Biographies
29 authors · 37 books
Preachers of the Great Awakening, founders of Black churches, evangelists, missionaries and pastors from the United States and Canada. Their lives trace the story of American Christianity from colonial Connecticut to modern New York.
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).
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. His diary, published by Jonathan Edwards, became one of the most influential missionary memoirs ever written.
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.
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.
Born free in New Jersey, Jarena Lee was converted under Richard Allen and became the first woman authorized to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, travelling thousands of miles to proclaim the gospel.
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.
Born to formerly enslaved parents, Julia A. J. Foote was a holiness evangelist who was excommunicated for preaching as a woman and later became the first woman ordained a deacon in the A.M.E. Zion Church.
Hannah Whitall Smith, born in 1832 in Philadelphia, was a prominent Quaker speaker and writer during the Holiness movement. Her influential book "The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life" became a classic of Christian devotional literature. Despite personal tragedies, she maintained a vibrant faith that influenced generations of believers until her death in 1911.
American Methodist pastor, Civil War chaplain and former attorney who gave the last years of his life to rising at four in the morning to pray. Only one of his eight books on prayer, Power Through Prayer, appeared in his lifetime; the other seven were published after his death.
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.
Arthur Tappan Pierson (1837–1911) was an American Presbyterian pastor and missions statesman whose 1886 address at Mount Hermon helped launch the Student Volunteer Movement, and who filled Spurgeon's pulpit in London from 1891 to 1893. A close friend of George Müller, he wrote George Müller of Bristol (1899), the authorized memoir of Müller's life of prayer and faith.
Dwight Lyman Moody, born in 1837 in Northfield, Massachusetts, rose from a fatherless farm boyhood and a Boston shoe store to become the best-known evangelist of the nineteenth century, preaching to as many as a hundred million people across America and Britain. Never ordained and barely schooled, he founded the Northfield schools, the Moody Bible Institute, and a colportage work that put good Christian books within everyone's reach.
Lottie Moon (1840–1912) was a Southern Baptist missionary who gave nearly forty years to China. Her letters home pressing for prayer, for laborers, and for a Christmas offering for missions built the foundation of Baptist mission giving; she died worn out amid famine and war on Christmas Eve, 1912.
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.
Jesse Lyman Hurlbut (1843–1930) was an American Methodist minister who spent over fifty years training Bible teachers through the Sunday school and the Chautauqua movement. His Story of the Bible (1904) and Life of Christ (1915) retold Scripture plainly and faithfully, adding nothing, so that young readers would be led straight to the Bible itself.
Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928) was an American evangelist, pastor and teacher who came to faith at Yale on a night he had resolved to take his own life. D. L. Moody made him the first superintendent of the Moody Bible Institute and he pastored the Chicago Avenue Church, later serving as first dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. He wrote more than forty books, chiefly on prayer and the Holy Spirit.
Billy Sunday (1862–1935) was an American baseball player turned evangelist, a Chicago White Stockings outfielder converted outside the Pacific Garden Mission who became the most famous revivalist of the early twentieth century. Preaching in wooden tabernacles to vast crowds, he called hundreds of thousands to “hit the sawdust trail” for Christ and was a leading voice in the campaign for Prohibition.
John “Praying” Hyde (1865–1912) was an American Presbyterian missionary to the Punjab, remembered above all as a man of prayer — a leading figure of the Sialkot Convention from its first year and one of the moving spirits of the Punjab Prayer Union, remembered as a man who asked God for a soul a day. Much of his vivid reputation comes from Francis McGaw’s 1923 devotional book “Praying Hyde,” written after his death.
John R. Mott (1865–1955) was an American Methodist layman who gave his life to “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” Converted to lifelong service as a Cornell student, he led the Student Volunteer Movement, founded the World’s Student Christian Federation, chaired the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference, and shared the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize. A tireless traveller and a man of the “morning watch,” he helped lay the foundations of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches.
John G. Lake (1870–1935) was a Canadian-born Pentecostal preacher and faith healer who, after his wife’s healing in the circle of John Alexander Dowie, helped found the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa (1908–1913). Returning to America, he opened his “Divine Healing Rooms” in Spokane and later worked in Portland, leaving a lasting and much-debated legacy in the healing movement.
F. F. Bosworth (1877–1958) was an American evangelist and early Pentecostal pioneer whose healing campaigns of the 1920s filled auditoriums across the United States and Canada. His book Christ the Healer (1924) became one of the most widely read works on divine healing, and in old age he travelled with William Branham to Africa and beyond.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, Dwight L. Moody, A. W. Tozer and Billy Graham are among the most widely read, together with Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Yes. A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Pentecostal preacher John G. Lake were both born in Canada.
Yes. The United States has a page of its own, and this page gathers those writers together with those from Canada.
