C. T. Studd (For Teens)

An English cricketer, born in 1860, who played for England at the Oval in 1882, went to China in 1885 as one of the Cambridge Seven, and gave away his inheritance. After years in China, America and India he went to the north-eastern Belgian Congo in 1913, founded the mission that became WEC International, and died at Ibambi in 1931.

Yes. It names the indigo money his family made from Indian labour, the two baby sons who died, his harshness with colleagues, his dismissal of his son-in-law Alfred Buxton, the twelve years he and his wife spent apart, his regular use of morphine for pain, and the split of 1931. It also gives the other side: his real pain, the committee’s real reasons, and the love of the Congolese Christians who buried him.

It is the saying traditionally attributed to him: “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.” Nobody has traced it to anything he published, but it sums up how he lived. He meant that if Christ had given everything for him, nothing he could give back would be too much.

Probably not. He loved the lines and is recorded as sending them to his grandchildren in his last year, but the longer poem built around them says its author first heard them from someone else. This edition treats them as words he loved and lived by, not as his own.

In China he wore Chinese clothes and joined a church Chinese Christians were already leading. In Congo he lived in a local-style house on local food and insisted the Congolese church support its own evangelists. He also called himself Bwana, meaning master, was slow to learn the language, and could be severe with Africans as well as Europeans. Congolese evangelists did most of the preaching that spread the church.

From the full-length biography of C. T. Studd, which checks the family accounts against cricket records, the record of the Cambridge Seven, an American’s diary from Niangara in 1914 and modern reference works. Where a story rests only on family tradition, like his last word, this edition says so. There is also a children’s edition for younger readers.

That it is worth giving your whole life to Christ, gladly; that a faith which costs nothing is in danger; that courage without love can wound people; and that you need people who can tell you when you are wrong, and the humility to listen.

From 1916 he led the work in the Congo and Priscilla, whose heart condition kept her from living there, led the mission at home. They loved each other and wrote constantly, but they met only once more, for a short visit in 1928. She died in Spain in January 1929, and he was not with her.