Bishop of Kigezi in 1972 and a leader of African Evangelistic Enterprise. After Archbishop Janani Luwum's murder in 1977 he fled Amin's Uganda over the mountains into Rwanda, then wrote the celebrated book I Love Idi Amin, a testimony to forgiving the tyrant who had driven him into exile.
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.
John Stott (1921–2011) was rector of All Souls, Langham Place, for his whole ministry and one of the principal architects of modern world evangelicalism — chief framer of the Lausanne Covenant and founder of the Langham Partnership. A clear Bible teacher, lifelong single, and disciplined man of prayer, he gave away his royalties to train pastors across the world.
Evelyn Christenson (1922–2011) was an American pastor’s wife whose six-month prayer experiment among a handful of reluctant women grew into the bestselling “What Happens When Women Pray” and a worldwide prayer-seminar ministry. Through the loss of four children she made Romans 8:28 her philosophy: “God is not making a mistake.”
Janani Luwum (c.1922–1977) rose from a herdsboy in northern Uganda to Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga-Zaire. Converted in the East African Revival in 1948, he preached fearlessly and, after leading the bishops’ protest against Idi Amin’s killings, was murdered on 17 February 1977. He is honoured as one of the ten twentieth-century martyrs whose statues stand over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey.
Helen Roseveare (1925–2016) was a British missionary doctor who built hospitals and trained African medical workers in the Congo. Beaten and raped during the 1964 Simba rebellion, she spoke of it as being “trusted” by God with suffering, returned to Congo to rebuild, and taught for the rest of her life that the cost is swallowed up in the privilege of knowing Christ.
Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) was widowed when her husband Jim and four others were killed by the Waorani of Ecuador — and then went to live among the very people who had killed him, seeing many come to Christ. Through decades of writing and teaching on suffering and obedience, she became one of the most trusted voices of twentieth-century evangelicalism: “do the next thing.”
Jim Elliot (1927–1956) was an American missionary speared to death, with four companions, by the Waorani of Ecuador — the people he had come to reach and had resolved not to fight. His journal line, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose,” and the later conversion of the Waorani made his brief life one of the most influential in modern missions.
Loren Cunningham (1935–2023) was the founder of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), who mobilized generations of young people into missions and taught believers to discern and obey the voice of God. From a vision he testified he received in 1956, he built one of the largest interdenominational mission movements in the world, and in his book Is That Really You, God? taught that guidance comes through listening prayer tested by Scripture, circumstances, and counsel.
Gareth Evans, born in 1938 in Merthyr Tydfil, is an itinerant pastor, teacher, and author. He studied physics, taught globally, authored devotionals, and now ministers to the hurting church through his website. Gareth, married to Anne, has three daughters, eight grand children, and fourteen great-grand children. His teachings emphasize practical faith and biblical wisdom. With a unique blend of scientific background and spiritual insight, Evans brings clarity to complex theological concepts.
Timothy Keller (1950–2023) was a Presbyterian pastor who founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in secular Manhattan in 1989 and wrote widely read books including The Reason for God and Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. A brush with thyroid cancer drove him to rebuild his prayer life, and facing pancreatic cancer at the end he wrote movingly of the nearness of God and the deepening of prayer.
