Stellar Christians

STARS IN GOD’S SKY
By Faith Cook
Evangelical Press. 160 pages. £8.95
ISBN 978-0-85234-696-9

If you need cheering up in your faith, this might well be the book to do it for you. It is a wonderful collection of nine short biographies of ‘extraordinary ordinary Christians’, telling what God has done in past times.

The lives covered are all British except for the story of the German hymn writer Gerhard Tersteegan. I think my favourites are those of Susanna Harrison, Hugh Bourne and John Gifford.

Susanna Harrison was an illiterate girl, who was converted on what she thought would be her death bed, only to be hugely gifted by God as a writer of spiritual verse. Hugh Bourne was used of God with others in the revival in the Potteries area of England at the beginning of the 19th century, which brought thousands to Christ. He was so naturally shy and nervous that ‘he covered up his face with his hands as he spoke — a strange mannerism that would continue with him throughout his life whenever he preached’. John Gifford was the man who would become John Bunyan’s pastor. During the English Civil War he had been a royalist. Captured as a ringleader of an uprising in Kent against Parliament, he was destined for the hangman’s noose, but escaped prison remarkably, later to be converted to Christ in Bedford.

What is especially refreshing about these biographies is their emphasis on biblical but experiential Christianity. They show the dealings of the living God with the souls of ordinary men and women. At a time when evangelicalism has become very cerebral and almost afraid of vital experience of the Spirit, this is a sweet and encouraging emphasis.