Dwight L. Moody: 19th c. Evangelist Issue 25 | 1990

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Dwight L. Moody was anything but conventional. To attract poor, urban children to his Sunday school, he bought a little Indian pony and offered rides. To preach the gospel to people who resisted attending church, he held meetings in theaters, auditoriums, and sprawling circus tents. When managers of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago decided to keep the Fair open on Sunday, many Christian leaders called for a boycott. Not Moody. He said, “Let us open so many preaching places and present the gospel so attractively that people will want to come and hear it.”

D.L. Moody earned his famous nickname “Crazy Moody.” But in his delightfully unconventional way, he reached 100,000,000 people with the good news of Jesus Christ.

At Christian History, we hope to emulate the spirit of D.L. Moody as we approach the grand task of communicating our Christian heritage. We endeavor to present the people and events that have shaped Christianity in a fresh, intelligent, and engaging manner. Historical reading often is caricatured as dry and dusty. We hope to change that, to live up to the words of Elton Trueblood: “Christian History proves that history need not be boring. It has done a remarkable thing in an unexpected way.”

Readers of Christian History also are delightfully unconventional. Compared to readers of most other magazines, you read more of an issue and are far more likely to keep it (93 percent of you save the entire issue). On a recent survey asking for reaction to possible themes for forthcoming issues, over 60 percent of you responded, an unheard-of percentage for such questionnaires.

We value that trust and hope to continue to earn it in every way.

For example, 86 percent of you said you were very interested or somewhat interested in ...