One of the most powerful American preachers was Charles Finney, who had an influential ministry in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The seventeenth century in England was a time of constant and often violent controversies over religion and politics. Despite finding himself cruelly vulnerable at the centre of many of these, Richard Baxter managed, as both pastor and writer, to proclaim Christ in a remarkable way.

The story of Adoniram Judson, the first overseas missionary from the United States of America and the man who founded the church in Burma, is one of the most challenging in Christian history.

It’s always inspiring to hear of encounters with Christ that utterly transform a life. The case of Mitsuo Fuchida is a spectacular example of just such a conversion.

Helen Cadbury was born in 1877 into the Quaker family who ran the famous Birmingham chocolate firm. Helen’s father Richard was committed not just to the social work that was a Quaker distinctive but also to enthusiastically sharing the gospel.

Samuel Zwemer was a remarkable missionary, traveller and teacher, and a man who became known as the ‘Apostle to Islam’.

In the eighteenth century the transatlantic slave trade had reached a level where, every year, tens of thousands of African people were transported under appalling conditions to the New World. Many Christians fought against slavery and the names of William Wilberforce, John Newton and Hannah More are widely remembered. Less well-known is the name of Olaudah Equiano, a man whose witness was particularly powerful because he himself had been a slave.

Polycarp – whose name means ‘much fruit’ – was born in Smyrna, today’s port of Izmir in Turkey. He was born in AD 69 and grew up at a time when some of those who had seen and heard Jesus were still alive. Converted at an early age he knew the apostle John, who in old age lived not far away from Smyrna in Ephesus. Throughout his long life, Polycarp was able to recount what he had heard from John and others who had been with Jesus. Living on to the middle of the second century, he became known as the last living link with the apostles.

Heroism isn’t about achievements; in my view it’s about what you attempt to achieve and how you attempt it. And that makes seventeenth-century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet a hero.

Andrew Murray was not only one of the most gifted church leaders in nineteenth-century South Africa but also a writer who continues to inspire Christians across the world today.