Today in Christian History
Today is Wednesday, January 2nd, the 2nd day of 2019. There are 363 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
303: According to tradition, Roman Emperor Diocletian orders a slaughter of Christians at an English town which, because of the event, becomes known as Lichfield, “field of corpses.”
1492: The Moors surrender Granada to their Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabella.
1542: Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances are ratified as church law in Geneva.
1792: Death in Canterbury, Kent, England, of Edward Perronet who had written the hymn “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”
1878: Death near Birmingham, England, of Edward Caswall, author of the hymn “When Morning Guilds the Skies.”
1883: Death in Philadelphia of Charles Porterfield Krauth. A Lutheran pastor, editor, and educator, he had spent his life promoting conservative Lutheran theology and a literal reading of the Augsburg Confession.
1905: Sergius Georgievich Golubyatnikov, known as “Seraphim,” is consecrated Bishop of Mozhaisk. While serving in a later post at Ekaterinburg and Irbit he will condemn the Bolsheviks’ February revolution, for which he will be sent to the Novospassky monastery in Moscow, becoming its first prisoner when it is turned into a prison. There he will be shot.
1909: Ordination of Aimee and Robert Semple by Chicago evangelist William H. Durham. Aimee will marry Harold McPherson after Robert’s death, becoming the founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and one of America’s most popular and controversial preachers of the early twentieth century.
1921: KDKA, a Pittsburgh radio station, broadcasts a service from Calvary Presbyterian Church to test its ability to make remote broadcasts; this is the first religious broadcast ever made.
1924: Death of Sabine Baring-Gould at Exeter, England. An Anglican clergyman, he will be remembered as the author of two popular hymns: “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Now the Day Is Over.”
1961: Sri Lanka’s Parliament nationalizes the island’s church schools, most of them Roman Catholic.
Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash
