After coming to China to work as a missionary in the early 1930s, Gladys Aylward adopts several orphans and tries to save nearly a hundred more during the war between China and Japan.

In 1660, after his father is imprisoned in the Tower of London, Richard Winslow goes to stay with his uncle who is in charge of the Bedford jail and there meets and is helped by the Puritan preacher John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress.

When he and his mother join the Fourpaugh Circus in 1893, fourteen-year-old Casey Watkins is certain that their lives will change for the better, but the real change comes when they meet the charismatic evangelist D. L. Moody.

In 1854, after being wounded while serving as a drummer in the British army in the Crimean War, twelve-year-old Robbie Robinson is cared for by Florence Nightingale and becomes involved in her efforts to improve the medical care of the sick and wounded soldiers.

While searching for his younger brother who has been "sold" to be trained as a chimney sweep in eighteenth-century London, thirteen-year-old Ned meets the itinerant preacher John Wesley whose message changes the lives of his entire family.

A young slave girl on a Maryland plantation is led to freedom by Harriet Tubman.

As the Burmese War begins in the 1820s, missionaries Adoniram and Ann Judson, the adoptive parents of May-lo and Len-lay, are accused of espionage.

Arriving in London in the 1880s, orphans Jack and Amy find themselves the prey of the worst elements of society until they receive aid from William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army people.

In 1817 a teenage brother and sister are relieved from the abuses of Newgate Prison in London by the prison reform efforts of Quaker minister Elizabeth Fry.

Thirteen-year-old Kyemap wants to accept the Christian teachings of Mr. Grubb, a missionary to the Lengua Indians of Paraguay during the 1890s, but he fears the reaction of the witch doctors.