True stories of changed lives
Famous Christian conversions
Some of history's most striking conversions to Christianity — slave traders and slaves, skeptics and scholars, soldiers and sadhus — told not by biographers but by the converts themselves. Each links to the full account, free to read and available as a clean edition.
Foundational & classic spiritual autobiographies
Augustine — Confessions
Augustine was an ambitious teacher of rhetoric who chased worldly success and followed the Manichaean sect for some nine years. Under the influence of Bishop Ambrose at Milan he converted in 386, was baptized in 387, and became a priest and then Bishop of Hippo.
John Bunyan — Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
Bunyan was a tinker who, by his own account, lived a profane and irreligious young life. After his marriage he was convicted of his sin, converted, joined the Nonconformist Bedford meeting, and became a preacher, ultimately spending twelve years imprisoned for refusing to stop preaching.
Thomas Halyburton — Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Halyburton
As a young man Halyburton wrestled intellectually with deism and religious doubt. He returned to the evangelical Reformed faith of his Covenanter father and became a parish minister, divinity professor, and apologist defending Christian revelation.
Dramatic conversions & evangelists
John Newton — An Authentic Narrative
John Newton went from a profane seaman and slave-trade participant to an evangelical Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer; in later years he became an outspoken abolitionist.
George Müller — A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller, Written by Himself
George Müller turned from a thieving, dissolute university student into a devout philanthropist who cared for thousands of orphans, trusting God for every provision rather than soliciting funds.
Down-and-out converts turned missionaries
John B. Gough — The Autobiography of John B. Gough
From wandering, friendless drunkard to the age's most celebrated temperance lecturer, who pleaded with crowds for forty years.
Thomas Cooper — The Life of Thomas Cooper, Written by Himself
From imprisoned Chartist and platform skeptic to a Christian lecturer who spent his last decades defending the faith.
Jerry McAuley — Transformed; or, The History of a River Thief
From river thief and Sing Sing convict to founder of the McAuley Water Street Mission, who spent his life reaching the city's outcasts.
Captives & prisoners who ministered to their captors
Patrick of Ireland — Confessio (The Confession of St. Patrick)
A nominal Christian boy, enslaved among strangers, turned to God in his loneliness on the Irish hills — then chose to go back to his captors' country as their apostle.
Joseph Pitts — A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans
Pressed under torture into renouncing Christ, Pitts wrestled for years with a faith he believed he had betrayed — and his book is the testimony of a conscience that found its way back.
Converts from other faiths & former opponents
Leo Tolstoy — A Confession
Raised Orthodox but an unbeliever from his youth, Tolstoy spent decades as a rationalist at the summit of literary fame before a suicidal crisis over life's purpose turned him back toward faith in God — though a faith of his own radical, non-Orthodox making.
Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto — A Daughter of the Samurai
Reared in the disciplined Confucian and Buddhist world of a samurai household, she converted to Christianity as a young woman and moved to America, carrying the values of her upbringing into a new faith and a new country.
Sadhu Sundar Singh — At the Master's Feet
Born into a Sikh family in the Punjab — and so hostile that he once burned a Gospel — he was converted after a vision and baptized in 1905, becoming a wandering Christian sadhu who preached for some twenty-five years until he vanished heading into Tibet.
Baba Padmanji — Baba Padmanji: An Autobiography
Not a Brahmin but a brazier's son, he weighed Christianity over years, was baptized in 1854 at the cost of his family and caste, and became the foremost Marathi Christian author, ordained in the Free Church of Scotland in 1867.
George Sexton — Christianity and Secularism
One of the leading platform advocates of Victorian secularism, Sexton renounced his unbelief for orthodox Christianity and spent his later years arguing the case for the faith he had once opposed.
James Lackington — The Confessions of J. Lackington
The wealthy bookseller whose earlier Memoirs had ridiculed religion turned, near the end of his life, to disown that scorn and profess the Christian faith he had mocked.
Oruj Beg Bayat (Don Juan of Persia) — Don Juan of Persia: A Shi'ah Catholic, 1560–1604
A courtier and secretary to Shah Abbas's 1599 embassy, he converted to Catholicism in 1602 knowing apostasy meant death and that he could never return home; baptized at Valladolid in 1604, he was murdered in a street brawl there in 1605, a year after publishing.
Adolphe Retté — From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu)
Raised without faith and, by his own and his contemporaries' account, a militant atheist active among anti-religious circles, Retté passed through despair and suicidal impulses to convert to Catholicism in 1906 — the most literal atheist-to-Christian journey among our conversion narratives.
Johannes Avetaranian — Geschichte eines Muhammedaners, der Christ wurde
A mullah who claimed descent from Muhammad, he was shaken by the drowning of twelve Turkish converts in Constantinople, embraced Christ despite the danger, and went on to produce the first Uyghur New Testament with the Swedish mission in Kashgar before running a Turkish-language Christian publishing ministry from Bulgaria until his death in 1919.
Kanzo Uchimura — How I Became a Christian
Raised in a samurai family in the practices of Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucian duty, he was baptized in 1877 and became a leading Japanese Christian author, pacifist, and founder of the indigenous Non-church (Mukyokai) movement.
Ivan S. Prokhanov — In the Cauldron of Russia
Born to a Molokan dissenter family and trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg, Prokhanov was converted in 1887, gave up his career to preach, and went on to found and lead the All-Russian Union of Evangelical Christians through the last years of tsarism and the early Soviet period.
Henry H. Jessup — Kamil Abdul Messiah
A well-born Beirut Muslim, educated in Turkish and Arabic and bound for government service, he sought out the scriptures for himself, was baptized, and gave the rest of his short life to mission work among the Bedouin and in Arabia with Zwemer and Cantine — dying at his post, buried under Muslim rites.
Paul M. Kanamori — Kanamori's Life-Story Told by Himself
After abandoning the ministry and drifting for years in unbelief, he came back to Christ and preached his celebrated three-hour gospel sermon across Japan, credited with winning some fifty thousand converts.
Nehemiah Goreh — A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares
He was a Chitpavan Brahmin and renowned Hindu apologist, author of a Sanskrit treatise against Christianity; baptized "Nehemiah" in 1848, he became an Anglican priest, a leading Indian Christian theologian, and finally a member of the Cowley Fathers.
Joseph Barker — The Life of Joseph Barker, Written by Himself
The complete life story of a Methodist preacher who became one of his era's most active secularist lecturers and then returned to the Christian faith he had opposed.
Joseph Barker — Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again
A former preacher who became one of the most active secularist lecturers of his generation, Barker passed through years of organized unbelief before returning to the Christian faith he had campaigned against.
Imad-ud-din Lahiz — A Mohammedan Brought to Christ
He was a Sunni maulvi — a Muslim cleric and controversialist who debated against Christianity — and he became an ordained Church Missionary Society clergyman at Amritsar, honoured with a D.D. and serving as chaplain to the Bishop of Lahore.
Yung Wing — My Life in China and America
Formed in the Chinese classics and then a mission school, he was converted to Christianity, graduated from Yale in 1854 as the first Chinese graduate of an American university, and devoted his life to bringing Chinese students west to be educated.
Nehemiah Goreh — A Rational Refutation of the Hindu Philosophical Systems
A Sanskrit pandit of Benares who wrote against the Christian faith before embracing it, Goreh set down here the very reasoning that dismantled his own position — autobiographical in argument rather than narrative.
Krishna Mohan Banerjea — The Arian Witness
A high-caste Bengali Brahmin and star pupil of the Hindu College, he was converted under Alexander Duff in 1832 — dismissed from his Hindu-funded teaching post for it — and became an ordained Anglican clergyman and one of India's leading Christian scholars, a genuine author who set out his own case in his own hand.
Orestes Brownson — The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience
A New England radical, labor agitator, and freethought editor who passed through nearly every 'ism' of his age before being received into the Catholic Church in 1844 — and spent the rest of his life defending the faith he had once attacked.
Giovanni Papini — The Failure (Un uomo finito)
A celebrated anticlerical intellectual who edited journals dedicated to attacking Christianity, then converted to Catholicism and wrote a best-selling Life of Christ — the provocateur turned apologist.
George John Romanes — The Examination and the Return
As a young man Romanes made the leading Victorian scientific case against belief; these two works, read in sequence, record how the same rigorous mind reasoned its way back toward Christian faith before his death.
Fei Ch'i-hao — Two Heroes of Cathay: An Autobiography and a Sketch
Converted as a young man in Shanxi, he lived through the Boxer violence of 1900 that martyred most of his missionary teachers and fellow Christians, and escaped to tell the story of the faith that carried him through.
Yan Phou Lee — When I Was a Boy in China
Raised in traditional Chinese culture, he came to America with the Chinese Educational Mission, was converted to Christianity, and graduated from Yale in 1887 — the first Asian American to publish a book in English.
Questions about conversion stories
- Who are some famous people who converted to Christianity?
- Across the centuries: Augustine of Hippo; St. Patrick, kidnapped to Ireland as a slave; John Newton, the slave-ship captain who wrote 'Amazing Grace'; Leo Tolstoy, at the height of his fame and hiding rope from himself; George Romanes, Darwin's own correspondent; the Indian sadhu Sundar Singh; and the Japanese writer Kanzo Uchimura — all of whom left first-person accounts of how they came to faith, and every one of them is on this site.
- What is a conversion story, or testimony?
- A conversion story (or testimony) is a first-person account of how someone came to Christian faith — the life they led before, the turning point, and the change that followed. The books gathered here are testimonies: people telling, in their own words, how they were changed.
- How did the Apostle Paul convert to Christianity?
- According to the Book of Acts, Paul — then Saul, a persecutor of Christians — was converted by a vision of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. He was struck blind for three days, was baptized, and went on to become the early church's foremost missionary.
- How did Augustine convert?
- In his Confessions, Augustine recounts hearing a child's voice in a Milan garden say 'take up and read.' He opened the Bible to Romans 13, was converted in 386, and was baptized by Ambrose the following year.
- What is the difference between a conversion and a testimony?
- A conversion is the change itself — turning to faith. A testimony is the telling of it. Every book here is a testimony: a person recounting their own conversion.
Conversions from other faiths
T.S. Baker — true stories of changed lives.