For Christians, this book is a family history. Our sister, Blandina, faced the snapping jaws of wild beasts rather than renounce Christ. Our brother, Ambrose, gave away his vast wealth to the poor and proclaimed the gospel to emperors and paupers. William Tyndale, our father in the faith, lived on the run and died at the stake to give us the Bible in English, that we might read it for ourselves. If we do not know about our Christian forebears, we cannot draw inspiration and encouragement from their lives nor praise God for His grace and power at work in them.
The Psalmist calls us to praise the Lord and “tell of His works with songs of joy.” God’s greatest works are not the creation of the mountains and seas but His acts of saving love, which transform sinners into children of God. These stories were not written to exalt great Christian men and women — they were written to exalt the Lord who made them great.
The book of Acts tells the story of the growth of the Church under the leadership of the Apostles. Through great trials they spread the good news of Jesus throughout the Roman world. The stories found in this book are drawn from the lives of those who served God in the years after the Apostles rested in their graves. Within these pages, you will encounter Christians from widely different places, times, and stations—from slaves laboring in chains to regal monarchs reigning over vast empires. The stories are not fiction but historically accurate, biographical sketches. The background events and actions of the subjects were drawn from the most reliable sources, and all quotations were taken from the subjects’ own speeches and writings.
I wrote the sketches originally for my own children, but if other readers may, in some small way, find inspiration in these stories from church history, I will be pleased and grateful. Richard M. Hannula
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