Several years ago while still in Bible College I was perusing the library and stumbled upon a dusty Wycliffe Biographical Dictionary of the Church.  I was surprised to find it filled with stories of men and women of faith—all but forgotten in the dusty annals of history—who did countless miracles, who led entire nations to belief in Christianity, who revolutionized entire societies.  I had been given a life-long Christian education and upbringing, but knew so little of these heroic deeds.  As I turned the pages I discovered men and women—revolutionaries—whose extraordinary lives had been summed up in a few short paragraphs for future generations to ferret out.  Furthering my research of the past several years I found some of these have one or more biographies written of them, while others have no biography, only sentences to summarize their great lives of faith. 

I was especially impressed to discover revolutionary people of faith during the “dark ages” of the Church, from the 5th to the 15th centuries, about which I had heard next to nothing during all my years of Christian education and Church history study.  Most Church histories are uneven, with arduous attention given to the first few centuries of the Church plus the Protestant Reformation onward, leaving a thousand years of the church largely unaccounted for.  I discovered, hidden within the seemingly dark ages of the Church, some of its most brilliant revolutionaries.  This book unveils their stories.  May they live on in the lives they impact, and continue to cause revolutionary change in societies around the world, both in our generation and beyond.