The history of Christianity is not a history of comfortable people living comfortable lives. It is a history of ordinary men and women who, gripped by something they could not deny, did things that changed the world – often at great personal cost. These are not legends. They are historical people whose courage invites us to ask what we are willing to risk for what we believe.
William Wilberforce: Faith That Ended the Slave Trade
In 1787, a young British politician named William Wilberforce was convinced by his Christian faith that the transatlantic slave trade was a moral abomination. He was advised by friends to drop the cause if he wanted a political future. He persisted anyway – for forty-six years. He was mocked, threatened, and exhausted. He faced defeat after defeat in Parliament.
Three days before he died in 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act passed, outlawing slavery throughout the British Empire. Wilberforce had held on long enough to see the victory. His faith was not a private comfort. It was a world-changing force that refused to accept a legal evil as inevitable.
Corrie ten Boom: Hiding Jews and Forgiving Nazis
During World War II, the ten Boom family in Holland began hiding Jewish families in their home – an act that would cost them everything. When they were betrayed to the Gestapo, Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Betsie died there. Corrie survived.
After the war, Corrie traveled the world with a message of forgiveness. On one occasion, she came face to face with one of her former guards – now a Christian – who extended his hand. By her own account, she felt nothing – no warmth, no forgiveness. She prayed a simple prayer asking God to provide what she could not manufacture. And she reached out her hand. She wrote that the forgiveness she felt in that moment was the most intense emotion she had ever experienced.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theology Under Fire
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who chose to return to Nazi Germany from the safety of the United States in 1939. He could have remained in academic safety. He chose to be with his people in their suffering and to resist the corruption of the German church by the Nazi regime.
He was arrested in 1943 and executed by the SS just three weeks before the liberation of Germany in 1945. His writings – including The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison – remain among the most important Christian texts of the twentieth century. He wrote that cheap grace is the enemy of the church and that genuine discipleship always costs something.
Jim Elliot and the Auca Mission
In 1956, Jim Elliot and four other young missionaries attempted to make contact with the Waorani (Auca) people of Ecuador – a tribe with a history of violent resistance to outsiders. On January 8, 1956, all five missionaries were killed on a beach along the Curaray River.
What followed was one of the most remarkable stories in the history of Christian mission. Jim’s wife Elisabeth Elliot and the wife of another murdered missionary eventually returned to live among the very people who had killed their husbands. Many Waorani became Christians, including some of the men who had carried out the killings. Jim Elliot had written in his journal: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” That line has shaped the faith of millions.
Harriet Tubman: Faith That Led to Freedom
Harriet Tubman was a devout Christian whose faith was not theoretical. She escaped slavery in 1849 and then returned south thirteen times to lead approximately seventy people to freedom via the Underground Railroad. She said she never lost a single passenger. She credited her success entirely to God’s guidance: “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Her faith was action. Her prayers were specific and she believed God answered them with practical direction. She was not a theologian or a preacher. She was a woman who took God at his word and walked north through the dark with people who trusted her with their lives.
What These Stories Tell Us
Every person in this list was ordinary before they were extraordinary. Wilberforce was a young politician. Corrie ten Boom was a watchmaker’s daughter. Bonhoeffer was a scholar. Elliot was a twenty-eight-year-old husband and father. Tubman was a formerly enslaved woman with a bounty on her head.
What they shared was not exceptional natural courage. What they shared was a faith that was real enough to act on – even when the cost was high. Hebrews 11 lists the heroes of the Old Testament faith and concludes: “These were all commended for their faith” (Hebrews 11:39). The same is true of these. And the invitation to that kind of faith is not reserved for the remarkable. It is extended to anyone willing to take God seriously enough to live accordingly.
