Dr. Robert Sumner passed away in December 2016. The Biblical Evangelist newspaper is no longer being published and the ministry of Biblical Evangelism has ceased operation.

The remaining inventory of his books and gospel tracts was transferred to The Baptist Tabernacle of Los Angeles and may be ordered here.

This Day In Baptist History II: 366 Daily Devotions
David L. Cummins and E. Wayne Thompson

Wow! What a book! Such is not the usual format for starting a review, but we were just putting down our thoughts and those emerged! If you like history – as we do – you will love this book. Make that double if you enjoy Baptist history. As the title of the volume implies, it is intended as a daily devotional aid, but the truth is that it is the kind of book that makes fascinating reading straight through from cover to cover. You can enjoy a number of thrilling evenings curled up with this book. Let me offer some samples.

We just turned to the entry for October 14 and read the piece, “A Servant in the Right Place at the Right Time,” about a preacher named Thomas Dungan. He had been severely persecuted for his faith in Ireland and had eventually fled to Rhode Island to enjoy the freedom of worship the Baptists had set up in that province. From there he moved to Pennsylvania and settled in Bucks County, establishing a Baptist church in Cold Spring. When he died, lack of a pastor to replace him resulted in the death of the church. Was his life a failure? Not exactly.

In Cold Spring he had come in contact with an unconverted hypocrite posing as a Baptist preacher, Elias Keach – actually the son of the illustrious Benjamin Keach – and Dungan not only led him to Christ, he ordained him to the Baptist ministry. Keach then planted a church that “for all intents and purposes became the foundation of all the subsequent Baptist work through the colony” William Penn had founded. Dungan’s ministry was, after all, a rip-roaring success, wasn’t it? And that is just the story of one devotional; there are 365 others from January 1 through December 31!

For my birthday there was a fascinating missionary tale, a theme that has always gripped me deeply. For the birthdays of my five children, there was a story of a Baptist philanthropist; the story of conversion, romance and marriage that led a couple to serve in China; another that recounted the life of a frail twin who had a bull dog determination to serve the Lord, and to serve Him in Africa, eventually reaching the three score and ten before she was forced back to the States; still another told the story of a 30-year-old sharecropper in Hungary who first heard the gospel at that age, surrendered to Christ, quit beating his wife (all husbands did it in that country at that time), and launched a highly successful ministry of lay preaching – eventually he traveled thousands of miles across his homeland, personally baptizing some 11,000 converts, and his biography lists 325 towns and villages where he conducted meetings, most of them producing a Baptist church as a result; and the fifth one was a challenge to try to keep up with (and surpass) the Joneses – a family in North Carolina who worked to evangelize the State, especially the Cherokee Indians.

Do you get the idea? If you find history fascinating, this is the book for you! One word of warning: your own service will seem kind of meager when compared to the giants in this book – most of whom you will have never heard of prior to reading this volume.

Bob Jones University Press

Greenville, SC

742 Pages

$29.95, Paper