Biographies
26 authors · 40 books
From Puritan pastors to Victorian preachers and twentieth-century missionaries, England has given the church a long line of writers. Their books still fill the shelves of Christian readers around the world.
John Foxe (c. 1516–1587) was an English Protestant historian and preacher who gave up his Oxford fellowship for conscience, fled Queen Mary's persecution, and in exile and after gathered the records of those who died for the Reformed faith into Actes and Monuments (1563), known ever since as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. In old age he pleaded with Queen Elizabeth to spare even the heretics he opposed from the fire.
Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) was an English Puritan preacher known in his own day as “the heavenly Doctor”. Where much Puritan preaching pressed hard on the conscience, Sibbes was famous for gentleness toward people who had already given up on themselves; his best-known book takes its title from Isaiah's promise that the bruised reed will not be broken.
English Puritan church leader and pastor at Kidderminster, ejected from the Church of England in 1662. A prolific author of practical divinity whose pastoral and devotional works became enduring Christian classics.
John Owen (1616–1683) was the foremost theologian of English Puritanism — chaplain to Cromwell, Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and after 1662 a dissenting minister barred from the universities he had led. He is famous for the density of his prose and for an unusually exact understanding of how sin actually works on a person, which is why The Mortification of Sin has outlived almost everything else written in its century on the subject.
English Nonconformist Puritan preacher and rector of St Stephen Walbrook in London, ejected from his living in 1662. He is remembered for warm, vivid, and remarkably accessible devotional writing.
English writer and Puritan preacher, a Bedford tinker by trade who was imprisoned for more than a decade for preaching without a licence. During that confinement he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, one of the most published allegories in the English language.
Susanna Wesley, born in 1669 in London, England, was the mother of John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism. A devout Anglican and mother of nineteen children (ten survived to adulthood), she provided rigorous religious education to her children, establishing daily routines of prayer and Scripture study. Despite financial hardships and her husband's absences, she maintained a strong spiritual household.
The father of English hymnody: a frail Dissenting minister who taught the church to sing the gospel in its own words, giving it “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “Joy to the World.” Laid aside by illness for years and sheltered for thirty-six by the Abney family, he also wrote Divine Songs (1715), the songs generations of children learned by heart.
William Law (1686–1761) was an English priest whose refusal to swear allegiance to George I cost him his Cambridge fellowship and any career in the established church. Barred from preferment, he wrote instead — and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729) became one of the most influential devotional books in English, shaping John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Samuel Johnson.
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.
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.
John Newton (1725–1807) was a slave-ship captain who, after a gradual conversion begun in a 1748 Atlantic storm, became an Anglican pastor at Olney, wrote “Amazing Grace,” and — late in life — a leading voice against the slave trade he had once plied, mentoring William Wilberforce.
William Carey (1761–1834) was an English cobbler and self-taught linguist whose 1792 call to missions helped launch the modern missionary movement. He gave forty years to India at Serampore, translating the Bible into six Indian languages and campaigning against sati, and is remembered as the “father of modern missions.”
John Charles Ryle (1816–1900) was the first Bishop of Liverpool and a leading evangelical of the Victorian church — a wealthy young man ruined by his family's bank collapse, redirected into the ministry, and famed for plain-spoken gospel tracts distributed by the million.
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.
William Booth, born in 1829 in Nottingham, England, was the founder of The Salvation Army. Originally a Methodist minister, he felt called to serve the urban poor and began his ministry in London's East End. In 1865, he established the Christian Mission, which later became The Salvation Army in 1878. Booth and his wife Catherine pioneered innovative approaches to evangelism and social welfare, establishing shelters, rehabilitation centers, and soup kitchens.
James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) was an English missionary to China and founder of the China Inland Mission. Converted at seventeen while his mother prayed for him miles away, he gave his life to reaching China's unreached inland provinces, pioneering a faith-mission that took no debt and solicited no funds but told every need to God in prayer.
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.
Frederick Brotherton Meyer was born on April 8, 1847, in Clapham, London, to Frederick Meyer, a business owner, and his wife, Ann. Raised in a deeply religious household that cherished the authority of Scripture, Meyer became a prominent Baptist pastor, teacher, and evangelist, based primarily in London. He was known for his expository preaching and devotional writings. Meyer pastored several prominent churches including Christ Church in London and Melbourne Hall in Leicester.
Smith Wigglesworth (1859–1947) was a Yorkshire plumber who could not read as a boy, worked in a woollen mill from the age of seven, and became one of the best-known evangelists of early Pentecostalism. With his wife Polly he led the Bowland Street Mission in Bradford for many years; after receiving the baptism in the Holy Spirit at Sunderland in 1907 he preached faith and divine healing across Europe, America, Australasia, India and Africa, and his sermons were gathered in Ever Increasing Faith and Faith That Prevails.
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.
Charles S. Price (1887–1947) was an English-born Pentecostal evangelist who, as a liberal Congregational pastor in Lodi, California, went to Aimee Semple McPherson’s 1921 San Jose meetings to expose them and was converted instead. His healing campaigns across North America drew huge crowds, notably in Victoria and Vancouver in 1923, and his book The Real Faith (1940) taught that true faith is not worked up but imparted by God.
Dr Joe E. Church (1899–1989) was an English CMS missionary doctor at Gahini Hospital in Rwanda whose two days of Bible study and prayer with the Ugandan layman Simeoni Nsibambi on Namirembe Hill in September 1929 are remembered as the spark of the East African Revival. He served in Africa for over three decades and always insisted the Revival was God’s work, not his own.
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.
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.
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.
Among the most widely read are John Bunyan, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon, J. C. Ryle and John Stott, along with missionaries such as Hudson Taylor and Gladys Aylward.
Charles Spurgeon, called the Prince of Preachers, drew thousands every Sunday to the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London in the nineteenth century, and his printed sermons reached millions.
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan is the classic place to begin.
