stories from acts 4

*it is possible this story is apocryphal, we were unable to find the original source of the story. Admiral Nelson of the British Navy was renowned for his mastery of naval strategy, a genius fro...

After many years of highly successful ministry, Dwight Lyman Moody had an experience of which he himself said, I cannot describe it, I seldom refer to it, it is almost too sacred an experience to name...

When Queen Victoria first took the throne, she attended a performance of Handel's Messiah, a customary event for royalty. Advised on proper etiquette, she was informed that she should not stand du...

A young Russian, deeply moved by the teachings of Tolstoy and the New Testament, had become a conscientious objector. Standing before a magistrate, he spoke passionately about a life that loves its en...

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), an author, critic, and devout Roman Catholic, lived in a Britain where strong anti-Catholic sentiment prevailed. Known for his passion and unwavering conviction, Belloc dec...

During his years as premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev denounced many of the policies and atrocities of Joseph Stalin. Once, as he censured Stalin in a public meeting, Khrushchev was inter...

We didn’t have a lot of rules [at the food pantry at St. Gregory, an Episcopal congregation in San Francisco]. You could be a drunk or junkie, but you couldn’t volunteer if you were high. You couldn’t...

Here’s a testimony from Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel: Harper grew up as a child of a single mother. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved from Philadelphia where ...

A missionary was preaching in the village market, and some of the people were laughing at him because he was not a very handsome man. He took it for a time, and then he said to the crowd, “It is true ...

From the outside Calvary Church in Holland, Michigan, looks like a typical large church that many Americans attend. The church developed the typical way: it started small and then began to grow. As th...

We were recently with a collection of pastors in San Diego and were asked to share about our common call to peacemaking. Fully aware of the posturing and isolation of many of these churches, we found ...

I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What . Miller took this point to an even further extreme. In his book, he tells a story about one occasion when he was speaking to a class at...

Have you ever met someone and known instantly, or at least guessed, that they were a fellow believer? When I was in college, I lived abroad for a year in Germany. We always had Fridays off so that we ...

A decade ago I spent an unforgettable week in the Galapagos Islands. This archipelago of islands off the coast of Ecuador hasn’t changed much since Charles Darwin sailed there on trheHMS Beagle in Dec...

Why is it so intimidating to talk about Jesus in contemporary western culture? One obvious reason might lie in the ubiquitous negative portrayals of Christians in mainstream media. Sam Chan makes this...