Let's keep going with those who started it all

Engraved on the Zwemer family headstone in Pilgrim Cemetery in Holland Mi is the following bequest...My sword to my successor , to him that can my courage…These words taken from John Bunyan’s pilgrims progress were spoken by Mr. Valiant for Truth. I could and did take up the courage and the sword and inherited legacy offered by the Great Apostle to Islam Samuel Marinus Zwemer. 

Samuel Zwemer is called the “Apostle to Islam” for blazing a trail into the world of Islam and being one of the first to do so. The late J. Christy Wilson, a friend of Samuel’s, dubbed him the flaming prophet. His life story ignites true hearts, young and old alike.

The leadership of church of Jesus Christ passes from generation to generation by what is sometimes called apostolic succession.  Zwemer taught that true apostolic succession is “the Ordination of the Pierced Hands."


Samuel Marinus Zwemer was born in Vriesland, Michigan in 1867, the thirteenth child in a Reformed Church minister’s family. Many years later when he shared with his mother that he believed God was calling him to the foreign field, she told him that she had dedicated him to the Lord’s service and placed him in the cradle with the prayer that he might grow up to be a missionary.

There was Bible reading at every meal and the family went through the whole of the Scripture in this way together each year. With such a heritage, it is little wonder that Samuel felt he had accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior as far back in his boyhood as he could remember.