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Following Christ in World Evangelization

In Following Christ,¹ Joseph Stowell relates the story of Edward Kimball, a quiet and unassuming Sunday school teacher who followed Christ in evangelization. On a routine Saturday in Boston, Massachusetts (USA), some 150 years ago, Kimball took the day to visit every young man in his class. He wanted to be sure that each one had come to know Christ. One of the students worked as a clerk in his uncle’s shoe store. Kimball entered the store, walked back to the stockroom where Dwight Lyman Moody was stocking the shelves and confronted the youth with the importance of knowing Christ personally. In that stockroom, D.L. Moody accepted Christ as his Savior. The faithful Sunday school teacher had no idea that this act of faithful evangelistic witness would reap such a rich harvest for heaven. It has been estimated that during his lifetime, Moody traveled more than a million miles (before the days of commercial air travel!) and spoke to more than 100 million people.

It was Moody who led Wilbur Chapman to the Lord. Chapman became a great evangelist in the generation succeeding Moody’s. During Chapman’s ministry in Chicago, Illinois (USA), a baseball player with the “Chicago White Stockings” had a Sunday off (as did all professional ballplayers in those days) and was standing in front of a bar on State Street. A gospel wagon from the Pacific Garden Mission came by, playing hymns and inviting people to the afternoon service down the street. This ballplayer, Billy Sunday, recognized the hymns from his childhood, attended that service and received Christ as his personal Savior. Sunday played baseball for two more years, then left professional sports to minister in the YMCA in Chicago. Sometime later, Chapman was passing through town and invited Sunday to join his crusade team as an advance man, to help organize pastors and set up evangelistic meetings. Sunday enthusiastically agreed. After two years, Chapman left the evangelistic ministry to become the pastor of one of the leading churches in America. Although Sunday felt stranded, he refocused on national crusade evangelism and soon began scheduling his own crusades.

In one of Sunday’s meetings, a young man named Mordecai Hamm accepted Christ. Hamm became a great evangelist in the southeastern United States, ministering to massive crowds south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In one of those large crowds one night, a lanky North Carolina farm boy named Billy Graham stepped out and moved forward to accept Christ.

In relaying this incredible, God-orchestrated connectivity of persons, Stowell says, “What a phenomenal succession of faithful and stellar harvesters for the cause of eternity. Edward Kimball, the Sunday school teacher, was simply an unheralded follower who gave up a Saturday for the cause. Heaven is crowded with the results of his routine faithfulness.”²