Catherine was born to a cloth dyer in Siena, Italy, in 1347, the twenty-third of twenty-six children, most of whom didn’t survive infancy. It was a tough time and place to be born: the Black Death, which was to kill a third of Europe, was spreading; much of what we now know as Italy was a mosaic of warring factions; and the Catholic church, which had brought some measure of stability to Europe, was in disarray with the Pope exiled at Avignon in France.

One Christian hero who I am privileged to have met is Richard Wurmbrand. His story, told in Tortured for Christ, impacted me deeply as a young student.

Watts’ hymns were of such quality and so rich in spiritual insight that objections to hymn singing in churches faded away for good.

Phoebe Palmer was one the foremost Christian leaders of the 19th century and someone whose influence continues to the present day. She stepped out from her comfortable New York home to do whatever the Lord demanded of her.

Two figures dominated the evangelical church of Britain in the late nineteenth century: the nonconformist preacher Charles Spurgeon and the Anglican preacher, writer and bishop, John Charles Ryle.

Few people have achieved as much for the kingdom of God in as little time as Henry Martyn, missionary and Bible translator, whose life ended when he was only thirty-one.

Running a beauty salon during the week, Mahalia began to sing professionally at weekends. She began to sing in secular theatres and bars, with jazz or blues bands, but she made the decision – sacrificial at the time – that she would only sing gospel and only where God’s music was appropriate and appreciated.

Although well read in the Bible, Roberts had only minimal education and, at the age of eleven, began work in the coal mines. Always something of a contemplative, Roberts lived in a world where God, heaven and spiritual powers were very real to him and he spent hours in prayer, enjoying fellowship with God. For eleven years he prayed for a new revival and spoke of how, in a vision, he had seen a piece of paper with the figure of 100,000 written on it; the number of souls who would be saved.

The injustices that Wycliffe attacked are gone but what he stood for, an idealistic, individual and instructed faith, is something that every age should value.

Helen was a woman endowed with intelligence, skill and determination but with a tendency to be impatient, domineering and a perfectionist.

Athlete and missionary Eric Liddell had been largely forgotten until the 1981 film Chariots of Fire reminded the world of him.

One winter’s night he learned that one of his boys had no home to go to and, led by him, was appalled to discover that homelessness among children was far worse than he had imagined. Barnardo now realised his calling lay not in China but among London’s poor.

Denominations, churches and even individual Christians always risk stagnation; a situation in which everybody is busy doing nothing. At such times, God often sends someone to shake things up. A man who did just that was David Wilkerson, the American evangelist who took the gospel from the comfort of the pulpit down into the ugliest of streets.

Benedict of Nursia was born in AD 480 just at the time when the Roman Empire was ending and the Middle Ages beginning. That Christianity and learning were kept alive during the troubled millennium between Rome’s fall and the Renaissance was something that Benedict played a significant part in.

John Wesley was one of the most influential Christian preachers in history and a man who had an enormous and lasting impact on his nation and the world.

Charlotte Moon was born in 1840 to a plantation-owning family in Virginia, in the pre-Civil War southern culture depicted in Gone with the Wind. After a youthful rebellion against Christianity, she was converted in 1859. A woman well under five-foot in height, Lottie spent the Civil War helping her widowed mother manage the estate and teaching in schools. Lottie felt called to be an evangelist and church planter. However, her mission’s policy prohibited a woman from preaching to groups which...

One of the most powerful American preachers was Charles Finney, who had an influential ministry in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The seventeenth century in England was a time of constant and often violent controversies over religion and politics. Despite finding himself cruelly vulnerable at the centre of many of these, Richard Baxter managed, as both pastor and writer, to proclaim Christ in a remarkable way.

The story of Adoniram Judson, the first overseas missionary from the United States of America and the man who founded the church in Burma, is one of the most challenging in Christian history.

It’s always inspiring to hear of encounters with Christ that utterly transform a life. The case of Mitsuo Fuchida is a spectacular example of just such a conversion.

Helen Cadbury was born in 1877 into the Quaker family who ran the famous Birmingham chocolate firm. Helen’s father Richard was committed not just to the social work that was a Quaker distinctive but also to enthusiastically sharing the gospel.

Samuel Zwemer was a remarkable missionary, traveller and teacher, and a man who became known as the ‘Apostle to Islam’.

In the eighteenth century the transatlantic slave trade had reached a level where, every year, tens of thousands of African people were transported under appalling conditions to the New World. Many Christians fought against slavery and the names of William Wilberforce, John Newton and Hannah More are widely remembered. Less well-known is the name of Olaudah Equiano, a man whose witness was particularly powerful because he himself had been a slave.

Polycarp – whose name means ‘much fruit’ – was born in Smyrna, today’s port of Izmir in Turkey. He was born in AD 69 and grew up at a time when some of those who had seen and heard Jesus were still alive. Converted at an early age he knew the apostle John, who in old age lived not far away from Smyrna in Ephesus. Throughout his long life, Polycarp was able to recount what he had heard from John and others who had been with Jesus. Living on to the middle of the second century, he became known...

Heroism isn’t about achievements; in my view it’s about what you attempt to achieve and how you attempt it. And that makes seventeenth-century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet a hero.