The Coming of the Friars, By Rosalind B. Brooke This is the story of how St. Francis began the missionary movement that bears his name. The Franciscans still follow the rule sanctioned for them by Pope Honorius III early in the 13th century. St. Francis and his followers were Friars Minor, “little brothers.” “It was a new name, to signify, he once said, a company of people differing in humility and poverty from all who had gone before, and content to possess Christ alone. He coined it in 1210 when he went to Rome with the 12 to seek approval from...

The Celtic Churches. A History, AD 200 to 1200, by John McNeill. University of Chicago Press ©1974 Celtics missionaries established Christianity in Europe by organizing "sending bases," what we would call monasteries. Churches were also established, but Christianity expanded by monastery-missionary sending bases. Columbanus establishes "sending bases" throughout western Europe and as far eastward as Moravia and Kiev. The impact of the missionary peregrine was strongly felt in Frankish Gaul through the work of Columbanus. From the time a local ruler gave permission for Columbanus and his men to settle in Annegray, crowds of locals came, repenting of their sins, and...

A story from China. When Greek Orthodox missionaries arrived in China, they met philosophers who studied the writings of a highly regarded teacher name Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu lived six centuries before Christ. He taught the Tao, which in English means “The Way.” In a short time The missionaries realized that there were remarkable similarities between the Tao and the Logos of Greek philosophy. Here is what Lao Tzu wrote: There exists a Being undifferentiated and complete,Born before heaven and earth,Tranquil, Boundless,Abiding alone and changing not,Encircling everything without exhaustion,Fathomless, it seems to be the Source of all things,I do not know...

Frederick Coan Frederick Coan (1859-1943) grew up in Urumia, Persia, the son of missionaries George and Sarah Coan. This is the story of a hundred years of missionary work “among mountain Nestorians” who lived in a hundred or more Christian villages in the region of Lake Urumia. [1] George and Sarah were sent to join Samuel Audley Rhea to open the work Others at the station were Rev. and Mrs. W.L. Whipple, Rev. and Mrs. J.M. Oldfather, Rev. Benjamin W. Labaree, Dr. Joseph P. Cochran, and Rev. William A. Shedd. Such hardships they endured! Coan writes, “My mother told me that...

The Nestorian Church in Persia. At last, the history of the Church of the East, known also as the Nestorian Church, is being told in this superb book. The Church of the East spread east of the Roman Empire beyond the Euphrates River. Its missionaries traveled along the Old Silk Road through Persia to China, or sailed the water routes from the Red Sea around Arabia to India.[2] Its adherents endured the greater persecutions than in the Roman Empire. The Church of the East Administrative Centers (Dioceses) By the 13th century the Nestorian Church exercised ecclesiastical authority over more of the...

A Story. Bilquis Sheikh was a wealthy Pakistan Muslim woman whose husband had abandoned her. She was living in her beautifully gardened villa, surrounded by servants, when one day Bilquis Sheikh met "a frightening Presence." This experience awakened her to desire to know God, and she began to read the Qur’an. She began to realize that the Qur'an refers many times to Jesus and to the Bible. One day she asked her driver, a Christian, to get her a Bible. His eyes widened; he was clearly uneasy. She asked him on three occasions; he never delivered until threatened with being fired....

I learned a lot about the Bible by reading Jewish authors. Thank you, Bill Bjoraker, for suggesting Israel Goldman's superb book, Life-Long Learning Among the Jews. I learned that Jews have developed two kinds of organizations, the synagogue, with which we are familiar, and a smaller, focused kind of association called a hevrah. The synagogue is mentioned 56 times in the New Testament; the hevrah not even once. But as we will see, Jews point to Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots as kinds of havurot (plural of hevrah) in Bible times. The hevrah, as one Jew said, “is hidden in plain sight...

A Story. The Honorable Order of the Mustard Seed. Three centuries ago Christians fled Moravia to find the safety of Count Zinzendorf’s landholdings in what is now the Czech Republic. In 1716 Zinzendorf and the Moravian Christian community established an extraordinary mission society called The Order of the Mustard Seed. They started a prayer meeting that prayed continually for one hundred years! They began sending missionaries to places like Greenland and to the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Members of this order wore a ring inscribed with the motto, “None live for themselves.” They made a solemn pledge: “Be true to...