Gladys Aylward and the Hundred Orphans

Gladys Aylward had worked as a London housemaid since she was 14. The China Inland Mission turned her down after she failed their exams. She went anyway, arriving in Yangcheng in October 1930 as an independent missionary. She helped run the Inn of Eight Happiness and became a mother to orphans. In the spring of 1938 she learned the invading Japanese had listed her as a spy. With only one assistant, she led more than a hundred orphans over the mountains toward safety. One morning, hopeless, she cried, “But I am not Moses.” A 13-year-old girl answered, “Of course you aren’t, but Jehovah is still God!” When you feel too small, remember who God is.

Marshall Keeble Kept Preaching

Marshall Keeble was a Black preacher among the churches of Christ who spent 55 years as a full-time evangelist, much of it in the segregated South. Estimates of how many people he baptized run from about 30,000 to as many as 40,000, and he is credited with planting hundreds of congregations. As president of the Nashville Christian Institute, he took young preachers along on his travels, including a student named Fred Gray, who later became a famous civil rights attorney. Gray said he learned how to preach and so much more from those trips. Keeble navigated prejudice with steadiness and toughness, and kept pointing people to Jesus until his death in 1968. Faithfulness over a lifetime is its own kind of miracle.

Where the Scriptures Speak

In 1809 in western Pennsylvania, Thomas Campbell was trying to explain to friends how Christians could stop dividing. He offered a simple rule: “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” A man named Andrew Munro saw right away where that might lead and said it would be an end of infant baptism. Another friend, Acheson, was moved to tears. That August they formed the Christian Association of Washington, and Campbell soon wrote his Declaration and Address. Those few words still challenge us. Speak boldly where God has spoken, and stay humble where He hasn’t.

Thousands Came to Cane Ridge

Barton W. Stone was the ordained minister at the Cane Ridge meeting house in Kentucky. In the summer of 1800 he traveled to Logan County to attend a revival led by James McGready. Back home he held a few preparatory meetings and then announced one for August 6, 1801. Nobody expected what happened. The crowd was estimated at anywhere from 10,000 to 25,000 people, at a time when Lexington, Kentucky’s largest city, had about 2,000. Rows of wagons and makeshift tents filled the clearing while preachers spoke from platforms and even fallen trees. Stone later broke with the Presbyterians, and his followers called themselves simply Christians. Never underestimate what God can do with people hungry for Him.

A Church Body That Chose to Die

On June 28, 1804, at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, Barton W. Stone and five other Presbyterian ministers signed one of the strangest documents in church history. They called it the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery. Their own organization was the one dying. They wrote, “We will, that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large.” They gave up the title “Reverend” and willed that people take the Bible as the only sure guide to heaven. The witnesses said it “died a voluntary and happy death.” Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is let your own name fade so Christ’s body can be one.