Introduction: Before You Were Grown

Nearly two thousand years ago, an old missionary named Paul wrote a letter to a young man named Timothy. Timothy had been given a hard job: to help lead a church in the city of Ephesus, full of people older, louder and more sure of themselves than he was. Paul knew what Timothy was afraid of, so he wrote: “Let no one despise your youth, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12).

Notice what Paul did not say. He did not say, “Wait until you are older.” He said that a young person could already be the example. Not the student of the example. The example.

This book is about people who took that seriously, often before they understood what it meant.

It is easy to look at the great names of Christian history and imagine that they were born great: that they arrived in the world knowing what they believed, never confused, never bored in church, never wondering whether any of it was true. The truth is the opposite. Every person in these pages was once fifteen and unsure. Some of them had good reason to be angry at the world. Some were lonely. One of them was a slave. One grew up in a country where Christianity had been banned for more than two hundred years. They did not know how their stories would end. They only knew that something had happened to them, and that they could not go back.

Here are the six people you will meet in Called, the first book of They Were Young:

Charles Spurgeon, a miserable fifteen-year-old in England who walked into a tiny chapel to get out of a snowstorm, and heard a stranger tell him to look.

Samson Occom, a Mohegan boy in Connecticut who heard the preachers of a great revival, taught himself to read from a children’s primer, and spent his life serving his people even when the people he trusted let him down.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne, a clever, popular Scottish student whose world was broken open at eighteen by the death of the older brother he loved.

Billy Graham, a farm boy in North Carolina who went to a tent meeting at sixteen half-expecting to scoff, and kept going back.

Kanzo Uchimura, a Japanese teenager at a new agricultural college who signed his name to a covenant to follow Jesus, at first under pressure from older students, and then had to decide what he really believed.

Richard Allen, born into slavery in the American colonies, who came to faith at seventeen, later bought his own freedom, and founded a church where Black Christians could worship with dignity.

How each chapter works

Each chapter begins with a moment, the decisive scene in that person’s teenage years, and then pulls back to tell you how they got there and what happened next.

After the story come three short sections. In Their Own Words gives you a few lines the person actually said or wrote, with the source, so you can hear their own voice. Think It Through offers some questions to sit with, on your own or with friends. They do not have right answers printed in the back. Read More on Ochorus points you to that person’s own books, sermons or biography, if you want to go further.

One promise about these stories: they are true, and we have tried not to add to them. We have not invented conversations or made up scenes. Where the old records are silent, or where historians disagree about a date or a name, we say so. When a person’s words are quoted, they are words they really said or wrote, as far as the records let us know.

For parents, teachers and youth leaders

These stories are written for readers aged about thirteen to seventeen, and they do not avoid hard things. Several of them touch on slavery, racism and injustice, including injustice done by people who called themselves Christians. Some deal with grief, depression and the death of people the characters loved. We have tried to handle all of this honestly and without sensationalism, as young readers deserve.

The chapters work well for group discussion. The Think It Through questions are meant to open conversation rather than close it. You may find that the most useful question in a group is the simplest one: “What would you have done?”