The Revivalists

Built an army out of the people no church wanted, with soup, soap, and salvation.

A shoe salesman with no ordination and no education who shook two continents with plain speech about Christ.

Died at twenty-nine of a fever caught from his own parishioners, leaving a Bible reading plan people still follow.

Pastored across South Africa and wrote about staying close to Christ in words a child can follow.

Argued from Scripture that a woman may preach, then stood up in her husband's meeting and out-preached him.

A plumber who could barely read, whose wife taught him the Bible and whose prayers for the sick filled halls across the world.

Learned Pentecost from a hallway because the law would not seat him in the room, then led a revival where the color line came down.

Died at forty-three in an Egyptian army camp; his wife's shorthand of his talks became the daily book millions still read.

Prayed for years that God would bend Wales, saw a revival credited at the time with about a hundred thousand converts (a contemporary estimate, not an audit), then vanished into hidden prayer for the rest of his life.

A Welsh miner who learned intercession as a vocation and led a college that prayed through a world war.

Burned a Bible at fourteen, saw Christ three days later, and walked the Himalayas in a saffron robe until the mountains kept him.

Widowed on the mission field at twenty, she came home and built a temple, a radio station, and a soup line that fed Los Angeles through the Depression.

Slept on the floor of his study to pray, and wrote The Pursuit of God in one night on a train.

Asked why revival tarries and would not let a single preacher near him answer the question easily.

Buried five of her six children, started preaching at thirty-five, and filled tents of eight thousand for more than forty years after that.

Took sword wounds from a Boxer mob, then watched Manchuria break open in public confession he had not planned and could not stop.

Left an insurance fortune for South Africa, buried his wife there within months, and kept praying for the sick for the rest of his life.

Sent his students into Acts to find the evidence of Spirit baptism - then spent his last years disgracing what he had begun.

Beaten by a Texas mob for preaching to Black congregations, and the author of the healing book that has never gone out of print.

Went to a Pentecostal meeting to expose it, came out converted, and spent the next twenty-six years preaching what he had gone to mock.

Wrote alone in near-total obscurity about the sovereignty of God, and was read everywhere only after he died.

Preached in person to more people than anyone in history and never once handled the offering himself.

Told the gang leader who threatened to cut him into a thousand pieces that every piece would still love him - and the man believed him.

Lost everything to a marriage she called her deepest disobedience, started over from nothing, and refused for thirty years to be called a healer.

A Cambridge philosopher who met God in an army barracks and spent fifty years teaching the Word and deliverance.

Bedridden as a boy with a deformed heart, he stood up believing Mark 11:24 and taught faith for the next seventy years.

Healed of tuberculosis at seventeen, he put the prayer line on television and built an accredited university out of a tent ministry.

A farmer who taught believers to speak God's own words back to Him over their circumstances.

Preached to African crowds of more than a million under a tent he had built for exactly that purpose.

Sent his records to anyone who asked for whatever they could pay, told sleeping churches so, and died at twenty-eight with two of his children.

Taught that intercession can be joyful instead of grim, and prayed that way until cancer took her.

A South African musician who prophesied from the keyboard in front of live crowds.