The Stammering Sunday School Teacher Who Changed the World

In April of 1855, a Boston Sunday school teacher named Edward Kimball paced the sidewalk outside a shoe store on Court Street, nearly losing his nerve. He had no theological degree. He possessed no gift for eloquent speech. By his own admission, he stumbled over his words so badly that afternoon that he could barely string a sentence together. But he walked inside anyway and found a seventeen-year-old stock boy named Dwight wrapping shoes in the back room.

Kimball later wrote that his appeal was so fumbling, so incoherent, that he wondered if he had done more harm than good. He had none of the polished rhetoric that the great preachers of Boston commanded from their carved pulpits. He came, as Paul described, "in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling."

That stock boy was Dwight L. Moody, who would become the most powerful evangelist of the nineteenth century, whose ministry would ripple forward through F.B. Meyer, J. Wilbur Chapman, Billy Sunday, and eventually Billy Graham.

The rulers of Boston's religious establishment would never have sent a stammering shoe-store visitor to change history. But God's wisdom operates on an entirely different frequency than human calculation. The Spirit of God took Kimball's shaking hands and halting words and accomplished what no amount of polished oratory could have achieved — because, as Paul reminds us, spiritual truth is spiritually discerned, and God's power is made perfect in human weakness.