St. Patrick

WIKIPEDIA SAYS:

"Patrick was born [in England]. When he was about sixteen, he was captured and carried off as a slave to Ireland. Patrick worked as a herdsman, remaining a captive for six years. He writes that his faith grew in captivity, and that he prayed daily. After six years he heard a voice telling him that he would soon go home, and then that his ship was ready. Fleeing his master, he traveled to a port, two hundred miles away he says, where he found a ship and, after various adventures, returned home to his family.

When in his early twenties."

"Patrick recounts that he had a vision a few years after returning home: I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading: "The Voice of the Irish". As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of Foclut, which is beside the western sea—and they cried out, as with one voice: "We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us."

___________________________________

The Celtic Way of Evangelism, by George Hunter III tells us that:

"Within Patrick’s lifetime historians estimate that he founded around 700 churches and ordained 1000 priests. Thirty to forty of the estimated 150 tribes in Ireland became substantially Christian within Patrick’s lifetime. Patrick’s influence pretty much put an end to the slave trade in Ireland, and greatly lessened the intertribal warfare that had been their way of life for centuries. In Ireland alone there are 6000 place names that contain an element of the work Cill, the Gaelic word for church."