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One year ago, we asked you, our readers, to do two things: list the five most influential Christians of the twentieth century and then note five well-known Christians who were most personally influential. We posed the same two questions to historians who belong to the Conference on Faith and History, a group composed of mostly Christian historians who study Christianity's influence in history. We've ranked each of the four lists by the percentage of votes received for each person. Here's what we discovered.

Surprises

• John Calvin (yes, the sixteenth-century reformer) garned two votes among readers as most personally influential. These are hyper-Calvinists, no doubt, who firmly believe in the resurrection.
  
  
• Radical demythologizer Rudolf Bultmann did make the top 20 list of most influential. It's clear both readers and scholars believe you don't have to admire a person to recognize how much trouble he may have caused the church this century.
  
  
• The only non-Western Christian to place significantly was China's Watchman Nee.
  
  
• William Cameron Townsend, founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators (the largest Protestant mission agency in the world) didn't even make the top 20 most influential lists.
  
  
• Same with Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision (the largest non-governmental social service agency in the world).
  
  
• Same with missiologist Donald McGavran, founder of the church growth movement.
  
  

Online differences

Responses from general readers (non-scholars) came in two forms, regular mail and e-mail, and we tabulated them separately to see if there might be some differences between the two. Three stood out.

First, pop Christian singer Keith Green tied for eighth on the online readers' most personally influential list (and Bill Gaither, Petra, and Stryper each earned a vote). Among regular mail respondents, Green tied for twenty-seventh. We surmise that the online readers are younger and have been nurtured more by contemporary Christian music.

Second, Henry Morris, of the Institute of Creation Research, tied for nineteenth most personally influential among online respondents but was hardly noticed by regular mail readers.

Third, among regular mail readers, positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale ranked thirteenth most personally influential, but with e-mail readers he tied for eighty-seventh. We're guessing the snail mail crowd is older and actually read Peale in the fifties and sixties when he was popular.

Regrets

Two people we should have included in our survey:

• Herbert J. Taylor, businessman and philanthropist (and president of Rotary International who created its famous four-fold test) whose support (personal and financial) helped bring to life InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Christian Service Brigade, and Young Life. He also sat on the boards of Fuller Theological Seminary and the National Association of Evangelicals.
  
  
• Henrietta Mears, founder of Forest Home Camp Grounds in southern California and Christian educator at Hollywood Presbyterian, who discipled thousands of future missionaries and Christian leaders, such as Bill Bright of Campus Crusade and Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the U.S. Senate.
  
  

General Readers: Most Influential (408 replies)

The main difference here between scholars and general readers is that James Dobson made the readers' most influential list (instead of the scholars' Reinhold Niebuhr). In fact, Dobson made three out of four of the lists in the survey. For both readers and scholars, Billy Graham was clearly the most influential Christian of the twentieth century, with a solid lead over the pack.

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