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Quote of the day

“Our unbearable political and economic situation is the fault of the bishops and their huge wealth.”

Date from: The History of Gustavus Vasa, King of Sweden. Extracts from His Correspondence. London, 1852. Quote from: an earlier Christian History Institute article.

Devotional

John the Baptist Was a Light (1886)

“He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light,” spoke our Ble...

Events

(annually) Members of the Russian Orthodox Church gather near the Maiden Tower at the ruins of St. Bartholomew chapel in Baku, Azerbaijan, to hold a religious ceremony honoring St. Bartholomew, whom tradition says was crucified upside down there in AD 71.

Authority for the date: Anar Alizade, Christianity in Azerbaijan

64

Nero begins the first imperial persecution of Christians.

Authority for the date: Snyder, Louis L. et al. Panorama of the Past I. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

1680

Death at St Asaph on Midsummer Day of Bishop Isaac Barrow (uncle of the better-known Isaac Barrow whose name will be associated with Sir Isaac Newton). He was notable for his charities, which included establishing a home for impoverished widows, providing for the education of young ministers, and for endowing the fund that financed King William’s College.

Authority for the date: Dictionary of National Biography

1694

The Wissahickon Hermits (Pietists) land in Philadelphia.

Authority for the date: Christian History 10 (1986).

1697

Two young Lutheran pastors, Andreas Rudman and Erik Bjork, arrive in Maryland to the astonishment of local Swedes and Finns who had no idea they were coming.

Authority for the date: Louhi, E. A. The Delaware Finns. New York: Humanity Press, 1925.

1797

Death of Henry Venn, the elder, an evangelical pastor and author of considerable influence in eighteenth-century England, father of John Venn (a leader in the Clapham Sect that did so much to ameliorate social conditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and grandfather of the notable mission leader Henry Venn, the younger.

Authority for the date: Ryle, J.C. Five Christian Leaders of the Eighteenth Century. London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1960.

1817

Execution of Chinese convert and Catholic priest Joseph Yuan Zaide in China’s Sichuan Province.

Authority for the date: Paul Hattaway, China’s Christian Martyrs. p. 70

1860

Nikolai, future missionary from Russia to Japan, becomes a monk.

Authority for the date: Orthodox Wiki.

1885

Consecration in New York of Samuel David Ferguson, the first African-American Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Authority for the date: African American Registry. http://www.aaregistry.org

1900

An imperial decree orders the killing of foreigners throughout China. The uprising is not primarily anti-Christian, but missionaries and Chinese converts will be the chief sufferers.

Authority for the date: Christian History 52 (1996).

1938

Death of James C. Sheafe, a learned African-American pastor, who brought African Americans into the Seventh-day Adventist movement, but also founded independent seventh-day movements because of disagreement with the racial teachings of the main movement. “That man could preach, and pray, and sing like nobody you have ever heard,” remarked another Adventist preacher who had heard most of the early Adventists.

Authority for the date: http://www.lcsheafe.net/timeline.html

1968

In the tenth year of the Coptic pope Kyrillos VI, relics of St. Mark, stolen by Venetians eleven centuries earlier, are returned to Cairo, Egypt.

Authority for the date: Pope Shenouda III. St. Mark.

1975

Metropolitan Michael of Toledo and Metropolitan Philip of New York sign articles of reunification, forming the united Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

Authority for the date: orthodoxwiki.org.

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