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A. J. Gordon

A. J. Gordon (1836-1895) didn’t pay much attention to dreams until one changed his life. It was late on a Saturday evening and A.J. was burning the midnight oil to finish a sermon. He fell asleep and dreamt about leading worship at Clarendon Baptist Church in...

Titus Coan

A large company of friends gathered at Boston Harbor on a blustery day in December 1834 to bid a tearful farewell to Fidelia and Titus Coan (1801-1881). They knelt for prayer and sang a final hymn together. The couple boarded the merchant ship Hellespont and set sail...

Billy Sunday

There’s a bar in Chicago called Billy Sunday, which is ironic, given that its namesake was a temperance activist. His “Get on the Wagon” abstinence sermon was instrumental in passing Prohibition laws in 1920. Billy Sunday (1862-1935) never knew his...

Philipp Nicolai

The COVID pandemic caught us by surprise. Nothing quite like it ever happened in our lifetime. Plagues were common in the Middle Ages. Philipp Nicolai (1556-1608) was a pastor in Unma (Germany) when the bubonic plague swept through the town. More than thirteen hundred...

Ursula Niebuhr

I have served my entire ministry with a church aligned with what many regard as a liberal mainline denomination. H. Richard Niebuhr critiqued the liberal social gospel in 1937 with stinging words, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom...