Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary: Collated from His Diary by Benjamin Funk

The grave opens this book, and so it begins: with death as the gateway to understanding a life. Elder John Kline spent twenty-nine years keeping a meticulous diary, and from those pages emerges not merely a record but an intimate witness to faith lived at extraordinary cost. As a missionary of the Church of the Brethren, Kline traversed difficult terrain in an era when such dedication could mean martyrdom. Benjamin Funk collated these entries into a portrait of a man whose honesty on the page matches the integrity of his ministry. The book captures the 1878 annual gathering of the Brethren, where those who knew Kline best remembered his warmth, his kindness, the particular quality of his presence. Here is history from the ground level, filtered through one man's daily struggle to live his convictions. For readers drawn to primary sources, to religious history, to the texture of American faith in the nineteenth century, Kline's diary offers something rare: direct access to a soul that refused to compromise what it believed.