Women of Faith and Courage: Susanna Wesley, Fanny Crosby, Catherine Booth, Mary Slessor and Corrie ten Boom - eBook

Vance Christie is a pastor and author specialising in missionary biographies.

In his book Women of Faith and Courage, Vance Christie writes the biographies of five women who changed Christian history: Susanna Wesley, Fanny Crosby, Catherine Booth, Mary Slessor, and Corrie ten Boom. Christie uses these remarkable women's lives to show the influence that faithfulness and devotion can have on the world. He hopes this influence will touch his readers, inspiring them to imitate these examples of faith and courage.

The book covers Susanna Wesley's challenging life as a woman in the man-dominated 17th century; Fanny Crosby's struggles as a blind woman in the 19th century; Catherine Booth's triumphs as one of the first influential female speakers; Mary Slessor's passion for the lost in Africa; and Corrie ten Boom's amazing testimony to the power of forgiveness even in Nazi concentration camps. Christie's story-telling method does not communicate the potential power of these stories. Although they are factually accurate and full of quotations from credible sources, the biographies (especially the first ones) at times feel like a disconnected flow of facts and events that are not effectively linked. Questionable word choices and confusing sentence structures also detract from the potency of these stories. Still, Christie is a pastor and an author specializing in missionary stories, and the substantial evidence he presents leaves little doubt as to the factual accuracy of his research.

Using other biographers' works and quotations from the profiled women themselves (speeches, journals, letters), Christie supports his account of the five women's lives with a wide variety of sources. At times it seems each woman is telling her own story and he is only compiling her quotations. It is sometimes unclear who is being quoted. There are quotation marks, but the words are not attributed to anyone. Over all, however, Christie presents five well-supported examples of lives that glorified God and drew others closer to Him.

As a whole, Women of Faith and Courage is a good book, but not a great one. Accurate and well-supported, it informs the reader and challenges him or her to live a life like those of Wesley, Crosby, Booth, Slessor, and ten Boom. The closing exhortation to leave our lives of compromise and follow whole-heartedly after Jesus offers a glimpse of how powerful the book could have been if the theme had been emphasized more strongly throughout the pages. Readers who appreciate factual biographies and are interested in the history of the modern Church will enjoy this book. Those who prefer exciting stories that are brightly and enthusiastically written would probably not like it quite as well. - Ellen Williamson, www.ChristianBookPreviews.com

Nothing inspires me like reading about the lives of women who lived and died serving the Lord Jesus. Vance Christie has done a wonderful job of opening the lives of five women-sharing their strengths and weaknesses as well as their victories and tragedies. I came away knowing that all I must do is to please God and the affirmation that the key to doing that is obedience, standing under Scripture without being swayed by my own logic or perceived giftedness or even by the opportunities presented! Indeed for God to take ordinary women and use them in such extraordinary ways should give every woman a mandate to serve the Lord faithfully even if in the most humble circumstances!

~ Dorothy K. Patterson

"He has written each life story in such a vibrant way, truly making each of the five women come alive."

~ Helen Roseveare

"This fascinating book, Women of Faith and Courage, shows in a beautifully-written and fascinating style, the faithful devotion of these women for Christ, and allows us to look deeply into their lives and ministries."

~ Faith Cook

"Whether confronted with poverty, a self-centered husband, endless debt, physical disabilities, perennial illness, government persecution, destructive fires, or loneliness, they all found faith in Christ gave them a courage to overcome every obstacle and serve Him."

~ Diana Lynn Severance

Thank you, Vance Christie, for your amazing biographies of five remarkable Christian women in history. Your book, Women of
Faith and Courage, shows in a beautifully-written and fascinating style, the faithful devotion of these women for Christ, and allows us to look deeply into their lives and ministries. I can highly recommend this book, and I hope women around the world will study it for personal spiritual growth and also in a group Bible study setting. Truly, these five women are role models for all of us today!

~ Denise George