There is a way of looking at the personal stories of certain women and men to learn of the richness and the potential of human life lived by the grace of God. We are going to do that over the next weeks in this series of sermons we have chosen to name "Saints Who Shaped the Church."

The people we will consider convey something of the breadth of Christian history. They are a rich assortment of young and old, learned and ignorant, people of action and people of thought, whose common denominator is simply that the grace of God worked mightily within them.

We will consider:

• John Calvin, God’s man for the time, and how he shaped the Reformed church;

• John Wesley, who saw religion as issues of the heart, and his shaping of the Methodist church;

• William Booth, his deep concern for the soul’s s…