Biographies
6 authors · 11 books
Preachers and missionaries of the Baptist churches, which baptise believers on their profession of faith. They include the "Prince of Preachers", the father of modern missions and a Welsh farm boy who became his country's greatest preacher.
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.”
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 below Cadair Idris.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Baptists baptise those who personally profess faith in Christ, usually by immersion, rather than infants. They also stress the authority of Scripture and the freedom of each local congregation.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, was called the Prince of Preachers. His sermons were printed every week and sold around the world.
William Carey, an English Baptist shoemaker, urged the churches in 1792 to send missionaries overseas and then sailed to India himself. His example began the great missionary societies of the nineteenth century.
