People Who Shaped the Church

by Temple, Todd

• ISBN13: 9780842317788
• ISBN10: 0842317783
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-09-01
• Publisher: TYNDALE HOUSE PUBLISHERS

Summary

People Who Shaped the Church examines in detail the lives of Christians who profoundly shaped the church of the twentieth century. Accounts of faith and faithfulness in adversity demonstrate the sovereignty of God. From Brother Andrew to Mother Theresa, from Billy Sunday to Bill Hybels, readers will be inspired by these lives and their impact on the church.

Author Biography

Todd Temple is a writer and producer who has written eighteen books in addition to numerous magazine articles. He is the founder of 10 TO 20 Kim Twitchell has been on staff with Campus Crusade for eleven years. She has also worked on special projects with the chaplain for the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Introduction: Naming Names	ix
Spirit of the Times: Events That Shaped Those Who Shaped Us	xi
The Lives of Our Times: Comparative Life Spans	xiv
Brother Andrew	1	(8)
Karl Barth	9	(8)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer	17	(8)
Evangeline Booth	25	(8)
Bill Bright	33	(10)
F. F. Bruce	43	(6)
Amy Carmichael	49	(8)
Oswald Chambers	57	(6)
G. K. Chesterton	63	(8)
Charles Colson	71	(6)
James Dobson	77	(6)
David du Plessis	83	(8)
Jim Elliot	91	(6)
Jerry Falwell	97	(8)
Charles E. Fuller	105	(8)
Billy Graham	113	(8)
Carl F. H. Henry	121	(8)
Bill Hybels	129	(8)
H. A. Ironside	137	(8)
John Paul II	145	(8)
Torrey Johnson	153	(8)
Martin Luther King Jr.	161	(8)
C. S. Lewis	169	(8)
J. Gresham Machen	177	(8)
Peter Marshall	185	(6)
Aimee Semple McPherson	191	(8)
Henrietta Mears	199	(6)
Thomas Merton	205	(8)
John Mott	213	(8)
J. I. Packer	221	(8)
Luis Palau	229	(8)
John Perkins	237	(8)
J. B. Phillips	245	(6)
Bob Pierce	251	(8)
Walter Rauschenbusch	259	(8)
Dorothy L. Sayers	267	(8)
Francis Schaeffer	275	(8)
John Stott	283	(8)
Billy Sunday	291	(8)
Joni Eareckson Tada	299	(8)
Ken Taylor	307	(8)
Corrie ten Boom	315	(8)
Mother Teresa	323	(8)
Cameron Townsend	331	(8)
A. W. Tozer	339	(8)
Desmond Tutu	347	(8)
Appendix A: Information about Organizations and Ministries	355	(4)
Appendix B: For Further Reading	359	(2)
Bibliography	361	(6)
About the Authors	367

Excerpts

1928-

Brother Andrew

STRENGTHENING THE SUFFERING CHURCH

Lord, in my luggage I have Scripture that I want to take to Your children across this border. When You were on earth, You made blind eyes see. Now, I pray, make seeing eyes blind. Do not let the guards see those things You do not want them to see.

The Prayer of God's Smuggler, from God's Smuggler

1956

Brother Andrew's first trip to the Soviet Union

1962

Seven Years of Prayer for the Soviet Union campaign begins, asking God to tear down the enemy stronghold

1966

Seven-year prayer campaign for the Soviet Union ends. Churches are open, prisoners are released!

1973

Brother Andrew is honored with a Religious Liberty Award in front of 6,000 people on Sunday, May 12, at a World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) General Assembly rally in Abbotsford, British Columbia.

The prayer meeting had just ended, and Brother Andrew and his traveling companion, Hans, were waiting in the crowded vestibule of a Baptist church in Moscow for God to show them who was to receive the Russian Bibles they had smuggled into the country. Spotting a thin, balding man staring into the crowd, they approached him cautiously. When they told him who they were and why they were there, the man's eyes grew wide. His church in Siberia, two thousand miles away, had 150 secret members-and not a single Bible. He had been told in a dream to go to Moscow, where he would find a Bible.

Hans held out the big Russian Bible they had brought. Overcome with emotion, the three men hugged each other, awestruck that God would allow them to be a part of what they saw unfolding right before their eyes.

In Short

In the darkest days of the Cold War, most Westerners experienced life in the "Evil Empire" through suspense films and spy novels. Brother Andrew experienced it firsthand. He was among the few who dared to venture behind the Iron Curtain. Over the course of his clandestine ministry, Brother Andrew risked life and liberty to let Christians living under communist rule know that they weren't forgotten, to hear their stories and share them with the Western world, and to give oppressed believers the most precious possession of all: God's Word.

Andrew and the organization he founded, Open Doors, expanded their efforts to other closed countries, including many in the Muslim world. Today this ministry continues to bring God's Word to forgotten believers worldwide.

Faith

As a boy, Andrew imagined himself crawling under barbed wire and dodging bullets as they whizzed past his head. In this young Dutch boy's world of play, danger was often the theme. Born in the province of Noord Holland in the village of Sint Pancras, Andrew was one of six children in a poor Protestant family. His mother suffered from a bad heart; his blacksmith father was deaf. But despite their poverty and disabilities, the family was generous-they never turned guests away from the dinner table.

In 1939 Andrew's brother Bastian was fighting tuberculosis. Andrew decided that if his brother was going to die, then he would too. Shortly after his eleventh birthday, Andrew sneaked into Bastian's room and kissed him, hoping that the contagious disease would take his life as well. In July of that year, Bastian died, but when Andrew stayed healthy, he thought God had betrayed him.

In 1940 Nazi Germany invaded Holland. When the German soldiers appeared in his town, Andrew's imaginary war games became real. At night Andrew would sneak out to foul up the German lieutenant's gas tank or to fire cherry bombs at the enemy soldiers. The family hid Jews escaping to the coast, and Andrew and his brother and father often hid to avoid deportation.

After the war in Europe ended in 1945, Andrew joined the army and was sent to Indonesia, which was still a Dutch colony at the time. He was wounded in 1949, and during his convalescence, he picked up a Bible and began to read. He continued to read after his return to Holland in 1950. One stormy winter night in his father's home, he heard voices in the wind, asking him questions and singing songs from a tent revival he had attended. Staring at the dark ceiling above his bed, he offered a simple prayer: "Lord, if you will show me the way, I will follow you." Jesus answered his prayer, and Andrew responded by committing his life to missions.

Fruit

Andrew found work at a local chocolate factory, where he also met his future bride, Corrie van Dam. During that time he began to investigate the requirements for becoming a missionary. Ordination appeared to be a must, but to attend college and seminary while working would take him twelve years. Discouraged, he enrolled in correspondence courses and learned English. Then he heard of an organization called Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, whose philosophy was not to rely on church missions budgets but to send out missionaries and trust God to provide the necessary funds. So in 1953 Andrew left Holland for two years of study at the Glasgow Missionary Training College in Scotland.

During his first term Andrew was sent on his first evangelism trip through Scotland with a team of five other men. Each man was given a one-pound note and told to pay for his own transportation, lodging, food, advertising, and the cost of renting meeting halls. In addition, throughout the four-week trip they were not to mention any need, and they had to tithe-within twenty-four hours-out of everything they received. At the end of the trip, they were to pay the pound back to the school.

As the trip progressed, Andrew was amazed to see God at work. Sometimes one of the men received a little money in the mail from his parents. A church they had visited weeks before would send a check. People donated fruit, vegetables, and eggs for their meals. When Andrew and his team came back to the school, they had ten pounds more than they had left with a month earlier. God had faithfully provided all that they needed.

As Andrew's two years of study in Glasgow ended, he prayed about where he should go. The week before graduation he read a magazine advertisement for a socialist youth festival to be held in Warsaw that summer. He wrote to the organizers, telling them he was a Christian missionary and wanted to exchange ideas. Could he come? He got a quick reply: Most certainly! As Andrew left school to return to Holland, he began to get a vision for ministering to the young faces he saw in the ad's photo-faces that were trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

During the three-week youth festival, Andrew often ventured out to attend churches, hand out tracts, visit a lone Bible store, and talk with soldiers and with people on the trolley and on street corners. One day he saw a parade of young people marching for their new religion, Communism. Andrew's eyes welled up as he realized that God was speaking to him through a verse he had read: "Now wake up! Strengthen what little remains, for even what is left is at the point of death" (Revelation 3:2). He knew his life's work would be behind the Iron Curtain, strengthening God's remnant church as it struggled to survive. The year 1955 saw Andrew making a series of trips to most of the countries behind the Iron Curtain.

One afternoon back in Holland, a friend knocked on Andrew's door. He told Andrew that God had impressed on him that he was to tell Andrew to learn to drive. Andrew protested-he didn't even have a car. Time passed, and when the friend saw that Andrew still had not learned to drive, he taught Andrew himself. A short time later as Andrew was preparing for a trip to Yugoslavia, another friend handed him a set of keys for a brand-new Volkswagen, saying that God had told him to give Andrew his car. Before Andrew left, another friend arrived on his doorstep holding out a stack of money. God had told her Andrew would need money for two months.

Jamil, a Christian leader in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, had often ordered Bibles in quantity from a distributor in the West. No one had heard from Jamil in years, and Andrew was asked to check on him. Andrew sent a carefully worded letter, telling Jamil that a Dutchman would be coming to visit him. Although Andrew did not know it, Jamil had moved, and it took the local post office many days to track down the new address and forward the letter. On the very day that Andrew drove into Zagreb, Jamil received the rerouted letter. Puzzled by the message from the mysterious Dutchman, Jamil boarded a train to take him to his old apartment, then stood on the sidewalk in front of it. A moment later Andrew pulled up to the curb. Seeing the Dutch license plates, Jamil seized Andrew's hands and welcomed him. Andrew's Bible ministry had begun.

In 1958, after traveling alone for three years, Andrew married Corrie van Dam. Together with a growing team of courageous followers, they smuggled dozens, then hundreds, and then thousands of Bibles into communist countries. In 1961 they completed Project Pearl, smuggling one million Bibles into China on a single night. On every mission they risked deportation, seizure of their vehicles, arrest, and imprisonment. And on each trip they trusted God to confound the authorities, to open doors into countries guarded with machine guns, to lead them to believers who were willing to risk their own lives to receive and distribute Brother Andrew's holy contraband.

The demise of the Soviet Empire did not mean the end of Brother Andrew's work. The church in that part of the world still suffers hardship, and Andrew has continued to serve. Indeed, Christians around the globe, including those in China and in much of the Middle East, face intense persecution for their beliefs. Andrew's ministry reaches believers worldwide-wherever politics, law, or culture opposes faith in Christ.

Open Doors, the ministry Andrew founded in 1955, has served persecuted Christians for half a century. Since 1956 the ministry's monthly magazine, Open Doors , has informed Christians about the suffering church around the world. Since Brother Andrew's book God's Smuggler was first published in 1958, over ten million copies have been printed, with editions in several languages. Today Brother Andrew is president emeritus of Open Doors, which now has over two hundred full-time workers in twenty countries. The ministry delivers Bibles where they are banned or restricted, supports and encourages believers who are suffering for their faith, and trains church leaders living in countries opposed to the gospel. Open Doors workers and their founder take seriously the words of Jesus, who said, "Go and make disciples of all the nations" (Matthew 28:19). To them, that little word all is significant. The miracles they have encountered as they have seen God open closed doors indicate that God thinks so too.

Legacy

Long before most of us could even imagine the fall of the Iron Curtain, much less see its crash, Andrew was praying for just such a deliverance. He saw the cold war not as a clash of political and economic philosophies but as a spiritual battle in which God's children had been taken prisoner by their enemy Satan. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose faith led him into defiance of the evil Nazi regime and even to plot an assassination attempt against Hitler, Brother Andrew faithfully defied the authority of governments who declared themselves enemies of Christianity. He broke the law to spread the great news of God's grace as seen in Jesus Christ.

It is tempting to romanticize Andrew's subterfuge, to see his mission as an exciting, biblically sanctioned way to sneak around and do illegal things. But Brother Andrew's actions were and are the result of simple obedience-an answer to God's call that could just as easily have led him to become a preacher or Sunday school teacher or anything else we would consider less sensational. Andrew's faith came first. God's endless provision-from seeing Andrew's team through that first Scottish mission trip, to blinding the eyes of border guards, to providing money for Bible printing-is compelling proof that Andrew has obeyed God's orders.

Few Christians give God the chance to prove his faithfulness to such an extent. Andrew has had faith enough to trust God with what seemed impossible, and millions of people worldwide have trusted Christ because Brother Andrew dared to trust him first.

For additional information about Open Doors, see appendix A.

Now wake up! Strengthen what little remains, for even what is left is at the point of death.

Revelation 3:2

BOOKS BY BROTHER ANDREW

And God Changed His Mind (with Susan Devore Williams) (1999)

A Time for Heroes (with Dave and Neta Jackson) (out of print)

For the Love of My Brothers (with Verne Becker) (1998)

God's Smuggler (with John and Elizabeth Sherrill) (1964)

The Calling (with Verne Becker) (1996)

1886-1968

Excerpted from People Who Shaped the Church by Todd Temple Kim Twitchell Copyright © 2000 by Todd Temple Kim Twitchell
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.