Two thousand years,
one long conversation.
Short, sourced accounts of the Bible, the missionaries who carried it, the revivalists who filled the tents, and the hymns the church still sings. Grouped by category — tap any header to fold it away.
- 325 AD
The Council of Nicaea and the Shaping of the Creed
Emperor Constantine summoned roughly 300 bishops to Nicaea in 325 AD to settle the Arian controversy — producing the Nicene Creed and a unified statement on the divinity of Christ.
Read story - 1526–1536
William Tyndale and the English Bible
Tyndale printed the first English New Testament from the original Greek in 1526. He was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 — but roughly 80% of his text survives in the King James Version.
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- 1793–1834
William Carey and the Birth of the Modern Missionary Movement
A Northamptonshire cobbler-turned-Baptist-pastor, William Carey reached Calcutta in 1793 and launched the modern Protestant missionary movement, translating Scripture into more than 40 Indian languages.
Read story - 1846
Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the First Yoruba Printing Press
An Albion press landed at Abeokuta in 1846. Samuel Ajayi Crowther set the first Yoruba type — work that powered both Africa's first vernacular newspaper and his translation of the Bible.
Read story - 1841 — 1873
David Livingstone — The Missionary Who Mapped a Continent
A Scottish mill worker turned London Missionary Society doctor who spent 32 years crossing southern Africa on foot — the first European to see the Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls) in 1855, and whose death in 1873 catalysed the abolition of the East African slave trade.
Read story - 1865–1905
Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission
Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission in 1865, adopting Chinese dress and pushing missionary work for the first time into China's vast interior provinces.
Read story - 1867
The Ifole of 1867: Expulsion of the Missionaries
On October 13, 1867, Egba authorities expelled the European missionaries at Abeokuta and destroyed the mission press — a political response to British encroachment from Lagos.
Read story - 1876–1915
Mary Slessor and the End of Twin-Killing in Calabar
A Dundee mill-worker who arrived in Calabar in 1876, Mary Slessor lived in the bush as 'Ma' to local Efik and Ibibio communities and helped end the custom of killing twin infants.
Read story - 1901 — 1951
Amy Carmichael and the Dohnavur Fellowship
A Northern Irish missionary who arrived in South India in 1895 and spent the next 55 years — never once returning to Europe — rescuing girls from temple prostitution and building the Dohnavur Fellowship, which by her death housed over 1,000 children.
Read story - 1889–1929
Sundar Singh, the Sadhu of the Himalayas
A Sikh boy who hated Christians, Sundar Singh saw a vision of Christ at 15, took the saffron robe of a sadhu, and walked the foothills of the Himalayas preaching the gospel until he disappeared into Tibet in 1929.
Read story - 1924 — 1945
Eric Liddell — Olympic Gold, Weihsien Camp
The Scottish sprinter who refused to run the 100m on a Sunday at the 1924 Paris Olympics, took gold in the 400m instead — and spent the next 20 years teaching in North China before dying in a Japanese internment camp five months before liberation.
Read story - 1906–1987
S.G. "Pa" Elton and the Nigerian Pentecostal Generation
A British missionary from Bradford, Sydney Granville Elton arrived in Nigeria in 1937 and stayed fifty years — mentoring Benson Idahosa, William Kumuyi and a generation of African Pentecostal leaders.
Read story - 1940 — 1945
Corrie ten Boom and the Hiding Place
A middle-aged Dutch watchmaker in Haarlem who, with her father and sister, hid Jews in a secret 30-inch-wide room behind her bedroom wall — until betrayal, Ravensbrück, and the death of her sister Betsie ten Boom on 16 December 1944.
Read story - 1950–1997
Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity
An Albanian-born nun who arrived in India in 1929, Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 to serve 'the poorest of the poor' — work that earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
Read story - 1956
Jim Elliot and the Auca Mission
In January 1956 five young American missionaries were speared to death by Waorani warriors in eastern Ecuador — a story whose aftermath became one of the most cited mission accounts of the 20th century.
Read story - 1919–1988
Festo Kivengere and the East African Revival
A Ugandan bishop who fled Idi Amin's death squads in 1977, Festo Kivengere returned and published I Love Idi Amin — a small book that became a manifesto of African Christian forgiveness.
Read story - 1996
The Catholic Education Legacy and Loyola Jesuit College
Catholic missionary institutions like Loyola Jesuit College, founded in 1996, became elite private standards as Nigeria's public-school system declined.
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- 1880s — 1924
Maria Woodworth-Etter — The Trance Evangelist
An Ohio farmer's widow who from 1880 conducted tent meetings across the American Midwest famous for mass 'trance' phenomena — audiences frozen in place for hours — and who by the 1910s was regarded as the grandmother of Pentecostal healing revivalism.
Read story - 1908 — 1935
John G. Lake and the Healing Rooms of Spokane
A Chicago insurance executive who left a $50,000 salary in 1907, sailed to South Africa in 1908, planted 625 churches in five years, and returned to open the Divine Healing Institute at Spokane — where city records logged 100,000 recorded healings in six years.
Read story - 1946 — 1965
William Branham and the Post-War Healing Revival
An Indiana game warden and part-time Baptist preacher who claimed a May 1946 angelic visit and became the pace-setter of the American post-war healing revival — packing stadiums from 1947 to 1955 and mentoring Oral Roberts, T.L. Osborn and A.A. Allen.
Read story - 1949 — 1970
A.A. Allen and Miracle Valley
The most controversial figure of the mid-century healing revival — tent meetings across the American South and Mexico, an integrated congregation at Miracle Valley, Arizona in 1958, and a print magazine that grew to 340,000 subscribers before his death from alcoholism in 1970.
Read story - 1986 — 2019
Reinhard Bonnke — 79 Million Decisions on African Soil
A German Pentecostal who inherited a 34,000-seat 'Big Tent' and spent thirty years preaching to open fields across Africa — with recorded crusade attendances of 1.6 million in a single night at Lagos in 2000 and a lifetime tally of 79 million registered decision cards.
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- 4th–5th c.
Augustine of Hippo and the Confessions
A Numidian rhetorician who lived a famously dissolute youth, Augustine's conversion in a Milan garden in 386 produced the Confessions and the City of God — books that shaped Western Christianity for 1,500 years.
Read story - 1517
Martin Luther and the 95 Theses
On October 31, 1517 the Augustinian friar Martin Luther sent 95 propositions against the sale of indulgences to the Archbishop of Mainz — and the Reformation began.
Read story - 15th–17th c.
The Itsekiri Kingdom and the Catholic Prince of Warri
Portuguese missions reached the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri in the 1500s, producing Olu Atuwatse I — a Catholic prince educated in Coimbra and Lisbon.
Read story - 1738
John Wesley and the Aldersgate Awakening
On May 24, 1738 John Wesley felt his heart 'strangely warmed' at a Moravian society meeting on Aldersgate Street — the spark of the Methodist movement.
Read story - 1906–1915
The Azusa Street Revival
From a converted livery stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, William J. Seymour led a multiracial revival that birthed the global Pentecostal movement.
Read story - 1907–1947
Smith Wigglesworth, the Apostle of Faith
An illiterate Yorkshire plumber who learned to read from the Bible, Smith Wigglesworth became one of the most prominent healing evangelists of the early Pentecostal movement.
Read story - 1903–1972
Watchman Nee and the House Churches of China
Ni Tuosheng — Watchman Nee — planted hundreds of indigenous "Little Flock" assemblies across China, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a Communist labour camp without recanting.
Read story - 1923–1944
Aimee Semple McPherson and the Foursquare Gospel
A Canadian-born evangelist who pioneered Christian radio and built Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, Aimee Semple McPherson founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1923.
Read story - 1904–1959
Joseph Ayo Babalola and the 1930 Oke-Ooye Revival
A Yoruba steamroller driver who heard an audible voice in 1928, Joseph Ayo Babalola sparked the Great Revival of 1930 at Oke-Ooye, Ilesa — the founding moment of what became the Christ Apostolic Church.
Read story - 1931 — 1963
C.S. Lewis — Reluctant Convert at Magdalen
An Oxford atheist and Magdalen College tutor who — after a September 1931 late-night walk on Addison's Walk with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson — became, in his own phrase, 'the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England' and went on to write Mere Christianity and the Narnia chronicles.
Read story - 1947–2009
Oral Roberts and the Healing-Television Era
Oral Roberts brought Pentecostal healing services to network television in the 1950s and founded Oral Roberts University in Tulsa in 1965.
Read story - 1948–1976
Kathryn Kuhlman and the Pittsburgh Healing Services
Kathryn Kuhlman led packed healing services across Pittsburgh and Los Angeles for nearly three decades and hosted the long-running television programme 'I Believe in Miracles'.
Read story - 1949–2005
Billy Graham and the Stadium Crusades
From the canvas-tent meetings of 1949 Los Angeles to global televised crusades, Billy Graham preached the gospel in person to more than 215 million people across 185 countries.
Read story - 1912–1997
Bilquis Sheikh — I Dared to Call Him Father
An aristocratic Pakistani Muslim woman, Bilquis Sheikh read the Qur'an and the Bible side by side, found herself addressing God as Father, and paid for her conversion with social exile — and a book read by millions.
Read story - 1973 — present
W.F. Kumuyi and the Rise of Deeper Life
A Cambridge-trained mathematics lecturer at the University of Lagos began a Monday-night Bible study of fifteen students in August 1973. Within a decade Deeper Life Bible Church was the fastest-growing indigenous Nigerian Pentecostal movement — and by the 2000s a global network in over 100 countries.
Read story - 1970s–present
The Pentecostal Explosion: From Idahosa to Adeboye
From the 1970s on, Nigeria shifted from a landscape dominated by mission churches to a global hub of Pentecostalism led by Benson Idahosa, Enoch Adeboye and others.
Read story - 1982
Pope John Paul II's 1982 Apostolic Journey to Nigeria
In February 1982, John Paul II spent six days in Nigeria — celebrating Mass for over a million people in Onitsha and meeting both national leaders and the Sultan of Sokoto.
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- c.1527 — 1529
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God — Luther's Battle Hymn
Martin Luther paraphrased Psalm 46 into 'Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott' around 1527 — during the plague year at Wittenberg — and set it to his own melody. It became the marching song of the Reformation and the funeral hymn Luther himself requested.
Read story - 1772 · published 1779
Amazing Grace — John Newton and the Slave Ship
A former slave-ship captain, converted during a 1748 Atlantic storm, wrote 'Amazing Grace' as the sermon text for his 1 January 1773 New Year's Day service at Olney — and spent his final years campaigning with William Wilberforce for the abolition of the trade he had once run.
Read story - 24 December 1818
Silent Night — Christmas Eve at Oberndorf, 1818
A young Austrian curate's poem, set to guitar the same afternoon by the village schoolmaster because the church organ was broken, was first sung at midnight Mass in the Salzburg village of Oberndorf on Christmas Eve 1818 — and reached the trenches of the 1914 Christmas truce a century later.
Read story - September 1847
Abide With Me — Henry Francis Lyte at the End
A tubercular Devon curate wrote 'Abide With Me' in September 1847 after preaching what he knew was his last sermon at Lower Brixham — and died in Nice ten weeks later. The hymn was sung at the wedding of King George VI and every FA Cup Final since 1927.
Read story - November 1873
It Is Well With My Soul — Horatio Spafford at the Wreck of the Ville du Havre
A Chicago lawyer who lost his real-estate fortune in the Great Fire of 1871, then two years later lost all four of his daughters when the French liner Ville du Havre was rammed and sunk in the Atlantic — and wrote his most-sung hymn crossing the same waters to meet his widowed wife.
Read story - 1820 — 1915
Fanny Crosby — Blind at Six Weeks, 8,000 Hymns
Blinded by a country doctor's mustard poultice at six weeks old, Frances Jane Crosby became the most prolific hymn-writer in American history — over 8,000 published texts including 'Blessed Assurance' (1873), 'To God Be the Glory' and 'Pass Me Not O Gentle Saviour'.
Read story - 1923 · popularised 1945
Great Is Thy Faithfulness — Thomas Chisholm, Written from a Sickbed
A frail Kentucky insurance salesman whose health kept him from settled work wrote 'Great Is Thy Faithfulness' as a private meditation on Lamentations 3 — and mailed it to a friend, William Runyan, who set it to music and pushed it into Moody Bible Institute's chapel canon.
Read story - 1885 · 1949 English version
How Great Thou Art — A Swedish Storm and a Missionary in Ukraine
A young Swedish preacher caught in a thunderstorm on the Baltic coast wrote 'O Store Gud' in 1885; it travelled through German, Russian and Ukrainian before the English missionary Stuart K. Hine produced the version Billy Graham adopted as his signature crusade hymn in 1954.
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Every story cross-checked against at least one independent source