God Used This Broken Pastor—and He Can Use You Too
God Uses Imperfect People
To ask a historian to pick a favorite person from church history is really tough because there are so many of them. I really enjoy getting to know people and how God has used them, how they have worked specifically in God’s church over time.
One of the things that I struggle with as a historian is trying to make sure that I’m not idolizing individuals. Certainly, you have a difficult time doing that, especially as you get engaged with some of these people and fall in love with them. So part of what I try to do as I’m reading church history is to make sure that I’m keeping these people human.
And so one of the people that stands out to me was a man named George Webb. He served as a bishop of Limerick as a Protestant in a very Catholic setting in the middle of the seventeenth century. He ends up dying at the hands of a Catholic mob that had besieged him in a castle in Limerick in 1642. He had written a prayer book beforehand, and we take a prayer from one of his writings from the earlier part of the seventeenth century.
Cloud of Witnesses
Jonathan W. Arnold, Zachariah M. Carter
This comprehensive anthology combines prayers and petitions of the greatest figures throughout history to bolster the reader’s knowledge of prayer and develop their walk with Christ.
He lives a life that is rather luxurious. He’s a chaplain to the king. He has quite a bit of wealth. He was Oxford-educated at a time when that was somewhat rare. And he ends up in this position as a very pastoral bishop of Protestants in the middle of the Catholic uprising. There is major turmoil and constant fighting, and everything is theological and everything is just sort of bigger than life. Everything—life itself—was on the line for them. As he is overseeing this Protestant movement and even trying to help build up the castle where they’re being besieged, the stories that come out about him are just filled with pastoral care.
He’s just walking alongside those that are about to die. He ends up catching dysentery while he’s there and dies just before the siege is over because he was willing to work alongside these poor people that he was trying to defend.
I think it’s those kinds of people. It’s not just George Webb; there are a ton of those kinds of stories. They’re not perfect. Webb had all kinds of problems. And the more you get into it, the more you realize how he is not an incredible guy. In some parts of his life, he wasn’t even a guy you might want as your neighbor.
God doesn’t need and rarely uses perfect people—if there is such a thing.
And yet God used him in mighty ways in the midst of the burgeoning civil wars of the middle seventeenth century and allowed him to pen some incredible prayers. And the prayer that we include from him in the book is about his understanding of how wealthy God has made him, and his prayer was that would not take his eyes off of God and that he’d be able to use his wealth for good amongst the kingdom movement.
Ultimately, it fits pretty well for basically everybody in the Western culture, where our idea of poverty and wealth is very different from what the rest of the world often thinks of. And so recognizing the amount of wealth that we have—even for those of us that don’t think of ourselves as particularly wealthy—is a good reminder. God doesn’t need and rarely uses perfect people—if there is such a thing. He uses very broken people, like George Webb, to do some mighty things.
Jonathan W. Arnold is the coauthor with Zachariah M. Carter of Cloud of Witnesses: A Treasury of Prayers and Petitions through the Ages.
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