baptist church
baptist church
baptist church
Great Preachers of History
Every preacher stands in a long line. Open Icon Baptist Church values great preaching, and honours great preachers. These are some of the women and men whose voices have shaped the way we understand what it means to proclaim the good news of Jesus — across centuries, continents, and traditions. They did not all agree with each other, and we do not endorse everything any of them said. But we honour their faithfulness to the call and their enduring influence on the Church.
Gregory of Nazianzus (c.329–390 AD)
One of the Cappadocian Fathers and a towering figure of fourth-century theology, Gregory earned the title The Theologian — an honour shared in Eastern Orthodoxy only with John the Apostle. A reluctant preacher who found public ministry exhausting, he nevertheless delivered some of the most brilliant sermons of the patristic era, including his Five Theological Orations on the Trinity that shaped orthodox Christology for centuries. He briefly served as Archbishop of Constantinople but resigned, finding ecclesiastical politics intolerable. His best preaching was done not from positions of power but from the margins, which may be why it still rings true.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD)
Augustine preached almost every day for thirty years as Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, and several thousand of his sermons survive. Born to a pagan father and a devout Christian mother (Monica), his restless intellectual journey through Manicheism and Neoplatonism before his dramatic conversion became the template for Western Christian autobiography. His Confessions is the most influential account of faith-seeking-understanding ever written. As a preacher he was direct, earthy, and theologically relentless — capable of addressing both the learned and the illiterate in the same congregation. His theology of grace, sin, and redemption has shaped Western Christianity, for better and worse, more than any other voice outside the New Testament.
FW Boreham (1871–1959)
Frederick William Boreham was a Baptist minister who spent most of his ministry in the antipodes — Mosgiel in New Zealand and then Hobart, Tasmania — but became one of the most widely read religious essayists in the English-speaking world. Mentored by Spurgeon at the Pastor’s College, he developed a distinctive homiletical style built around biography, literature, and the texture of everyday life. His hundreds of published essays and sermon collections reached readers across Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond who might never have entered a church. He had an extraordinary gift for making the gospel feel like the most interesting thing in the world. In his later years he served Armadale Baptist Church in Melbourne — a near neighbour to our former home in South Yarra — and the city claimed him as its own. He is buried in Kew Cemetery, and his grave remains a place of quiet pilgrimage for admirers of his work.
Justin Martyr (c.100–165 AD)
A philosopher turned Christian apologist, Justin Martyr was among the first to argue that the gospel could be proclaimed in the language of Greek philosophy without losing its soul. Preaching and writing in Rome during a time of persecution, he addressed his Apologies directly to the Emperor, defending Christians against charges of atheism and immorality with calm intellectual confidence. His description of early Christian worship — gathering on Sundays, reading scriptures, preaching, praying, sharing bread and wine — is one of the earliest accounts we have of what church actually looked like. He died for his faith around 165 AD, beheaded under Marcus Aurelius, which is how he got his surname.
Billy Graham (1918–2018)
Billy Graham preached the gospel to more people in more countries than any other figure in Christian history — an estimated 215 million in person over six decades. His crusades filled stadiums on every continent and his radio and television reach extended far beyond. He insisted from early in his ministry that his crusades would be racially integrated, at personal cost in the American South. His long career was not without failure — most notably his failure to speak against the Vietnam War and his complicity with Nixon, which he later repented of publicly. We would not endorse everything said over so long a career. But we honour his faithful pursuit of his calling, his profound impact on a generation of church life, and his growth towards a more open and wholistic theology at a time of life when many instead become more inflexible.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)
Mystic, composer, scientist, and preacher, Hildegard of Bingen defies any single category. Entering monastic life as a child, she experienced visions from her youth but didn’t begin writing or speaking publicly until her forties, when a divine commission overcame her hesitation. She conducted four preaching tours through the Rhineland — extraordinary for a woman in twelfth-century Europe — addressing clergy, laity, and religious communities with a prophetic authority that silenced most objections. Popes and emperors sought her counsel. Her theology of viriditas — the greening power of God in creation — speaks with remarkable freshness to contemporary ecological crisis. She is one of only four women named Doctor of the Church.
John Wesley (1703–1791)
When the Church of England’s doors closed to him, John Wesley took his preaching outdoors — and changed the world. Riding on horseback across Britain for fifty years, he preached an estimated 40,000 sermons to miners, factory workers, and the rural poor, proclaiming a gospel of grace available to all and a holiness that expressed itself in social transformation. The movement he sparked, Methodism, became one of the great engines of social reform: abolition, prison reform, universal education. Wesley himself never left the Church of England, but the movement he founded became one of the largest Protestant denominations in the world. His theological insistence that “the world is my parish” made geography irrelevant to the call to preach.
Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922)
One of the most remarkable figures in Christian history, Pandita Ramabai was a Sanskrit scholar, social reformer, Bible translator, and evangelist who transformed the lives of thousands of Indian women. Born into a high-caste Hindu family committed to women’s education — unusual for the time — she was widowed young with a small daughter and came to Christianity through her encounter with the gospels and with Christian women working among India’s poor. She established Mukti Mission near Pune, which at its height housed and educated over 1,500 destitute women and children. Her preaching was inseparable from her practice: the gospel she proclaimed was one of liberation, dignity, and practical transformation. She translated the entire Bible into Marathi from the original Hebrew and Greek.
CH Spurgeon (1834–1892)
Charles Haddon Spurgeon was the most popular preacher in Victorian England — and possibly in Christian history. Pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London from his mid-twenties, he regularly preached to congregations of six thousand, and his printed sermons circulated in millions of copies worldwide. A Calvinist Baptist with a genius for illustration and an earthy, direct communication style that made theology accessible to working people, he also ran an orphanage, a pastors’ college, and dozens of social ministries from his church. He suffered from depression throughout his life, and wrote about it with unusual honesty. Whatever one makes of his theology, his sheer output, his pastoral heart, and his insistence that preaching must connect with real human life make him impossible to ignore.
Oscar Romero (1917–1980)
When Oscar Romero was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, the Salvadoran government breathed a collective sigh of relief — he had a reputation as a cautious conservative. Within weeks, the murder of his friend Father Rutilio Grande by a government death squad transformed him. For the next three years, his Sunday homilies were broadcast across El Salvador on Catholic radio — the poor gathered around transistor radios in their villages to hear him name what was happening to them and declare that God saw it too. He advocated tirelessly for the poor and the disappeared, confronted the government and the military, and appealed to US President Carter to stop arming the regime. On 24 March 1980, he was shot dead at the altar while celebrating Mass. He was canonised in 2018.
Doug Nichols (1939–2022)
Pastor Sir Doug Nichols was a Yorta Yorta man, a pastor in the Churches of Christ, and one of the most respected Aboriginal Christian leaders in Australian history. A gifted evangelist, he ministered across Australia and internationally, bringing a distinctively Indigenous perspective to the gospel — insisting that Jesus was good news for Aboriginal people in particular, not despite their culture but through it. He was knighted for his services to the church and to Aboriginal communities. His preaching was warm, direct, and grounded in a life of integrity: he walked what he talked. His presence in this gallery is a reminder that the gospel has always found its most authentic expression among those the powerful have tried to silence, and that the church in Australia is not complete without the voices of its First Peoples.
John Smith (1942–2019)
“Smithy” was one of Australia’s most original and provocative preachers — a motorcycle-riding, leather-jacketed evangelist who founded God’s Squad Christian Motorcycle Club and spent decades riding with bikies, building bridges between the church and the margins of Australian society. His preaching combined evangelical passion with a sophisticated cultural critique and a gift for connecting with people the church had written off. He addressed rallies, universities, and rock festivals, as comfortable on a Harley as in a pulpit. Like many gifted leaders, Smithy was a complex character. He fell out with many who worked alongside him, and in the last months of his life made some strident and uncharacteristically conservative pronouncements on social issues that left many of his supporters feeling let down. We honour the preacher and the pioneer, and hold the complexity honestly. Our own pastor heard his call to ministry under Smithy’s preaching.
Tony Campolo (1935–2024)
Tony Campolo was an American Baptist sociologist and preacher whose career was defined by the conviction that you cannot separate personal salvation from social justice. A professor at Eastern University for decades, he became one of the most recognisable voices in American evangelical Christianity while consistently challenging it from within — on poverty, race, consumerism, and eventually on LGBTQ inclusion, publicly affirming full inclusion in 2015 at a cost to his standing in some evangelical circles. His preaching style was exuberant, accessible, and relentlessly focused on the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount. He was perhaps best known for the sermon that begins “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming” — a piece of preaching so perfectly constructed it has been delivered by preachers worldwide for decades.
John Chrysostom (c.349–407 AD)
Chrysostom means Golden-Mouthed, and the name was earned. Preaching in Antioch and then as Archbishop of Constantinople, John was regarded in his own lifetime as the greatest preacher in the Greek-speaking world. His sermons on Matthew, John, and Paul’s letters remain models of close biblical exposition combined with passionate social application — he was ferocious in his criticism of the wealthy for their indifference to the poor. His courage in confronting the Empress Eudoxia over her abuse of power led to his exile and death. But his vile statements about Jews and homosexuals are a dark blot on his legacy that cannot be overlooked; we include him here for the preaching, not for everything he said. One of his short sermons is still prescribed for preaching at the Paschal Vigil liturgy every year in most Eastern Orthodox churches, and a paraphrase of it has been preached in our church too.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, preacher, and theologian who understood earlier than most that the Nazi regime was not merely a political problem but a theological one — a false gospel that demanded the church’s resistance. He helped found the Confessing Church, ran an underground seminary, and preached and wrote with extraordinary clarity about what “cheap grace” costs and what “costly grace” demands. His Life Together and The Cost of Discipleship remain essential texts for anyone thinking about what faithful Christian community looks like under pressure. Arrested in 1943 for his involvement in plots against Hitler, he was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945, just weeks before the war ended. His final recorded words, to a fellow prisoner: “This is the end — for me, the beginning of life.”
Winifred Kiek (1884–1975)
In 1927, Winifred Kiek became the first woman ordained to Christian ministry in Australia, recognised by the Congregational Church of South Australia. A graduate of the Melbourne College of Divinity and the University of Adelaide, she combined her pastoral ministry with decades of advocacy for women’s rights, peace, and social justice. Preaching in an era when most denominations considered female ordination unthinkable, she did so with quiet conviction and scholarly depth, refusing to be defined by the controversy her ministry provoked. She served churches in South Australia for many years and remained active in ecumenical and social causes well into old age. Her ordination was a landmark not only for Australian Christianity but for Australian public life.
Desmond Tutu (1931–2021)
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the moral voice of South Africa through apartheid and beyond — and the instrument of that voice was preaching. From his earliest years as a priest through his time as Archbishop of Cape Town, his sermons were acts of political theology: naming the idolatry of apartheid, declaring the non-negotiable dignity of every person made in God’s image, and insisting that God takes sides with the poor and the oppressed. He chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid’s end, applying his theology of restorative justice to a wounded nation. Small, exuberant, given to infectious laughter and sudden tears, he modelled a Christianity that was fully African, fully Anglican, and fully free. He was an early and consistent advocate for LGBTQ dignity, calling it the great justice issue of his time.
Athol Gill (1937–1992)
Athol Gill was a New Testament scholar and Baptist pastor whose preaching and teaching had a profound impact on a generation of Australian Christians, including a number in our congregation, opening their eyes to what it might look like to be radically committed to Jesus without being ignorantly literalist about the Bible or socially conservative. He founded the House of the Gentle Bunyip, an intentional Christian community in inner-city Melbourne, and taught New Testament at Whitley College. When conservatives in the Baptist Union of Victoria moved to block his reappointment as Professor, Athol volunteered to stand before the Assembly and take questions about his faith and teaching for two hours — after which he was overwhelmingly voted back into his position. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1992, at the height of his influence, leaving a gap in Australian Baptist life that has never quite been filled.
Dora Yu (1873–1931)
Dora Yu was one of the most significant evangelists in twentieth-century Chinese Christianity — and one of the least known in the West. Trained as a medical doctor, she felt called to preaching and eventually gave up medicine to travel and evangelise across China. Her ministry influenced a generation of Chinese Christian leaders, most notably Watchman Nee, who attributed his conversion to her preaching. She established a Bible training school in Shanghai that shaped hundreds of pastors and evangelists. Preaching at a time when women in public ministry were doubly marginalised — by gender and by the colonial dynamics of the Chinese church — she carved out space for a distinctively Chinese, Spirit-led evangelicalism that was neither Western missionary Christianity nor simply a reaction against it.
Julian of Norwich (c.1342–c.1416)
Following a near-fatal illness at thirty, Julian of Norwich received a series of visions of the crucified Christ that she spent the next twenty years pondering and writing about. The result, Revelations of Divine Love, is the first book written in English by a woman, and one of the most profound theological texts in any language. As an anchoress — living in a small room attached to a Norwich church — she counselled all who came to her, earning a reputation as a wise and gentle guide. Her central conviction, that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” was not naive optimism but hard-won trust in the love of God that will not let creation go. Her cat was her constant companion.
Paul of Tarsus (c.5–c.67 AD)
The most prolific preacher of the early church, the Apostle Paul carried the gospel across the Mediterranean world, establishing communities from Antioch to Rome. A tentmaker by trade, he preached in synagogues, market squares, and private homes — anywhere people would listen. His letters, written to guide and encourage those communities, became the theological backbone of Christian preaching for two thousand years. Passionate, argumentative, and tireless, Paul understood preaching not as performance but as participation in God’s own announcement of liberation. His famous declaration that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, planted a seed of radical equality that preachers have been trying to catch up with ever since.
Francis of Assisi (1181–1226)
Francis didn’t set out to be a preacher — he set out to live like Jesus, and the preaching followed naturally. Son of a wealthy merchant, he embraced radical poverty, rebuilt a ruined chapel with his own hands, and gathered a community of brothers who walked from town to town proclaiming the kingdom of God through word and deed. He preached to the Sultan of Egypt during the Crusades, advocating for peace. He preached to birds. He preached by feeding lepers. His simple, joyful, creation-loving spirituality was a reformation of the church’s imagination long before Luther. He preached peace to the wolf who had been terrorising the town of Gubbio, so the legend says, and the wolf became his companion — a symbol of the reconciliation at the heart of his message.
Sojourner Truth (c.1797–1883)
Born into slavery in New York as Isabella Baumfree, she escaped to freedom in 1826 and experienced a conversion so overwhelming she described it as seeing God face to face. Taking the name Sojourner Truth, she began travelling and preaching — an illiterate Black woman standing before white audiences in the antebellum United States and speaking with a power that left them speechless. Her most famous speech, Ain’t I a Woman?, delivered at a women’s rights convention in 1851, is one of the great pieces of preaching in American history. She understood herself as a prophet: God had given her a message about freedom and dignity that could not be contained by slavery, racism, or the subordination of women. She delivered it for forty years.
Mary Magdalene (1st century AD)
The first preacher of the resurrection. When the other disciples were hiding behind locked doors, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb, encountered the risen Christ, and was commissioned to carry the news. The early church called her apostola apostolorum — apostle to the apostles. Whatever her story before Easter, she was the first to say “I have seen the Lord,” and the first to be sent to tell it. That makes her the founding figure of Christian proclamation. Her presence in this gallery is a reminder that the gospel was first entrusted not to the powerful or the credentialed but to a woman whose testimony the other disciples initially refused to believe.
In Eastern Christian tradition, Mary Magdalene is often depicted holding an egg — a symbol of resurrection. According to the tradition, she travelled to Rome and gained an audience with Emperor Tiberius, declaring “Christ is risen.” The Emperor scoffed, saying it was as impossible as the white egg on the table turning red. It turned red. The story is almost certainly legendary, but it captures something true: she was a preacher who would not be silenced, even by empire.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)
Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist preacher who changed the world, which is exactly what Baptist preaching is supposed to do. Drawing on the traditions of the Black church, the theology of the Social Gospel, and the nonviolent philosophy of Gandhi, he preached a vision of the beloved community that was simultaneously deeply Christian and universally compelling. His sermons — “I Have a Dream,” “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail” — are among the greatest pieces of public rhetoric in American history. He was thirty-nine years old when he was assassinated in Memphis. The FBI, which had surveilled and harassed him for years, named him the most dangerous man in America. That is a form of tribute.
John Saunders (1806–1859)
The founding pastor of the first Baptist church in Australia, John Saunders arrived in Sydney in 1834, paying his own way, and established what became Bathurst Street Baptist Church — opened in 1836 as an intentionally open and ecumenical congregation that welcomed Christians of all denominations to both membership and the Lord’s table, unusual for Baptists of his era. A quietly persuasive preacher who could flame with righteous indignation, Saunders was ahead of his times on almost every social issue he touched. Most significantly, his sermon of October 1838 — preached in the immediate aftermath of the massacre of Indigenous people at Myall Creek — was described by historian Henry Reynolds as one of the most eloquent presentations of humanitarian doctrine from the period. He insisted that Aboriginal people were fully human, made in God’s image, and that the colony’s treatment of them was a sin demanding repentance and restitution. It is one of the most important sermons ever preached in Australia.
Catherine Booth (1829–1890)
Catherine Booth co-founded the Salvation Army with her husband William, but she was the better preacher of the two — and she knew it. At a time when respectable Christian opinion held that women should be silent in church, she wrote a pamphlet arguing from scripture for women’s right to preach, then stood up and preached. She never looked back. Drawing enormous crowds in London’s poorest neighbourhoods, she combined evangelical passion with a clear-eyed analysis of how poverty, alcohol, and exploitation trapped women and families. She called the wealthy to account and the powerful to repentance. Her theological conviction was simple: if God has given a woman a message, she has an obligation to deliver it. The Army she helped build is still feeding the hungry in 130 countries.