From Every Nation

When people think of the great names of the Christian faith, they often think of Europe and America. Of Luther and Wesley, of Spurgeon and Moody, of missionaries who left for India or Africa with a suitcase and a Bible. Many well-known collections of Christian biographies are mainly about Westerners too. Even the books about missionaries usually tell the story of people who went from the West to the rest of the world.

But the gospel did not stop with the missionaries. It was taken up by people who were born there. A Sikh in the north of India put on a saffron robe and walked into the mountains. A learned woman from a Brahmin family brought starving girls home in bullock carts. A Javanese teacher placed his chair next to that of the missionary, at the same height. A Liberian walked barefoot along the coast, and tens of thousands of people asked to be baptized.

This book is about them.

WHY THIS BOOK

Today most of the world’s Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. That is a great change from a hundred years ago. The people in this book stand at the beginning of that change. Yet outside their own countries their names are often barely known.

I am Dutch, and there is a Dutch side to this story. Kiai Sadrach clashed with Dutch missionaries on Java. John Sung preached in Batavia and Surabaya, in what was then the Dutch East Indies. In my books about Dutch missionaries I told the story of those who went. Here you see the other side: what happened when people there began to carry the faith themselves, sometimes together with the missionaries, sometimes against them.

HOW THIS BOOK WAS MADE

As in the other books in this series, facts come first. With many of the people in this book, the stories grew over time. Miracles became bigger, dates shifted, and sometimes an early biographer wrote down more admiration than facts. I have tried to keep apart what is certain, what is known only from someone’s own words, and what is uncertain or disputed. After each chapter you will find this in a short overview, with the sources.

That also means I am honest about tensions. With missionaries who thought they knew better. With colonial governments. With rulers who could not bear criticism. And sometimes about the weak spots of the people themselves. They were not saints on a pedestal. They were people who followed God in a world that was often not waiting for them.

This first volume tells the story of eight people from three continents and very different churches: Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and churches they started themselves. The order is that of time.

A GREAT MULTITUDE

In the last book of the Bible, John sees a picture of the end. He describes a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues (Revelation 7:9). That picture gave this book its name.

The eight people in this book are a small part of that multitude. I hope their stories show you how great that multitude is, and how close it can come.