Running a beauty salon during the week, Mahalia began to sing professionally at weekends. She began to sing in secular theatres and bars, with jazz or blues bands, but she made the decision – sacrificial at the time – that she would only sing gospel and only where God’s music was appropriate and appreciated.

Although well read in the Bible, Roberts had only minimal education and, at the age of eleven, began work in the coal mines. Always something of a contemplative, Roberts lived in a world where God, heaven and spiritual powers were very real to him and he spent hours in prayer, enjoying fellowship with God. For eleven years he prayed for a new revival and spoke of how, in a vision, he had seen a piece of paper with the figure of 100,000 written on it; the number of souls who would be saved.

The injustices that Wycliffe attacked are gone but what he stood for, an idealistic, individual and instructed faith, is something that every age should value.

Helen was a woman endowed with intelligence, skill and determination but with a tendency to be impatient, domineering and a perfectionist. 

Athlete and missionary Eric Liddell had been largely forgotten until the 1981 film Chariots of Fire reminded the world of him.

One winter’s night he learned that one of his boys had no home to go to and, led by him, was appalled to discover that homelessness among children was far worse than he had imagined. Barnardo now realised his calling lay not in China but among London’s poor.

Denominations, churches and even individual Christians always risk stagnation; a situation in which everybody is busy doing nothing. At such times, God often sends someone to shake things up. A man who did just that was David Wilkerson, the American evangelist who took the gospel from the comfort of the pulpit down into the ugliest of streets.

Benedict of Nursia was born in AD 480 just at the time when the Roman Empire was ending and the Middle Ages beginning. That Christianity and learning were kept alive during the troubled millennium between Rome’s fall and the Renaissance was something that Benedict played a significant part in.

John Wesley was one of the most influential Christian preachers in history and a man who had an enormous and lasting impact on his nation and the world.

Charlotte Moon was born in 1840 to a plantation-owning family in Virginia, in the pre-Civil War southern culture depicted in Gone with the Wind. After a youthful rebellion against Christianity, she was converted in 1859. A woman well under five-foot in height, Lottie spent the Civil War helping her widowed mother manage the estate and teaching in schools.

Lottie felt called to be an evangelist and church planter. However, her mission’s policy prohibited a woman from preaching to groups which included men. Never one to suffer quietly, Lottie began writing letters and articles, many of which found their way back to the United States. Pointing out the shortage of missionaries and the extraordinary evangelistic opportunities available in China, Lottie pressed for women to be allowed to use any gifting they had for evangelism or preaching.