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We all have been there before: We walk out of the movie theater with a sense of elation and challenge. Could our life change to reflect something of the life that was just portrayed?

We've all been here too: We are reading up on John Wesley and learn of his accomplishments: 250,000 miles traveled on horseback, 30,000 pounds sterling given away to the poor, more than 40,000 sermons preached. And we are not only flabbergasted but deflated: Why have we been unwilling to make such extreme sacrifices of our time and comfort? How can we ever hope to measure up to such a giant?

Perhaps we've been here as well: Reading about an outstanding figure in our own field of work or ministry, we begin to think prideful thoughts: I could do what she's done! I could even surpass her! And then they'll be writing my biography!

Biographies have the power to move us in many ways: to challenge and inspire, to depress and deflate, to puff up and tempt us with questionable goals and grandiose self-imaginings. But when the right biographies (see "The Mushroom Hunt," page 52) are approached with the right spirit, they can be powerful agents of spiritual transformation.

A Christian understanding of the power of biography goes back a long way. In the middle of the 4th century A.D., the orthodox bishop Athanasius, exiled from his beloved Alexandria by an Arian-sympathizing emperor, fulfilled his longtime dream of traveling to the desert to live among the hermits. During his long ascetic pilgrimage, he wrote what historian Derwas Chitty correctly calls "the first great manifesto of the monastic ideal." This was not some tidy, orderly rule, but rather a biography of the most gripping sort: the life story of the best-known early monk and the first desert father, Antony of Egypt (251-356).

Translator Robert Gregg tells us that through Athanasius's fond biographical account of his monastic friend, "the testings and miracles of Antony fixed themselves in the consciousness of the church and of Western culture as a sharp image of what a life committed to God demands and promises." The Egyptian monk's life set the pattern for all subsequent saints' lives and became the touchstone for monastic foundations and monastic reforms since.

One person transformed by Antony's life story was eminent Western theologian Augustine of Hippo. Today we remember the part of Augustine's conversion story when he goes out to a garden, hears a child's voice repeating the phrase "take up and read," and picks up a Bible and reads a passage from Romans, which brings him to Christ. But what really set Augustine's heart on fire? What drove him out to the garden in the first place, frantic with shame and grief and desperate to find peace in God? It was hearing a friend tell of how two soldiers had committed their lives to Christ after reading Athanasius's Life of Antony. Such is the power of biography.

In the modern era, John Wesley's early Methodists, the Wesleyan holiness folk, and Pentecostals and charismatics share a particularly intense emphasis on "giving one's testimony." What is the purpose of standing in a church meeting or small group to relate one's testimony? Not to present a moral example—as if the testifier were a spiritual athlete to be applauded and imitated—but rather, to testify to God's amazing grace. This is the emphasis of the traditional title for the Book of Acts: "the Acts of the Holy Spirit."

As evangelicals of all stripes believe, hearing someone's spiritual narrative can give the Holy Spirit an opening to direct our affections—our thoughts, feelings, and will—toward holy things. It can imbue in us a new resolve—not the moralistic resolve to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but the spiritual resolve of compunction or "piercing of the heart," which Peter's hearers experienced in Acts 2:37 ("When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, 'Brothers, what shall we do?' "). Hearing a fellow believer's testimony can redouble our yearning for God, our taste for prayer, and our resonance with God's holiness. It can set our hearts in an upward trajectory toward a gracious Father.

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November 2009, Vol. 53, No. 11

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