Biography
Faith Cook was an English writer who gave her life to telling the stories of Christians from earlier centuries. She was born in 1937 and grew up in England. She came to faith in Christ and spent her adult life in the English Reformed Baptist tradition, which held to the sovereignty of God and the authority of Scripture. She was married to Peter Cook, and together they raised a family and served in their local church. She was not a professional historian, and she did not hold a university post. She was a wife and mother who loved to read and write, and she turned that love into a calling.
She began writing books relatively late in life. Her first works were small, for the purpose of encouraging believers who were suffering. In 1995 she published Singing in the Fire, a collection of the stories of Christians who found strength in the midst of trials. It brought together the lives of men and women across the centuries who suffered illness, loss and persecution and held fast to the Lord. The book spoke to many readers who were going through hardship, and it set the pattern for her later work. She did not wish to simply tell a story of a past age. She wanted to show how God keeps His people in the furnace.
She went on to write full biographies. She wrote William Grimshaw of Haworth in 1997, the life of an eighteenth-century Anglican clergyman in a rough Yorkshire parish, who became a leader in the revival. In 2001 she published Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, the story of a noblewoman who used her wealth and influence to support the preaching of the gospel in Britain. In 2008 she wrote Fearless Pilgrim: The Life and Times of John Bunyan, which tells of the tinker who became the author of The Pilgrim's Progress and who endured twelve years in prison for preaching without a license. Her books were marked by careful research and by a warm, readable style.
She wrote about people who were neglected by history. She brought out the stories of women who served God and of ordinary believers who had faced danger and sorrow. She had a gift for finding the human side of those she wrote about. She did not hide their faults. She showed how they struggled and how they learned to depend on the Lord. Readers found in her pages people who seemed close to them, and they were encouraged.
Her writing was done in the midst of a busy life. She wrote at her kitchen table and in the margins of her family's days. She also faced trials of her own, including periods of ill health, and she did not claim to be free of the struggles that she wrote of. She spoke of her need for the grace of God and said that her own times of weakness gave her a deeper feeling for those whose lives she described. Those who knew her described her as a gracious, modest woman who preferred to turn attention away from herself.
She died in 2015. By then her books had been read by many thousands and had been translated into other languages. Many readers found in them a fresh love for the history of the church and a stronger faith for the present.
Her work shows how God can use an ordinary woman to serve the church through her pen. She did not preach from a pulpit, and she did not lead a movement. She told the truth about the saints of the past and reminded the church of the great company of those who have gone before. She helped believers to see that the same God who kept those saints keeps His people now.