Introduction: The Sent Ones Who Would Not Stop

There is a question at the heart of the Christian faith that comfortable religion does its best to avoid: what does it actually cost to follow Jesus? Not the polished, institutional version of Christianity — the kind that fits neatly into an hour on Sunday and asks nothing of the rest of the week — but the raw, original, apostolic version in which the risen Lord issues His commission and His disciples actually obey it. The ten men and women in this book answered that question with their lives, and the answers they gave were not comfortable. They gave away fortunes, buried spouses, endured imprisonment, survived violence, crossed oceans, and in several cases gave their own bodies to the work. They were sent, and they went, and they did not stop.

The mandate that shaped their lives was the same mandate that has always shaped the church at its most faithful. Before His ascension, the risen Christ gathered His disciples and gave them the commission that has never been revoked: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:19–20, NIV). These words have sent men and women to the ends of the earth in every generation since they were first spoken. The ten lives in this book are ten answers to that commission — ten different translations of the Great Command into the particular geography, culture, and moment God had prepared for each of them.

Before He ascended, Jesus also defined the scope of the mission with a precision that left no corner of the world outside its reach: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8, NIV). “The ends of the earth” was not a figure of speech for the men and women in this book. William Carey spent forty-one years in India. David Livingstone pushed into the unmapped interior of central Africa and died there on his knees. C.T. Studd served in three continents. Catherine Booth took the gospel to the streets of Victorian London’s most dangerous slums. The ends of the earth were, for each of them, specific coordinates on a map — places with names and peoples with faces, to whom the Gospel had not yet come.

What equipped these ten people for their extraordinary lives of sacrificial mission? It was not superior courage or exceptional resilience, though both were present. It was a settled theological conviction about the lostness of those without Christ and the compulsion that flowed from it.

They had each, in their own way, absorbed the logic of the apostle Paul’s argument and felt its full moral weight. They understood what was at stake — that behind every person who had never heard the gospel was a soul of eternal significance, and that the question of their eternal destiny was not a matter of comfortable religious theory but of burning, urgent, life-altering reality.

The logical chain Paul laid out in Romans could not be comfortably ignored by those who truly believed it: “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’” (Romans 10:14–15, NIV). The chain runs from hearing to believing to calling to salvation — and at the beginning of the chain stands the one who is sent. These ten people were links in that chain. They were the beautiful feet. And the chain did not break.

The sacrifice these lives entailed was not incidental to the mission but intrinsic to it. Paul described his own ministry with words that these ten could each have written about themselves: “I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me — the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace” (Acts 20:24, NIV). To consider one’s life worth nothing is not morbidity or self-hatred; it is the liberation of a soul that has found something worth infinitely more than the preservation of its own comfort. These ten people had found that something. They called it the gospel of grace, and they gave everything they had to share it.

These chapters are portraits, not pedestals. The men and women you will meet in these pages were not superhumans immune to fear, doubt, loneliness, or failure. William Carey’s first seven years in India produced no converts. David Livingstone’s marriage crumbled under the pressures of his mission. C.T. Studd’s heroic sacrifices were matched by personal difficulties that his biographers have not glossed over. Jim Elliot died at twenty-eight before he saw a single conversion among the people he had gone to reach. What made these lives extraordinary was not the absence of human frailty but the presence of a God who works through frail human beings who are, despite everything, willing.

May these ten lives strip away every excuse for a comfortable, self-contained, privately religious life. May they reawaken in you the question that every generation of serious Christians must answer afresh: given what Christ has done, given what the world needs, given that one life is all any of us has — what am I doing with mine? The answer has never been more urgent.