Category: Faith and Teaching

Every other man on this page teaches you how to talk to somebody who believes nothing. Walter Martin taught you how to talk to somebody who believes something else.

That is a different job, and almost nobody was doing it.

Brooklyn, and the youngest of six

Walter Ralston Martin was born on 10 September 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of six children.

He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1951 and took his degree from Shelton College the year after.

The work nobody wanted

In 1955 he set up the Division of Cult Apologetics. In 1960 he founded the Christian Research Institute.

The word people use for what he did is apologetics, which sounds like apologising and is nothing of the sort. It means giving a reason for what you believe when somebody asks — or when somebody argues.

He is generally reckoned to be the father of the whole evangelical counter-cult movement. Before him there was very little of it. After him there was a great deal.

The Kingdom of the Cults

Published in 1965, and still the book people reach for.

He went through the belief systems one at a time — what they actually teach, where it departs from Scripture, and how to talk to somebody inside it without either agreeing or shouting.

That last part is what made him useful. Plenty of people can tell you a thing is wrong. He taught you what to say to the person standing at your door.

The Bible Answer Man

From 1975 he was on the radio, taking questions live. Anybody could ring in and ask him anything about the Bible or the faith, and he would answer it there and then.

He did that for fourteen years, until he died at home on 26 June 1989, aged 60.

Why we point people to him

Because somebody will knock at your door. Somebody always does.

And when they do, most Christians have two options — say nothing and feel useless, or say something badly and make it worse. Walter Martin gave people a third option.

He is the one to go to when the person in front of you is not an unbeliever at all. They are a believer. Just not in the same thing.

His teaching is still on YouTube, in his own voice, and it has not dated.

“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” — 1 Peter 3:15

Sources: Wikipedia; Christian Research Institute; Reasons to Believe; BYU Library Special Collections.

Most Bible teachers come out of a Bible college. Chuck Missler came out of guided missiles and computer networks.

That is why he teaches the way he does.

The Naval Academy and the missiles

Charles W. Missler was born on 28 May 1934. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1956, took a Master’s in Engineering at UCLA, and was commissioned into the US Air Force.

When his military obligation was up he became Branch Chief of the Department of Guided Missiles at Lowry Air Force Base.

Ford, and the first network of its kind

He joined the Ford Motor Company in 1963. In 1966 he built the first international industrial computer network in the world.

Think about the year. 1966. Most people had never seen a computer, and this man was joining them up across countries.

In 1977 he became chairman and chief executive of Western Digital, and its largest shareholder.

Founding Koinonia House

He had started Koinonia House in 1973, while all of that was still going on. Teaching the Bible was not his retirement hobby — he was doing both.

Eventually the teaching took over. He spent the rest of his life at it, and died on 1 May 2018.

Learn the Bible in 24 Hours

Published in 2002, and the reason most people know his name.

It is exactly what the title says. Twenty-four hour-long sessions that take you through the whole Bible — every book, how they fit together, what runs through the lot of it from Genesis to Revelation.

You watch one an hour at a time. Nobody sits through twenty-four hours in one go. One a week and you have done the entire Bible in under six months.

Then you go back and study properly, because now you know where everything sits.

Why we point people to him

Because he treats you as though you have a brain. There is no talking down, no watering it down, no assuming you cannot follow.

And because of how he handles the Bible itself. He came from engineering, where a thing either works or it does not, and he approached Scripture the same way — as one document, written across sixteen hundred years by forty men, that hangs together as a single design.

That is the argument he keeps making. Not a library of religious books. One book, with one Author, and a structure to it.

If you have ever felt the Bible was too big to get hold of, he is where to start.

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” — 2 Timothy 3:16

Sources: Koinonia House; chuckmissler.com; Wikipedia; Missions Box.

In December 1965 a man in his late thirties took over a small church in Costa Mesa, California. It had twenty-five people in it.

By the time he died it had spawned over a thousand churches around the world.

Seventeen years of ordinary work

Charles Ward Smith was born on 25 June 1927 in Ventura, California. He went through LIFE Bible College and was ordained with the Foursquare Gospel church.

Then he pastored. Small churches, one after another, for seventeen years. Nothing anyone would have written down.

Eventually he left his denomination altogether, took a church plant in Corona, and in December 1965 moved to that little chapel in Costa Mesa with its twenty-five members.

He was thirty-eight years old and, by every measure anyone uses, nothing much had happened.

The decision that changed it

What happened next was not a strategy. In the late sixties, young people started turning up — barefoot, unwashed, off the streets and out of the drug scene, with nothing about them that fitted a Sunday morning congregation.

Plenty of churches made it clear they were not welcome. Some put notices up about bare feet on the carpet.

Chuck Smith let them in. When somebody complained about the carpet, the story goes that he said he would rip the carpet out before he would turn a young person away from Jesus.

In March 1968 he brought an eighteen-year-old evangelist named Lonnie Frisbee into his own home, and out of that came a Christian house where those young people could live while they got their lives sorted out.

Thousands were converted. It became known as the Jesus Movement.

Teaching straight through the Bible

His method was almost dull, and that was the point. He taught verse by verse, straight through a book of the Bible from the first chapter to the last, and then started the next book.

No skipping the hard parts. No picking a topic and hunting for verses to prop it up. Just the text, in order, explained plainly.

That is why Calvary Chapel spread. Anybody could do it. You did not need to be clever or charismatic — you needed a Bible and the discipline to keep going.

Why we point people to him

Because of who he opened the door to. He took in people the respectable churches had written off, and he did not ask them to clean themselves up first.

Our own people know what it is to walk into a building and feel the room change. He is worth honouring for that alone.

And because of the seventeen years. Nothing happened for a very long time, and he kept turning up anyway. Then it all happened at once, and it was never really him doing it.

He died of lung cancer on 3 October 2013, aged 86.

“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” — 1 Corinthians 1:27

Sources: Calvary Chapel; Wikipedia; GotQuestions.org.

Ken Ham started out as a science teacher in Queensland. He ended up building a full-size Noah’s Ark in Kentucky that you can walk around inside.

How a man gets from one to the other is worth knowing.

A schoolmaster’s son

Kenneth Alfred Ham was born on 20 October 1951 in Cairns, in far north Queensland, Australia. His father Mervyn was a Christian educator and a school principal at several schools across Queensland.

So he grew up in a home where the Bible was taken seriously and where teaching was the family trade. Both of those things stuck.

The question he could not leave alone

He trained and worked as a science teacher. And in an Australian state school he ran into the same thing over and over — young people who had been taught the Bible at church and something quite different at school, and who had quietly decided the Bible was the part that must be wrong.

That is the thing he could not let go of. Not the science on its own. The effect it was having on young people’s faith.

Leaving to start again

He left teaching for creation ministry, and spent years with the Institute for Creation Research in America.

In 1994 he left that too, and with two colleagues — Mark Looy and Mike Zovath — started Creation Science Ministries. In 1997 it took the name it still has: Answers in Genesis.

It now runs the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, a full-scale ark built to the dimensions given in Genesis.

What he actually argues

People assume the argument is about dinosaurs. It is not, and never really was.

His argument is that Genesis is the foundation. Every doctrine that matters — sin, death, marriage, why the world is the way it is, why anybody needs saving at all — is laid down in the first eleven chapters of the Bible. Pull those out and the rest has nothing underneath it.

It is a question about authority. If the Bible cannot be trusted where it speaks about history, why would anyone trust it where it speaks about salvation?

Why we point people to him

Because young people in our own community get the same treatment he saw in those Queensland classrooms. Told one thing on a Sunday and the opposite on a Monday, and left to work out on their own which one to drop.

And because he is a schoolteacher at heart. He explains things plainly, for ordinary people, without needing you to have letters after your name.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” — Genesis 1:1

Sources: Wikipedia; Answers in Genesis; HandWiki.

Most people who know Ray Comfort know him from a camera and a car park — stopping a stranger, asking a few questions, and watching the penny drop. What fewer people know is where he came from, and how close he came to never being a Christian at all.

A birth certificate that told a lie

He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 5 December 1949. His mother was Jewish. His father, in Ray’s own words, was a Gentile who was open to the things of God.

When he was born, his parents wrote “Methodist” on his birth certificate. Not because they were Methodists. His mother had lived through the war years and feared there might one day be another Hitler — and if there were, she did not want a piece of paper anywhere naming her son as a Jew.

That is the household he came from. Not a religious one. By his own account he went to church about three times in twenty years, and was given no religious instruction at all.

25 April 1972

He was twenty-two when he was converted. He gives the date plainly — 25 April 1972, in Christchurch.

Not raised into it. Not talked into it over years. A man with almost no church behind him, turning around at twenty-two.

Twelve years on a soapbox

He was ordained and pastored in Christchurch for three and a half years. But the part worth paying attention to is what he did alongside it.

He spent twelve years preaching in Christchurch’s Speaker’s Corner — the open air, no building, no invitation, no audience who had chosen to be there. Twelve years of hecklers.

That is where the method came from. Not a seminary. Not a book. Twelve years of standing in the open and finding out what actually works when the person in front of you does not want to hear it.

Around 1974 he started Living Waters, which began as nothing more than a free evangelistic newspaper with gospel tracts in it.

California, and the camera

In 1989 he joined the pastoral staff at Calvary Chapel in California — the same Calvary Chapel movement Chuck Smith started.

Later came The Way of the Master, co-hosted with the actor Kirk Cameron, teaching people how to share their faith and how to handle the hard questions.

Why we point people to him

Because his method starts where the Bible starts. He uses the Law — the Ten Commandments — to show a person what they already know about themselves, before he says a word about grace. You do not tell a man about a cure until he knows he is ill.

And because of who he was. A boy whose birth certificate was written to hide what he was, from a home with no faith in it, who ended up teaching hundreds of thousands of Christians how to open their mouths.

“Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.” — Romans 3:19

Sources: Ray Comfort’s own autobiography, as cited in his Wikipedia entry; Living Waters; Faithlife.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born in Kelvedon, Essex, in 1834, into a family with ministers going back generations — his father and grandfather were both Independent preachers. But the faith he grew up around was not yet his own.

That changed on a January morning in 1850, when he was fifteen. Spurgeon set out for a church appointment, but a heavy snowstorm forced him to give up on reaching it and duck instead into the nearest building he could find — a small Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester. The regular preacher never made it through the snow either. In his place, an ordinary layman with, by Spurgeon’s own account, very little to say, stood up and preached from one verse: Isaiah 45:22 — “Look unto me, and be saved, all the ends of the earth.”

By his own telling, Spurgeon looked, and was saved, in that chapel, that morning, because the weather had blocked his own plan and put him somewhere he had never intended to be.

From a snowed-in chapel to London’s largest pulpit

He was baptised by immersion in the River Lark and joined a Baptist church soon after. He preached his first sermon at sixteen, took his first pastorate at Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, at eighteen, and by twenty — just four years after the snowstorm — had been called to London’s New Park Street Chapel, which grew so large under his preaching that it eventually became the Metropolitan Tabernacle. He became known in his own lifetime as “the Prince of Preachers.”

Why this belongs next to the others

Every biography told here so far has turned on a moment nobody planned — a field, a pawnshop, a caravan fire. Spurgeon’s turning point is the plainest of them all: a storm he did not choose, forcing a detour he did not choose, into a building he would never otherwise have entered, to hear a sermon from a man with nothing special to say. The point was not made by the preacher. It was made by whoever put the storm there in the first place.

The point

Spurgeon did not go looking for God that morning — he was blocked from going anywhere else. It was never really about the man’s own effort or planning. Something else was doing the steering, and the man’s part was simply to look, when he was told to look, in a place he never chose to be.