Known as "Praying Hyde," remembered for a life of intense intercession for pastors and the Indian people.
Born in 1865 into the family of a Presbyterian pastor in the United States, John Hyde had his call to missions confirmed during an entire night of prayer at McCormick Seminary. He sailed for India in 1892 to serve in the Punjab region — but what would define his life wasn't a method of evangelism, but an unusual discipline of prayer.
Faced with a shortage of visible results in his work, Hyde began investing more and more time in intercession. Before the first Sialkot Convention, in 1904 — created to spiritually renew missionaries and national workers —, he devoted thirty days and thirty nights solely to prayer. The extraordinary and lasting success of those conventions, which became an international point of reference, was widely attributed to that period of intercession. It's no accident his biographers nicknamed him "the apostle of prayer."
That prayer, which Hyde repeated with unusual urgency, inspired missionaries around the world. In 1908, he felt God gave him the goal of seeing one person a day convert to Christ — a number that, by 1910, would rise to four a day. After that year's Sialkot Convention, a doctor warned him: if he didn't abandon his exhausting prayer routine, he would die within six months. Hyde chose to keep praying.
With his health already failing, he left India in 1911. Back in the United States, surgery to treat severe headaches revealed cancer, to which he succumbed on February 17, 1912. Hyde never founded an institution, never translated a Bible, never wrote a theological book — his legacy is, simply, the reminder that persevering intercession is, in itself, a powerful form of ministry. A reminder especially relevant to the work of this project, sustained both by translation and by the prayer of those who follow it.
