John Wesley

John Wesley (1703-1791) was the founder of the Methodist Church (including its spin-offs, such the United Methodist, Free Methodist, and Wesleyan Churches) and was one of the most effective, hardest-working preachers of all time. Wesley is credited as reaching over 120,000 people across Britain and North America.

Nicknamed the Little Giant, Wesley was small in stature, but exerted a powerful influence in his ministry. Wesley was the 15th of 19 kids in his family (no, that’s not a misprint) and was influenced greatly by his mother’s evangelical faith. He eventually went to Oxford and studied theology. He formed a group while at Oxford, known as the Methodists, who sought to live their lives like those in the early Church.

Early on, Wesley was convinced that perfection was the ultimate Christian goal. Yet, after some personal failings, perfection seemed so far away, and Wesley struggled to understand what faith was. He eventually realized that what he needed more than to strive for perfection was to simply experience the forgiveness of Christ in his life. He soon felt a real change occur in him, a sense of assurance that he was forgiven and that, as Luther discovered two hundred years earlier, salvation is attained by grace through faith. Unlike Calvin, Wesley was a strong proponent of human free will, believing that God’s all-knowing nature enables him to know his elect, but that God lets each person make up his or her own mind.

Although Wesley wasn’t the outdoor type, he eventually teamed up with another preacher named George Whitefield and preached to people in open fields. The impact was amazing, and the Methodist revival came out of it.

Wesley was a workhorse, travelling at least 4,500 miles per year around England by horseback. Over his lifetime, he is estimated to have travelled over 250,000 miles preaching the gospel to people across Britain.

I discuss Wesley in more detail in Chapter 11.

William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was an evangelical Christian who lived out his beliefs as a member of British parliament for decades. Wilberforce felt called by God to seek justice and righteousness in this world. He felt that the number one issue of his day was slavery, so he became the force behind the abolition movement in England.

Wilberforce started speaking against the slave trade in 1789 by giving a speech in the House of Commons. At that time, few listened – the commercial interests against his position were too strong. But Wilberforce’s determination against the odds never wavered. Although it took him decades to build the support needed, he persevered. Finally, in 1807, the British Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade. Wilberforce saw that as the first victory in the complete abolition of slavery, so he immediately set out to end slavery itself in the British Empire. However, because of bad health, he was forced to leave Parliament – but not before getting another evangelical known as Thomas Fowell Buxton to take the reigns and continue the fight. Just four days before Wilberforce died, Britain outlawed slavery in its vast empire – thanks in large part to the personal conviction of one Christian attempting to live like Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and was one of the few pastors with the courage to speak against Hitler and the German Church, which looked the other way regarding the evils of the Nazis.

This defiance wasn’t by any means easy for Bonhoeffer. He grew up thinking of the Church and the government as having the same interests, and he struggled as Hitler rose to power and began implementing policies that directly opposed biblical teaching. He eventually came to the conclusion that he had to obey God first and Germany after that. After World War II started and the evils of the Nazi regime grew more apparent, Bonhoeffer became involved in a doomed plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. When the attempt failed, Bonhoeffer was charged, arrested, and ultimately hanged just before the end of the war.

Bonhoeffer is best known for his work The Cost of Discipleship (Touchstone, 1995), which I discuss further in Chapter 13.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-present) is one of the greatest intellectuals and political writers of the past century. He was detained for eight years (1945-1953) for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union. While in prison, his life was transformed as he became a Christian due to the influence of another Christian he met in the labor camp.

After Solzhenitsyn was let out of prison, he wrote a book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet, 1998) that told the brutal nature of the Soviet Gulag (prison system). This book became widely known in the U.S. and Europe, and he quickly became world renowned for his nonconforming positions. He also wrote The Gulag Archipelago (Perennial, 2002) based on stories he memorized while in prison, each of which chronicled the horror of the realities of the Gulag. Although he had to leave the Soviet Union in the 1970s as a result of his outspokenness against the government, he continued to be a moral force as an author and ultimately helped bring down the Communist Soviet Union.