Bearing Witness: Stories of Martyrdom and Costly Discipleship is a collection of brief biographies that is part of the Bearing Witness Stories Project, a collaborative project of Anabaptists that continues the tradition of telling the stories of costly discipleship that began with Thieleman van Braght's 1685 collection of martyr stories, Martyrs Mirror.While Martyrs Mirror remains inspiring and relevant for the stories of Christian discipleship, it doesn't include the testimonies of the Anabaptists who have also suffered for their faith in the years since 1685. That's what makes Bearing Witness such an important collection.
When I first read this collection, my immediate response was one of being driven to prayer in thanksgiving. These stories tell the life of faithful discipleship from the Church's earliest days (Stephen, Polycarp, etc.) to the stories of those of the Radical Reformation (John Hus, William Tyndale, etc.). But there are more modern stories here, and stories of lives lived throughout the world (from the Virgin Islands to the Congo to Romania). What you find here is a testimony of lives that point to the King of kings and Lord of lords. Lives that live and die in testimony to the Prince of peace.
Bearing Witness is an important spiritual discipline for the contemporary church, because it's here that we learn to tell the story of Jesus in real, every day lives. That makes Bearing Witness a book not to be missed.
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I received a free copy of this book from Plough Publishing in exchange for my honest review here.