Category Archives: The Modern Era (1227-1936)

William Seymour — September 28

North America, The Modern Era (1227-1936)

Bible connection

Read Acts 2:14-21

In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.

All about William J. Seymour (1870-1922)

William Joseph Seymour was born May 2, 1870 in Centerville, St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. His parents, Simon Seymour (also known as Simon Simon) and Phillis Salabar were both former slaves.

After Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Seymour’s father enlisted in the Northern Army and served until the end of the Civil War. He may have contracted malaria or another tropical disease in the southern swamps. Simon never fully recovered.

William Seymour, the oldest in a large family, lived his early years in abject poverty. In 1896 the family’s possessions were listed as “one old bedstead, one old chair and one old mattress.” All of his mother’s personal property was valued at fifty-five cents. He also suffered the injustice and prejudice of the reconstruction south. Violence against freedman was common and groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized southern Louisiana.

Many accounts of Seymour’s life say he was illiterate. This is not true. He attended a freedman school in Centerville and learned to read and write. In fact, his signature shows a good penmanship. Fleeing the poverty and oppression of life in southern Louisiana, Seymour left his home in early adulthood. He traveled and worked in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and other states possibly including Missouri and Tennessee. He often worked as a waiter in big city hotels.

In Indianapolis, Seymour was converted in a Methodist Church. Soon, however, he joined the Church of God Reformation movement in Anderson, Indiana. At the time, the group was called “The Evening Light Saints.” While with this conservative Holiness group, Seymour was sanctified and called to preach. After a near fatal bout with smallpox, Seymour yielded to the call to ministry. The illness left him blind in one eye and scarred his face. For the rest of his life he wore a beard to hide the scars.

In 1905, Seymour was in Houston, Texas where he heard the Pentecostal message for the first time. He attended a Bible school conducted by Charles F. Parham. Parham was the founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement, a “tritheist,” also a member of the KKK and arrested as a pedophile (see Goff, James R. Jr. (1988). Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 1-55728-025-8).  Because of the strict segregation laws of the times, Seymour was forced to sit outside the class room in the hall way. Nevertheless, he soon picked up all of Parham’s teaching, though not the gift of tongues. Parham and Seymour held joint meetings in Houston, with Seymour preaching to black audiences and Parham speaking to the white groups. Parham hoped to use Seymour to spread the Apostolic Faith message to the African-Americans in Texas. He and Seymour are both called the the father of the modern Pentecostal/Charismatic revival.

Neely Terry, a guest from Los Angeles met Seymour while he was preaching at a small church regularly pastored by Lucy Farrar (also spelled Farrow). Farrar was also an employee of Parham and was serving his family in Kansas. When Terry returned to Los Angeles, she persuaded the small Holiness church she attended to call Seymour to Los Angeles for a meeting. Her pastor, Julia Hutchinson, extended the invitation.

Seymour arrived in Los Angeles in February 1906. His early efforts to preach the Pentecostal message were rebuffed and he was locked out of the church. The leadership were suspicious of Seymour’s doctrine, but were especially concerned that he was preaching an experience that he had not received. He joined a prayer group in which his host was involved. On April 9, that man was baptized in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues. News of this event spread and a powerful outpouring followed. Over the next few days hundreds gathered. The streets were filled and Seymour preached from the porch. On April 12, three days after the initial outpouring, Seymour received his own Spirit baptism.

The group quickly outgrew the home. Seymour wrote:

In a short time God began to manifest His power and soon the building could not contain the people. Now the meetings continue all day and into the night and the fire is kindling all over the city and surrounding towns. Proud, well-dressed preachers come in to “investigate.” Soon their high looks are replaced with wonder, then conviction comes, and very often you will find them in a short time wallowing on the dirty floor, asking God to forgive them and make them as little children. ― The Azusa Papers

They found a bigger place at 312 Azusa Street. The mission had been built as an African Methodist Episcopal Church, but when the former tenants vacated, the upstairs sanctuary had been converted into apartments. A fire destroyed the pitched roof and it was replaced with a flat roof giving the 40 X 60 feet building the appearance of a square box. The unfinished downstairs with a low ceiling and dirt floor was used as a storage building and stable. This downstairs became the home of the Apostolic Faith Mission. Mismatched chairs and wooden planks were collected for seats and a prayer altar and two wooden crates covered by a cheap cloth became the pulpit.

On April 17, The Los Angeles Daily Times sent a reporter to the revival. In his article the next day, he lampooned the meeting and the pastor, calling the worshippers “a new sect of fanatics” and Seymour “an old exhorter.” He mocked their glossolalia as “weird babel of tongues.” However, his article was published on the same day as the great earthquake in San Francisco. Southern Californians, already gripped with fear, learned of a revival where doomsday prophecies were common.

Immediately an itinerate evangelist and Azusa Street participant published a tract about the earthquake. Thousands of the tracts, filled with end-time prophecies, were distributed. Soon, multitudes gathered at Azusa Street. One attendee said more than a thousand at a time would crowd onto the property. Hundreds would fill the little building; others would watch from the boardwalk; and, more would overflow into the dirt street.

With the help of a stenographer and editor the mission began to publish a newspaper, The Apostolic Faith. Seymour’s sermons were transcribed and printed, along with news of the meetings and the many missionaries that were being sent forth. Circulation for the little paper soon passed 50,000.

To Seymour, tongues was not the only message of Azusa Street: “Don’t go out of here talking about tongues: talk about Jesus,” he admonished.

An expression of the Spirit as notable as tongues was how blacks and whites were in one church at Azusa St. Seymour rejected racial barriers that plagued the Church at that time. Blacks and whites worked together in apparent harmony under the direction of a black pastor, a marvel in the days of Jim Crow segregation. One commentator said: “At Azusa Street, the color line was washed away in the Blood.”

What’s more, Seymour installed women as leaders (notably Lucy Farrow, a formerly enslaved woman and the niece of Frederick Douglass), which was almost universally opposed at the time. Seymour dreamed that Azusa Street was creating a new kind of church, one where a common experience in the Holy Spirit tore down old walls of racial, ethnic, and denominational differences.

Seymour quotes

  • I can say, through the power of the Spirit that wherever God can get a people that will come together in one accord and one mind in the Word of God, the baptism of the Holy Ghost will fall upon them, like as at Cornelius’ house.
  • So many today are worshiping in the mountains, big churches, stone and frame buildings. But Jesus teaches that salvation is not in these stone structures–not in the mountains—not in the hills, but in God.
  • The Pentecostal power, when you sum it all up, is just more of God’s love. If it does not bring more love, it is simply a counterfeit.
  • Many people today are sanctified, cleansed from all sin and perfectly consecrated to God, but they have never obeyed the Lord according to Acts 1, 4, 5, 8 and Luke 24: 39, for their real personal Pentecost, the enduement of power for service and work and for sealing unto the day of redemption. The baptism with the Holy Ghost is a free gift without repentance upon the sanctified, cleansed vessel. “Now He which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God, who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts” (2 Cor. 1: 21-22). I praise our God for the sealing of the Holy Spirit unto the day of redemption

More

Azusa Street Revival [link]

The Azusa Street Project movie (2006) [link]

More details in this bio [link]

A great theater note on the Gospel at Colonus enlightens us about ecstatic spiritual gifts. [link]

What do we do with this?

Seymour would probably simply ask us to consider his observation: “Many people today are sanctified, cleansed from all sin and perfectly consecrated to God, but they have never obeyed the Lord according to Acts 1, 4, 5, 8 and Luke 24: 39, for their real personal Pentecost, the enduement of power for service and work and for sealing unto the day of redemption.” What would you say about yourself?

George MacDonald — September 18

Europe, The Modern Era (1227-1936)

Bible connection

Read Ephesians 3

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. — Ephesians 3:20-21

All about George MacDonald (1824-1905)

In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight. — George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

George MacDonald, who died on September 18, 1905, spent his life putting this quote into practice. He was a prolific writer, constantly trying to light up the imagination and the hearts of his readers, to open up their spiritual sight. He consistently created scenarios in his fiction in which God’s love and the New Creation could be encountered from a new angle. He asked “What if?” and followed it far beyond the conventional wisdom of his day. He banked on what could not be described and for that many consider him a mystic.

He loved exploring the character of God’s Fool. He created countless characters and circumstances that helped us to see ordinary things with new eyes. In many novels and stories he imagines a person who knows the foolishness of Christ so intuitively and completely that they just can’t fit into the norms of various British societies (often his home, Scotland).  They are misunderstood almost to the point of absurdity, which delivers many plot twists and much inspiration for those of us wishing to be invasive separatists in our own time and place. Examples of this fool include, Sir Gibbe in the book by the same name, who is really the quintessential example; also Donal Grant’s mother in Donal Grant; David Elginbrod, the title character of his first novel; Ruby in The Back of the North Wind; and Dawtie in The Elect Lady.

PhantastesThe spiritual adventurer is the main character of his most well known fantasies, Phantastes and Lilith.  There is a sequence at the end of Lilith which imagines heaven in such a beautiful, extended way it seems impossible. The protagonist wakes from his vision, reflects on his journey through the land of the dead to this beautiful heaven and wonders, “Was it a dream or a real journey and does that matter?”

MacDonald cites imagination as a source for faith. Believing our dreams to be given by God we can touch the truest nature of things that often lies beyond the perceptible.

In moments of doubt I cry,
“Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?”
“Whence then came thy dream?” answers Hope.
“Out of my dark self, into the light of my consciousness.”
“But whence first into thy dark self?” rejoins Hope.
“My brain was its mother, and the fever in my blood its father.”
“Say rather,” suggests Hope, “thy brain was the violin whence it issued, and the fever in thy blood the bow that drew it forth.—But who made the violin? and who guided the bow across its strings? Say rather, again—who set the song birds each on its bough in the tree of life, and startled each in its order from its perch? Whence came the fantasia? and whence the life that danced thereto? Didst THOU say, in the dark of thy own unconscious self, ‘Let beauty be; let truth seem!’ and straightway beauty was, and truth but seemed?”
Man dreams and desires; God broods and wills and quickens.
When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it.

Princesses, witches, goblins and fairies abound in his fairy tales, for which he is probably most well known.

MacDonald says “For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” His stories provide us with courage and loyalty for our own impossible tasks. The allegories between the fantastic world he paints and the spiritual world he perceives are thick and rich enough to walk on barefooted beyond the edge of your familiar spiritual paths. The tenderness of his language, though old fashioned and often even in the Scotch language (did you know there was a distinct Scotch dialect?) are difficult enough to be all consuming, intellectually and spiritually. They are worth the effort.

A less-known element of MacDonald’s life but one of his major occupations for 12 years was traveling with his family as itinerant performers of Dramatic Illustrations. His wife, Louisa saw these performances as her calling. During their first tour in 1877 he played Greatheart in their recasting of Bunyan’s famous Pilgrims Progress focused on the second part in which Christiana and her family follow her husband, Christian.  He wrote to her that Fall in the spirit of their acting, “I have once of twice been tempted to feel abandoned ——in this messy and struggling house——-But it is only a touch of the Valley of Humiliation—-of the Hill of difficulty rather. ” [Christian History]

More

All of MacDonald’s works are in the public domain and can be read for free at Project Gutenberg. Also, LibriVox has recorded dozens of his works in audio format, many of which you can find in your podcast app.

Here is an extensive fan page

Check out this great video that eloquently introduces his mysticism and his impact:

This entry emphasized MacDonald’s imaginative works but his Unspoken Sermons is among the best of the gold mine of really good theology he wrote in several collections of sermons. [Another collection with an introduction]

What do we do with this?

Put a novel on your reading list, even if MacDonald is not your cup of tea.

Where does your imagination find a home? What goodness can you dream? What did you actually dream last night while you were sleeping? All of these are sometimes neglected, or underappreciated sources of revelation. Practice trusting beyond the intellect.

Perhaps you can grasp at revelation with your own art⁠—language or otherwise. Share that feeling that is hard to describe. Attempt to illustrate God’s glory.

Peter Claver — September 8

South America, The Modern Era (1227-1936)
By Raul Berzosa for the Chapel of Our Lady of Bethlehem at the Belen Jesuit Prep School, Miami, FA

Bible connection

Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross. — Philippians 2:5-8

All about Peter Claver (1580-1654)

Peter Claver came from Spain to the docks in Cartagena (now in Colombia) shortly after his training for the priesthood was completed. He was ordained there in 1615. He worked with Alfonso de Sandoval, a priest who dedicated more than forty years of his life to ministering to enslaved people. Sandoval wrote the earliest record of Black Africans in the Spanish Colonies. Peter not only took up his mentor’s mantle, he called himself “Petrus Claver, Aethiopum servus,” or “Peter Claver, slave of the Africans.”

Cartagena was a wealthy center for the slave trade. Ten thousand slaves poured into the port each year after crossing the Atlantic from West Africa under conditions so foul and inhuman that an estimated one-third of the passengers died in transit.

As soon as a slave ship entered the port, Peter Claver moved into its infested hold to minister to the ill-treated and exhausted passengers. After the slaves were herded out of the ship like animals and shut up in nearby pens to be inspected, Claver plunged in among them with medicines, food, bread, brandy, lemons, and tobacco (see this excerpt of a letter he wrote).

The life Peter Claver chose to lead defied convention. When others shrank back in repulsion, he extended his hands in love. When others avoided situations for fear of filth and feces, he bravely entered into the darkness of sickness and death with the light of Christ. What others thought of as wasted time resulted in the baptism of over 300,000  people during his ministry.

Peter Claver ventured into the places no one wanted to go, and he did the work that no one thought anyone should do. And no one could stop him. One of the great feats he completed was learning the languages of the enslaved people in order to bring them the Gospel. Claver worked with seven interpreters, one of them spoke four African dialects. With their help, he  taught the Gospel with words that could be understood. He would also use pictures in his teaching, primarily images of the crucified Christ. He sought ways for discarded people to know their dignity and worth, and they learned how deeply they were loved despite their circumstances. The image of the Suffering Servant giving his life said it all.

He said, “We must speak to them with our hands before we try to speak to them with our lips.”

Claver’s work extended beyond his care for slaves. He became a moral force in Cartagena; some said he was the “apostle” of the city. He preached in the city square, organizing the mass with sailors and traders he recruited from the ships along with the country folk coming for the markets. He avoided the hospitality of the planters and owners and lodged in the slave quarters instead.

In 1650, after dedicating nearly forty years of his life to ministering to enslaved and devalued people, Claver became ill during a virulent epidemic and nearly lost his life. After he recovered, he was still bedridden and in pain for the remaining four years of his life. He was largely forgotten and neglected as the unrelenting plague swept through.

Just a few days after another priest came to take up the mantle of ministering to the suffering Africans, Peter Claver died. It was as if he knew, while bedridden, his work was not being done until a successor arrived. It is even reported that he gathered strength to rise from his bed to greet his replacement. Upon his passing, those who had ridiculed him and mocked his ministry as “a waste” gave him a lavish state funeral.

More

This nice biography is also a spirited defense of human rights as a Catholic inspiration, not the province of a few white men, many who owned slaves (that would be you, Thomas Jefferson):

The history of St. Peter Claver Church Philadelphia (closed 2023) is interesting and a little sad. [Archdiocese site]

The Knights of Peter Claver  was organized in 1909 in Mobile, Alabama. It is the largest and oldest Black Catholic lay-led organization still in existence. It was modeled after other Catholic fraternal orders such as the Knights of Columbus, who at the time did not allow Black members in all of their councils. Here is a video of their centennial mass in 2009:

The Roman Catholic Church commemorates St. Peter Claver on September 9 instead of on his death day. It could be because Mary’s birthday has been on September 8 since the 6th Century when St. Anne’s Church was built on a site in Jerusalem where she was purportedly born.

What do we do with this?

Worldwide, there are still men and women who are being treated as objects. There are also those who have tragically forgotten or have never understood their dignity and their worth. There are many who are sick without aid or relief. There are many who are dying alone. We are all longing for the same message Peter Claver brought to the slaves from Africa: “You are loved, you are unrepeatable, and you have dignity and purpose.”

This snippet from the Forum of Christian Leadership also shows that human rights is a concept that begins with Christian thinkers. If you can’t outthink the present influencers of our day, you can support people who can. Otherwise, Peter Thiel and the like will buy all the politicians and the airwaves to sell a vision for a society in which only his kind can win [video].

Louis Francescon — September 7

North America, South America, The Modern Era (1227-1936)

Bible connection

Look at the proud!
Their spirit is not right in them,
but the righteous live by their faithfulness.–– Habakkuk 2:4

All about Luigi (Louis) Franscescon (1866-1964)

Luigi Francescon was born in an Italian farming village named Cavasso Nuovo, not far from what is now the Slovenian border. His family faced hard times. Their poverty was compounded by the need to pay tribute to the village overlord. Though only educated to the sixth grade, Francescon overcame his poverty by perfecting his craft as a mosaicist. He then joined the military and earned enough to emigrate to the United States.

He arrived in Chicago on March 3, 1890. There he heard the preaching of Michele Nardi the Italian immigrant evangelist and left Catholicism for interdenominational Protestant faith. Together with Waldensians Teofilo Gay and Filippo Grill, also connected with Nardi, Francescon helped found the First Italian Presbyterian Church of Chicago. He soon left the Presbyterians, however, because infant baptism did not make sense to him. The evangelist, Giuseppe Beretta, led him to embrace adult baptism by immersion and rebaptized him. A new church formed under Beretta’s leadership, meeting in homes, including Francescon’s.

On August 25, 1907, during a visit to William H. Durham’s North Avenue Mission, only blocks away from his home, Francescon was baptized in the Spirit. Durham’s mission had become the center for a revival influenced by the outpouring at Azusa Street in Los Angles. Durham had been a skeptic until he visited Azusa Street and spoke in tongues.

With fellow Pentecostal pioneer Pietro Ottolini, Francescon stood for several years at the helm of an awakening at the Italian Grand Avenue Mission, which later took the name the Assemblea Cristiana (Christian Assembly). Francescon helped steer the church through several years of doctrinal turbulence (over issues such as the Sabbath), while continuing to stand firmly against further attempts to “organize” the work. However, when the future of the Italian American Pentecostal movement depended on it, he relented to the demand to structure the church along doctrinal and missional lines. He was thus among the chief founders and original overseers of the Christian Church of North America, the flagship denomination of the movement — later the CCUS or Christian Congregation in the United States. There is a congregation in Philadelphia at 1900 Ripley in Rhawnhurst.

Francescon also founded congregations in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, often leaving his wife and six children in the care of the church.

Alongside his pioneering work on the North American front, Francescon is also counted among the most prominent of the founders of Pentecostal work in South America.  Accompanied by Giacomo Lombardi and Lucia Menna from the Chicago Mission, in late 1909 Francescon embarked on a missionary trip to family and friends in Argentina. His own report, and the historical memory of the churches he founded, attest to his evangelism being accompanied by healings and various miracles. In the city of San Cayetano, Francescon was arrested and stood trial. Upon his release, he was forbidden to ever preach there again.

Present mother church of Congregação Cristã no Brasil in Bras, Sao Paulo. 50,000+ temples in 78 countries with over 3 million members.

Francescon’s life-defining work still lay ahead. Among the Italian diaspora in Brazil he founded the Congregação Cristã no Brasil (Portuguese for Christian Congregation in Brazil). This church became the mother of a global denomination. In March of 1910 he arrived in São Paulo. One of his first contacts there was Vincenzo Pievani, an atheist. Pievani brought him to his home in San Antonio da Platina where Francescon conducted a fruitful outreach among the Roman Catholic population. His success attracted the attention of a local priest. The priest reportedly plotted to have Francescon killed, sparking Francescon’s escape and return to São Paulo. There he witnessed to a number of Presbyterians, Methodists, and Roman Catholics, who left their parishes and joined the fledgling Pentecostal movement. He delivered a homily in Italian at a Presbyterian church in the Italian barrio known as the Brás, urging the congregation to seek the baptism in the Spirit. The eldership fervidly disapproved of both the manner and language Francescon used to deliver the sermon. Ordered to leave the congregation, Francescon carried a large number away with him and founded an independent congregation. The church became the linchpin for the Congregação Cristã, which remains to this day one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in Brazil.

In 1911, William Durham reported that Francescon had left for Italy to evangelize his home region. “It was never our privilege to meet a more blessed and powerful man of God”, he wrote. “He is certainly doing, as it were, the work of an Apostle”.

Over his lifetime, Francescon made nine trips from his home church in Chicago to Brazil. Although he made no monetary demands, the Congregação Cristã funded his last two trips. Even until his death in 1964, at 96, and completely blind, Francescon continued to send letters of encouragement to the Pentecostal work he founded in Brazil.

More

Nice Wikipedia page.

Explorations in Italian Protestantism has been much referenced above. Here is Francescon’s page.

At the CCUS website, they have included their founder’s testimony.

Are you familiar with Family Search? Here is Luigi’s page.

This is in Portuguese, but the pictures give some nice background:

What do we do with this?

The Pentecostal movement has made a huge impact on Brazil and all of South America.  It felt wild to the Presbyterians Francescon left behind. Ironically, the denomination he founded reportedly lost more than 200,000 adherents leading into the 21st century due to their inability to adapt to the times. Their prophecy was overcome by the order Francescon resisted. It makes us think how we can be stuck in our ways and irrelevant, even though what got our churches started was also passion and selfless work.

In the mid-20th century, 90% of Brazilians identified as Catholics.  Recent estimates suggest the percentage is closer to 50%. The Wikipedia page outlines the expansion.  If you are an American, you might not be aware of  anything on that page. But you might run into one of the Brazilian missionaries called to serve in your godless backyard.  The Family Church Brazil has been in Frankford for over 5 years.  What do you think about living in a mission field?

Lilias Trotter — August 28

Africa, Europe, The Modern Era (1227-1936)

Image result for lilias trotter

Bible connection

…unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. —Matthew 5:20

All about Lilias Trotter (1853-1928)

Isabella Lilias Trotter has been recently reintroduced to our century through the documentary, Many Beautiful Things, which depicts her life and vision.

Trotter was born in England in 1853 to an upper-middle-class family. She was a gifted artist and was told she could be England’s greatest living artist, but to achieve that place she would have to give herself totally to her art. At the same time, Lilias had a growing faith which encouraged her not only in her personal spiritual growth, but also in service to others.

Trotter felt a call to go to North Africa and serve the Lord there. She thought she had to choose between pursuing her career as an artist and fulfilling this calling. She chose to follow God. As a single woman who was denied support from a mission agency because of health issues and who didn’t know the language or culture, going to Africa was a radical decision.

Here’s a peek at her life story. Lilias Trotter’s father died when she was twelve. She was devastated. Fortunately, the family’s financial circumstances were only comparatively diminished by his loss. When the family moved to 40 Montagu Square, their next-door neighbor was writer Anthony Trollope.

In her early twenties, Trotter and her mother were greatly influenced by the Higher Life Movement, and Lilias joined the volunteer force that counseled inquirers during the London campaign meetings of American evangelist Dwight L. Moody.

Trotter’s mother thought her self-taught daughter was an exceptional artistic talent. In 1876, she sent some of Lilias’ drawings to art critic and social philosopher John Ruskin while all three were staying in Venice—the latter while recovering from the early death of Rose La Touche, a young pupil to whom he had proposed marriage. Ruskin praised Trotter’s artistic skill, and she became an informal student and a good friend despite the disparity in their ages. Ruskin told Trotter that if she would devote herself to her art “she would be the greatest living painter and do things that would be Immortal.”

Although Trotter was drawn to the prospect of a life in art, in May of 1879 she decided that she could not give herself “to painting and continue still to ‘seek first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness.’” Trotter became active in the Welbeck Street YWCA and served as secretary, a voluntary position usually filled by women like herself from wealthy families. She did a considerable amount of teaching and (unusually for respectable young women of the period) fearlessly canvassed the streets alone at night near Victoria Station for prostitutes who might be persuaded to train for an employable skill or to simply spend a night in a hostel. In 1884, suffering from physical and emotional exhaustion, she underwent surgery which apparently left her heart permanently damaged.

During the next few years, Trotter felt an impulse toward missionary work, She told one of her friends that “whenever she prayed, the words ‘North Africa’ sounded in her soul as though a voice were calling her.” In May 1887, when a missionary to North Africa asked at a religious meeting if God was calling anyone to North Africa, Trotter rose and said, “He is calling me.” On her thirty-fourth birthday, she applied as a candidate to the North African Mission—which then rejected her because she was unable to pass its health examination. However, because she had the resources to be self-supporting, the Mission decided that she might “work in harmony” with the society without being an official member.

Nine months later, Trotter and two other financially independent women—including Blanche Haworth, who for more than thirty years played “Martha” to Trotter’s “Mary,” arrived in Algiers. Trotter recalled, “Three of us stood there, looking at our battle-field, none of us fit to pass a doctor for any society, not knowing a soul in the place, or a sentence of Arabic or a clue for beginning work on untouched ground; we only knew we had to come. Truly if God needed weakness, He had it!”

The women moved into the French quarter and diligently studied Arabic through French study materials and eventually through a professional tutor. They also learned how to do domestic work, all of them previously having had their needs met by servants.

Later Trotter said that the early years were like “knocking our heads against stone walls,” but the women were indefatigable, trying one technique after another in an attempt to make inroads into the Algerian culture and all the while improving their Arabic. Eventually Trotter was able to gain access to the heavily secluded women by befriending their children. The outreach to women, she believed, was a “great line of cleavage in the rock face of Islam.”

Converts were banished, beaten, even (Trotter believed) poisoned with “mind drugs” that were administered in food or drink and would produce “a paralysis of mind and will.” Many converts died, and Trotter “came to rejoice in their loss. ‘We were glad to let them go….One draws a breath of relief when they get safe home [to heaven].’”

Trotter’s health was so seriously impaired that she regularly spent extended periods of convalescence in Great Britain or on the continent. Adding to the difficulties of the English missionaries was French colonial suspicion of their activities. The local government bought a house across the street and for three years lured potential converts away with competing classes. Spies and gendarmes even followed the women into the southern desert and threatened fines and imprisonment for any who went near them or accepted their literature.

Lessons from a Hero: What Lilias Trotter Can Teach Us Today
An illustration from Trotter’s Parables of the Cross.

By 1906, with warming relations between England and France, Trotter experienced less governmental antagonism and more freedom for her missionary work. In 1907 five new workers joined the “Algiers Mission Band.” By 1920, there were thirty full-time workers and fifteen preaching stations. Trotter became the reluctant, but unchallenged, leader of the group. Trotter was sensitive to the contemporary difficulty of a woman exerting authority over a man, but as the staff included more men, she shrewdly refined “the organizational system to capitalize on their leadership.” Trotter never solicited funds because she said God’s wealth was boundless.

Trotter was also a pioneer in attempting to adapt Christian missionary endeavor to the Algerian culture. Referring to evangelistic meetings as a “European idea,” she proposed evangelizing with “a native cafe on a Christian footing,” readings of the Bible in a “rhythmical recitative” accompanied by a drum, a craft house that would teach little girls embroidery, and a Christian retreat for women to “take the place of the outings to shrines which are their only chance of fresh air.” Trotter designed cards that had biblical passages drawn by an Arab scribe because “no one but a native can give the subtle lines & curves of the writing as they should be.” The mission society even published a series of cards with a sentence from the Koran followed by verses from the Old Testament.

Image result for lilias trotter

While Lilias turned her back on fame, she did not turn her back on her art. In addition to art found in her journals, she used her art in the pamphlets she created to share the gospel with the people in Algeria. Trotter was a “prodigious writer,” filling a journal page nearly every day for forty years and illustrating the world around her with sketches and watercolors. From these efforts came several books of somewhat flowery and mystical prose, including Parables of the Cross and Parables of the Christ-life. Though she considered orthodox Islam “dry as the dune, hard as the gravel,” she responded to the “sincere hunger for things of the spirit” in the Sufi mystics and wrote for them The Way of the Sevenfold Secret as a devotional guide based on the seven “I am” statements found in the Gospel of John.

Confined to bed during her last years, Trotter devoted herself to prayer, writing, and sketching while continuing to manage the affairs of the Algiers Mission Band as best she could. As her body failed, her mind remained clear, even at the end asking prayer for the strength to dictate a letter to Amy Carmichael of India, with whom she had regular correspondence. As she was dying, while attendants sang a hymn, she exclaimed, “A chariot and six horses.” “You are seeing beautiful things,” someone asked. “Yes,” she said, “many, many beautiful things.”

More

The documentary: Many Beautiful Things

The original biography.

Parables of the Cross online

Lilias Trotter Legacy page [link]

What do we do with this?

Trotter was inspired by the higher life of notable Christians. Perhaps you will be inspired by her.

Trotter loved those who were marginalized. She ministered among the prostitutes in London and lived among the poor of Algiers, ministering with women and children. One Algerian woman shared this about her: “No one loved us like she did.” Lilias writes in her journal, “I have been thinking lately what a work for God it is just loving people.” In our current cultural climate of hatred for the “other,” we have an opportunity to be people of love, not hateovercome evil with good. 

She had courage to take risks, following where God was leading her. Her choices were radical, defying concern from friends and societal expectations. She served the Lord alone.

She was willing to turn her back on everything she knew and what was familiar and comfortable to follow God. She was willing to leave behind comforts, friends, culture, language, and fame. This is no different for people today who choose to follow Christ. It costs them everything. 

She recognized that her gift as an artist was from God; it wasn’t her own doing. While we might think we are where we are today because of our own abilities, in reality it is God who decided which time period, family, country, and gifts were given to us. We are simply stewards of all that we have and are to use our gifts for God’s glory and to further His kingdom.

She engaged in cross-cultural ministry by listening and learning from the people. She respected their culture. She did not come to the people with a paternalistic mindset; rather, she came as a fellow traveler in life and as a learner. She met physical needs as well as spiritual needs. She was driven to share the love of Christ with whomever she met.

William Booth — August 20

Europe, The Modern Era (1227-1936)

William-Booth-c1900.jpg

Bible connection

Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving in the army gets entangled in everyday affairs; the soldier’s aim is to please the enlisting officer. – 2 Timothy 2:3-4

All about William Booth (1878-1912)

William Booth, “The Prophet of the Poor,” was an English Methodist preacher who, along with his wife, Catherine, founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878–1912). The Christian Mission he started in 1865 later acquired a quasi-military structure and government and spread to many parts of the world where it is now known for being a major source of humanitarian aid.

After Booth died, 150,000 people filed by his casket, and 40,000 people, including Queen Mary (yes that Queen Mary), attended his funeral. It was a remarkable end for a man born into poverty and who worked in the midst of poverty his whole life.

Booth was born near Nottingham, England. His parents were not religious and lower middle class at best, with little education. His father, “a Grab, a Get,” according to Booth definition, died when he was 14. By that time, William was helping to earn the family income as a pawnbroker’s apprentice.

Sometime during his fifteenth year, Booth was invited by a couple to attend a Wesleyan chapel, where he decided to follow Jesus. He wrote in his diary, “God shall have all there is of William Booth.” Then came another life-changing experience: he heard Charles Finney (see Aug. 16) speak in a Nottingham church. The reaction of the crowd led Booth to see that “soul-saving results may be calculated upon when proper means are used for their accomplishment.” Booth went on to make a lifelong commitment to Finney’s methods.

Booth and a group of friends set out to evangelize the poor. They made nightly open-air speeches, after which they invited people to meetings in homes. Their use of lively songs, short exhortations calling for a decision for Christ, and personal visits to the sick and their converts (whose names and addresses they recorded) anticipated methods Booth would write into Salvation Army Orders and Regulations 30 years later. When he was criticized for using secular tunes to attract crowds, he replied, “Secular music, do you say, belongs to the devil? Does it? Well, if it did I would plunder him for it, for he has no right to a single note of the whole seven.”

Catherine Mumford and William Booth

When his pastor proposed that he prepare for ordained ministry, Booth accepted. The disorganized church to which he was called repelled him. During this period, he met Catherine Mumford. Beginning with their second meeting on Good Friday 1852, they entered one of the most remarkable relationships in Christian history. They married in June of 1855.

By 1861 Booth decided “settled ministry” did not suit him, and he resigned. He and Catherine became itinerant evangelists in Wales, Cornwall, and the Midlands, Britain’s “burned-over” districts. The Booths preached in lantern-lit tents on unused burial grounds, in haylofts, in rooms behind a pigeon shop—anywhere to fulfill his famous words, “Go for souls and go for the worst!”

An invitation for Catherine to preach in London in 1865 led him to accept temporary leadership of a mission in East London. That area in the 1860’s was a crowded, squalid, maze of hovels, 290 people to the acre. It was said that every fifth house was a gin shop, and most of them had special steps to help even the tiniest children reach the counter. After seeing some of East London’s gin palaces, he told Catherine, “I seemed to hear a voice sounding in my ears, ‘Where can you go and find such heathen as these, and where is there so great a need for your labors?’”

Booth soon organized his own East London Christian Mission. In 1878, he energized it by giving it the name “Salvation Army,” with himself as the General. Military trappings were added over the next couple of years. The idea caught the imagination, and within ten years, the Salvation Army was established in the United States, Canada, and Europe as well.

Over the years, he and Catherine created an elaborate social relief system because he believed charity would speed the work of evangelism. In 1890, he published  In Darkest England and the Way Out to explain his social relief scheme; it became a best-seller.

At the time of his death, the Salvation Army had become a family-run Christian empire, with seven of the Booths’ eight children taking leadership positions. Today, following the pattern established by the first general, the Salvation Army marches on with over 25,000 officers in 91 countries.

Quotes:

While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight; while little children go hungry, I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight—while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, where there remains one dark soul without the light of God—I’ll fight! I’ll fight to the very end!

The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.

God loves with a great love the man whose heart is bursting with a passion for the impossible.

More

Get his story from the Salvation Army. A more detailed bio from UK Wells that highlights the struggles and opposition Booth faced.

Hear William Booth in his own voice

Watch a dramatization of a vision if William Booth. [Try an artistic one with an English accent!]

Joan Kroc’s bequest of McDonald’s money to the Salvation Army changed things.

This video is a 1978 revision of materials discovered in 1953:

What do we do with this?

Booth’s passion caused some major relationship issues and division. At the same time it caused a lot of healing and drew people into relationship with Jesus who would never have gotten there through a more traditional church. Does anything move you, in particular these days? Are you movable? Booth would ask you, “What are you waiting for? Jesus did not hesitate to rescue you.”

Umeko Tsuda — August 16

Asia, The Modern Era (1227-1936)

Bible Connection

“Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

He also told them this parable: “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit? The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher. — Luke 6:38-40 NIV

All about Umeko Tsuda (1864-1929)

Umeko Tsuda believed all women in Japan should have equal access to higher education and that only education could help improve women’s status in the country.

Tsuda Umeko was a Japanese educator who founded Tsuda University. She was the daughter of Tsuda Sen, an agricultural scientist. At the age of 7, she became Japan’s first female exchange student, traveling to the U.S. on the same ship as the Iwakura Mission, the government’s exploration tour of Western culture.

Umeko was born in 1864 in Edo, present-day Tokyo. Four years later, the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate gave way to the Meiji period (1868–1912), when a new, young Japan sought to modernize its political, social, economic, cultural, and religious systems. In this era, Christian women came to play an important role in Japanese society.

While in the United States, Tsuda lived with Charles Lanman, the secretary of the Japanese legation, and his wife, Adeline, both of whom were committed Episcopalians. Inspired by their faith, Umeko also embraced Christianity and was baptized.

Bryn Mawr graduation photo

When she turned 18, Tsuda returned to Japan and worked as a children’s tutor there. She soon returned to the United States to pursue an education at Bryn Mawr College, in a Philadelphia suburb, majoring in biology and education. During her second stay stateside, Tsuda became convinced that the only way to improve women’s status in Japan was to give them the same opportunity to enter higher education as men.

“Oh, women have the hardest part of life to bear in more ways than one. … Poor, poor women, how I long to do something to better your position!” she wrote in a letter to Adeline Lanman.

Existing schools for Japanese girls and women aimed only to educate them to be submissive wives, sisters, and daughters at home, whereas education for boys and men was far more comprehensive. Tsuda soon established the American Scholarship for Japanese Women to provide financial aid to women studying in the United States who would return to Japan to lead in developing women’s education. Some of them became influential political and educational leaders in Japan during and after the Meiji period.

Such inequality in educational opportunities was also why she founded Joshi Eigaku Juku, the Women’s Institute for English Studies, in 1900. The Tokyo-based school afforded women equal opportunities to pursue higher education in the liberal arts. After World War II, the Women’s Institute became Tsuda University, which is now one of the most prestigious institutes of higher education for women in Japan. Tsuda also became the first president of the Japanese branch of the World Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1905.

For all her accomplishments, Tsuda was not immune to discouragement:

“There is a great work to be done, but the laborers are indeed few. God bless the cause, and bless and keep us all. I wonder if I can ever do any good. … It is tiresome work, and I am not used to it all yet, and I don’t know how to work best for the Master’s cause,” she confessed in another letter to Adeline.

Tsuda’s legacy remains strong today. She was ranked one of the top 20 most prominent Japanese women in a 2019 survey by national magazine Tokyo Weekender, and her face will appear on the ¥5,000 bill starting in 2024.

As Tsuda wrote, “Somehow God seems to be opening the future [in] some way, and he has given me such a strange, wonderful, uncommon-place life, thus far, that it seems as if the future could not be merely useless.”

More

Bio from Japan Society of Boston  [link]

Many interesting, historic pictures here [link]

What do we do with this?

Can you imagine who you would be if your family had sent you to a new country when you were seven years old?

Tsuda might have married an American and settled into a nice, wealthy life in the Philadelphia suburbs. Instead, she went back to Japan and threw herself against the limits of her traditional society. She broke down many barriers. No doubt her faith encouraged her, like Jesus, to give what she had been given for the lives of others.

Charles Finney — August 16

North America, The Modern Era (1227-1936)

Bible connection

Read 1 Thessalonians 5:16-22

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.

All about Charles Finney (1792-1875)

One time someone brought a shotgun to one of Charles Finney’s revival meetings, intending to kill him. May you cause that kind of trouble as you defy the powers!

Some people might not think Finney fits into the “cloud of witnesses” that make up our respected spiritual ancestors. He was the “father of modern revivalism.” He was the forerunner of Billy Graham in the sense that he popularized the “altar call” and other tactics many find a bit too coercive or manipulative. But his demands for living a truly Christian life, his determination to get something going, and his presumption that people could live up to their radical calling, is right up our alley. He was also among the first to have women and African Americans participating in his meetings as equals with white men. One story is that the altar call’s original purpose was to come forward to sign petitions to abolish slavery.

The zenith of Finney’s evangelistic career was in the 1830′s during the Second Great Awakening. In Rochester, New York, he preached 98 sermons that caused a ruckus.  Shopkeepers closed their businesses, posting notices urging people to attend Finney’s meetings. Reportedly, the population of the town increased by two-thirds during the revival, and crime dropped by two-thirds over the same period. In 1900 church historian Susan Hayes Ward wrote “The hearer at the time felt that Mr. Finney was talking to him personally rather than preaching before an audience…He did not speak about sinners in the abstract, but he talked to the individual sinners before him.”

In 1832 he began an almost continuous revival in New York City as minister of the Second Free Presbyterian Church, organized especially for him. In the middle of his installation service he became ill with cholera. Others who caught the disease that day died. Finney almost died, as well, and it was months before he could take up his full duties.

From its inception the church embraced Finney’s passionate anti-slavery stance.  Black worshipers were welcomed (albeit in a separated section) –- a policy which, coupled with Finney’s outspoken abolitionist sermons, did not sit well with many outsiders and newspapers.  During the riots of 1833, a mob broke into the church and attacked black members.  On July 8 the Courier and Enquirer spat “Another of those disgraceful negro-outrages &c., occurred last night at that common focus of pollution, Chatham Street Chapel” (Susan Hayes Ward).

In 1834 after further anti-abolitionist riots, Finney moved into the huge Broadway Tabernacle his followers built for him. He stayed there for only a year, leaving to pastor Oberlin Congregational Church in Ohio, and to teach theology at Oberlin College. In 1851, he was appointed president of the college, which gave him a new forum to advocate the social reforms he championed, especially the abolition of slavery. Oberlin College, under his leadership, was the first college to admit woman and black/brown people to be educated with white men.

Finney married evangelism to social reform, New Testament evangelism with Old Testament prophecy, piety with radicalism, and conversion with action. He got people talking and acting. He was not content with them simply receiving or consuming. His commitment to Jesus meant taking care of the poor and the needy, and his deep commitment to social reform was seen in the radicalism of Oberlin College and in his major push to end slavery. Those he inspired continued to take risks in order to relate to each other and change the world.

Finney quotes:

Nothing tends more to cement the hearts of Christians than praying together. Never do they love one another so well as when they witness the outpouring of each other’s hearts in prayer.

No government is lawful or innocent that does not recognize the moral law as the only universal law, and God as the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge, to whom nations in their national capacity, as well as individuals, are amenable.

When there are dissensions, and jealousies, and evil speakings among professors of religion, then there is great need of a revival. These things show that Christians have got far from God, and it is time to think earnestly of a revival.

More

Oberlin College remembers Finney.

Questioning Finney’s legacy: Michael Horton, Christian History, PBS, Johnny Lithell (Sweden).

What do we do with this?

Don’t get yourself shot unless you have to, but how should you stir up enough trouble being a Christian that you arouse opposition? Ever think of doing that? Ever make a plan?

Pray for revival to break out. It would be great if people shut their business down (or turned off the TV) to come meet with Jesus followers and experience the presence of God!

Basil, Fool for Christ — August 2

Europe, The Modern Era (1227-1936)
Icon of St. Vasily the Blessed (Bas relief, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow)

Bible connection

For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have begun to reign—and that without us! How I wish that you really had begun to reign so that we also might reign with you! For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like those condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to human beings. We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honored, we are dishonored! To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world—right up to this moment. — 1 Corinthians 4:7-13 NIV

St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, viewed from Red Square

All about Basil, Fool for Christ (1468-1552/1557)

Basil is known as Vasily the Blessed, or Vasily, Fool for Christ, or Vasily, Wonderworker of Moscow, or Blessed Vasily of Moscow, Fool for Christ. He is one of the best known Russian Orthodox saints of the type known as a yurodivy or “holy fool.” He is so well known that one of the most iconic buildings in Moscow, near the Kremlin, was renamed in his honor.

Basil was born into a family of serfs in December 1468 in a village which is now a neighborhood in Moscow. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker and soon showed his unique calling. For instance, when a merchant ordered special boots but could not wait for them to be finished, he told the shoemaker he would get them when he returned the following year. Basil wept and said, “I wish you would cancel the order, since you will never wear them.” When his perplexed master questioned him, he explained that the man would not wear the boots because he as he would soon die. After several days the prediction proved true.

Basil adopted the eccentric lifestyle of other holy men who were known as fools for Christ. The role of “holy fool” is especially honored in the Russian Orthodox Church. Dostoevsky includes characters who are “holy fools,” such as Lizaveta and Sonya (the heroine), in Crime and Punishment. Tolstoy tells about Grisha, the holy fool who came onto his parents’ estate in his memoir. Francis of Assisi is a notable Roman Catholic example of a person who thought being a fool for Christ was his calling. While there is great variety among them, holy fools in every case are ascetic Christians living well outside the borders of ordinary social behavior, including conventional religious behavior. In many countries they might be locked away in asylums or simply ignored until the elements silence them, after which they would be thrown into unmarked graves.

Basil was known for walking through the streets of Moscow barefoot (in the cleaned up version of the story) or naked in the burning summer heat and the harsh winter cold. His actions were often strange. For instance, the story goes, one time he overturned a kalachi (sweetbread) stand, and another time he spilled a jug of kvas (near beer). The angry merchants beat him, but he endured the beatings with joy and he thanked God for them. Then, it was discovered that the kalachi were poorly cooked, and the kvas was badly prepared. Soon, his reputation grew, and people saw him as a holy fool, not just a fool, as a man of God, and a denouncer of wrong.

Basil preached mercy. He helped those who were ashamed to beg, but who were the most in need. He harshly condemned those who did not give alms for love but thought they could use the action to buy God’s blessings on their business. Basil passed by a house in people were drinking and wild and he wept and hugged the corner of the building. When Basil was asked why he answered: “Angels stand in sorrow at the house and are distressed by the sins of the people, but I entreat them with tears to pray to the Lord for the conversion of sinners.”

It is said that Basil could foresee the future. In 1547, he predicted the great fire of Moscow. It is said he extinguished a fire at Novgorod by prayer. Once he reproached Tsar Ivan the Terrible, because during worship he was preoccupied with thoughts of building a palace on the Vorobiev hills. Another time, Basil gave Tsar Ivan some meat during Lent, telling him it did not matter whether or not he fasted from eating meat, because of the murders he had committed.

Basil was so revered by Muscovites that, when he died, his thin body was buried, not in a pauper’s grave on the city’s edge, but next to the newly erected Cathedral of the Protection of the Mother of God. Tsar Ivan himself acted as pallbearer and carried his coffin to the cemetery. From that time people began calling the church St. Basil’s, because to go there meant one would pause to pray at Basil’s grave. Not many years passed before Basil was formally canonized. A chapel built over his grave became an integral part of the great building, adding one more onion dome to the eight already there.

More

History of St. Basil’s Cathedral [Wiki]

“The Way of the Holy Fools” by Jim Forest.

“Jesus the Holy Fool” by Hans Boersma.

Would you like to see the architecture of the iconic church?:

What do we do with this?

Paul sounds a bit irate when his detractors mock his foolishness for Christ. Jesus seems innocent, as if being a fool were normal and being normal were foolish. Basil seems like he can’t help himself because he is just not normal. What is unique about you that the world needs to see? What will it cost you to show it and what difference does it make if it costs you?

Conrad Grebel — August 1

Europe, The Modern Era (1227-1936)
Conrad Grebel imagined by Oliver Wendell Schenk in 1972.

Bible connection

When the high priest and his associates arrived, they called together the Sanhedrin—the full assembly of the elders of Israel—and sent to the jail for the apostles. But on arriving at the jail, the officers did not find them there. So they went back and reported, “We found the jail securely locked, with the guards standing at the doors; but when we opened them, we found no one inside.” On hearing this report, the captain of the temple guard and the chief priests were at a loss, wondering what this might lead to.

Then someone came and said, “Look! The men you put in jail are standing in the temple courts teaching the people.” At that, the captain went with his officers and brought the apostles. They did not use force, because they feared that the people would stone them.

The apostles were brought in and made to appear before the Sanhedrin to be questioned by the high priest. “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,” he said. “Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man’s blood.”

Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!  — Acts 5:22-29

All about Conrad Grebel (1498–1526)

Conrad Grebel acted on his convictions with his twentysomething buddies (and quite a few older relatives) and catalyzed the Swiss Brethren, part of the Radical Reformation, later tagged the Anabaptists.

Grebel was born in Gruningen to Jakob and Dorothea Grebel. The family moved to Zurich when he was around fifteen years old.

Grebel spent six years in three universities but never earned a degree. In Paris he lived a wild life. When his father cut off his funds, he returned to Zurich.

In 1521, he met with a group led by Ulrich Zwingli, leader of the Reformation in Switzerland. The two studied Greek, Hebrew and the Latin Bible together.

His life changed in 1522 when he married a woman below his social class his family  found inappropriate. He later experienced a Christian conversion and underwent a dramatic lifestyle change, becoming an ardent supporter of Zwingli and his church reforms.

The next year differences between Grebel and Zwingli arose. Both men wanted the Catholic Mass to be abolished but when Zurich city councilmen did not favor it, Zwingli relented. Grebel believed the councilmen had no authority over the church and also didn’t think the church had authority over the state.

What he really believed in was the authority of the Bible. The principle that galvanized the new movement was adult baptism. The Bible did not mention infant baptism. But the church and state both used it — the former to control members and the latter to identify citizens. Grebel and his group believed only adults should be baptized on the basis of their profession of faith. On January 17, 1525, Zwingli called for a public debate on the issue. Felix Manz and George Blaurock joined Grebel on the side of believers baptism.

City council members and Zwingli disagreed and ordered Grebel’s group to disband and all unbaptized infants to be baptized. Grebel’s daughter was an infant, but he refused her baptism.

In the Home of Felix Manz’s Mother

Soon Grebel met with the exiled radicals and baptized Blaurock. Then Blaurock baptized Grebel, Manz and others present. Grebel traveled to St. Gall and preached the gospel of repentance and baptism, and more than 500 people responded to his call. This was the beginning of a significant radical outbreak that was soon suppressed.

In October 1525, Grebel was arrested. In prison he wrote a defense of adult baptism; what we know of it is from quotes in a Zwingli pamphlet from 1527. He escaped in March 1526 to continue preaching. A few months later he died of the plague at the age of 28.

His closest friends were martyrs — Manz was drowned in 1527, and Blaurock was burned at the stake in 1529.

Although his ministry was less than four years and his time as an Anabaptist only a year-and-a-half, Grebel’s contributions made him known as “The Father of Anabaptists.”

Quotes

Seek earnestly to preach only God’s word unflinchingly, to establish and defend only divine practices, to esteem as good and right only what can be found in definite clear Scripture, and to reject, hate, and curse all the schemes, words, practices, and opinions of all men, even your own. –– Letter to Thomas Munzter

Moreover, the gospel and its adherents are not to be protected by the sword, nor [should] they [protect] themselves, which as we have heard through our brother is what you believe and maintain. True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for the slaughter. They must be baptized in anguish and tribulation, persecution, suffering, and death, tried in fire, and must reach the fatherland of eternal rest not by slaying the physical but the spiritual. They use neither worldly sword nor war, since killing has ceased with them entirely, unless indeed we are still under the old law, and even there (as far as we can know) war was only a plague after they had once conquered the Promised Land. No more of this. — Also Letter to Thomas Muntzer

More

“The Face of Conrad Grebel” from the university that bears his name in Waterloo, Ontario [link]

Anabaptist Encyclopedia entry [link]

The story of the first baptisms from Plain Values. 

The Bruderhof have a nice history series:

What do we do with this?

If you are a twentysomething, or newly married with young children, take heart! People have done important things in your exact situation. You might also celebrate the  college students who have disrupted the U.S. response to the Gaza incursion by Israel.

The powers-that-be quickly put the kibosh on radical reform. The Catholic Church did not allow any reform and began hunting down people who didn’t toe the line. But likewise, the more liberal Swiss canton leaders and rulers of the smaller states in Germany also had no taste for giving away their power to the people to make their own decisions, or even to read the Bible for themselves. This is the kind of discouragement you radical readers have experienced first hand. What are you willing to suffer for Jesus and the truth of the Gospel?