I was recently asked by a good friend, Hélène Grondines, one of the finest artists I know and who is working on a portrait of Samuel Pearce (1766–1799), the Baptist leader of the eighteenth century, how I would explain who Pearce was in one line to non-Christians. Here is an initial go at it:
Samuel Pearce was a Baptist minister in England at the close of the eighteenth century whose preaching and walk with God, despite an early death at the age of thirty-three, made him an influential figure at the beginning of the modern worldwide expansion of Christianity.