From Every Nation

The first two volumes of this book were about Christians from Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this third volume the map grows larger. It includes people from North America, from the islands of the Pacific, from Australia and from the Middle East. Again they are not missionaries who came from far away, but people who carried the gospel in their own countries and among their own people.

A Mohegan in New England whose sermon, according to historians, was the first printed work published under the name of a Native American. A Tongan who sailed to Fiji to bring the gospel there. An Aboriginal inventor and preacher who appears on Australian money. A young Congolese man on a rubber plantation who wore a scapular around his neck. A Mexican evangelist who started his own church when he saw how little say Spanish speakers had in other churches. A Chinese pastor in Beijing who spent more than twenty years in prison. A Korean pastor who took in the young man who had killed his sons as a son of his own. And an Iranian bishop who wrote a prayer for the murderers of his son.

THE SAME APPROACH

In this volume too, the facts come first. After each chapter you will find what is certain, what is known only from a person’s own words or from later tradition, and what is uncertain or disputed. The sources are listed with it.

For a few people in this volume the sources are thin. Little has been written in Dutch or English about Francisco Olazábal and Son Yang-won. For Joeli Bulu much comes from his own life story, as a missionary wrote it down. Where I could not check more, I have kept the story shorter, and I say so when a story rests on a single source.

The eight people in this volume belonged to very different churches: Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Anglican, and congregations they started themselves. The order is again that of time, from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth.

FROM EVERY NATION

John saw a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues (Revelation 7:9). Some of the people in this volume came from peoples who almost disappeared, or who were long left out of the count. They too stand in that multitude. Who knows whom else you will meet there.