Some people carry an urgency that unsettles everyone around them, yet also moves mountains. William Farel was one of them: a preacher with a piercing voice and a courage that bordered on recklessness, unable to stay silent in the face of what he saw as error.
Born in 1489 in Gap, in southeastern France, he went to Paris in 1509 and studied under the humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, who introduced him to Paul’s letters. Around 1521 he embraced the cause of the Reformation, still in its infancy on French soil, and broke decisively with Rome in the years that followed.
Persecuted, he fled to Basel, Strasbourg, and other Swiss cities, preaching with an energy that won him as many converts as enemies. Over more than thirty years of itinerant ministry, he was beaten, nearly drowned, targeted by a poisoning attempt, and shot at with a gun that misfired by accident.
His zeal had a darker side. In Geneva, one of his sermons preceded a riot that destroyed altars, images, and organs in St. Peter’s Cathedral in 1535, and in Neuchâtel his public rebuke of a noblewoman nearly sparked a riot against him.
In 1530 he led Neuchâtel to officially adopt the Reformation, by a narrow popular vote, and in 1536 Geneva did the same. It was there, in a decisive summer, that Farel convinced the young John Calvin, passing through the city, to stay and take on the pastoral work he himself could not sustain alone.
Expelled together from Geneva in 1538 after conflicts with the city council, Farel settled in Neuchâtel as pastor for the rest of his life. At age 69, he married Marie Torel, a Huguenot refugee under 20, nearly fifty years younger than him. Calvin openly disapproved of the union, calling it contrary to the order of nature, and even tried, unsuccessfully, to have it annulled, which strained the two reformers’ friendship for a time.
Farel’s life reminds us that the courage to confront wrong does not always come paired with gentleness, and that God uses imperfect vessels to open paths that others complete. Without him, Calvin might never have stayed in Geneva.
Today, when a Christian urges a reluctant friend not to back away from a difficult calling, it echoes, even unknowingly, Farel’s bold gesture toward Calvin: the conviction that certain urgencies cannot wait for ideal circumstances.
