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Devotional

Pray in all situations (1880)

Pray continually—1 Thessalonians 5:17 (NIV).             Ar...

Events

753

Death of Pirminius, the first Abbot of Reichenau, Germany. He left some of the earliest evidence for the present form of the Apostles’ Creed.

Authority for the date: “St. Pirmin, Bishop, Monastery founder and Faith Preacher.” www.heiligenlegenden.de/literatur/bavaria-sanct

1523

Simeon Stumpf is deprived of his parish in Zurich and will be exiled the following month. With Conrad Grebel he had called for complete abolition of the mass. The Zurich town council had said it should be left up to each priest.

Authority for the date: Littell, Franklin H. The Origins of Sectarian Protestantism. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

1631

John Eliot arrives in Boston, Massachussets. He was the first Protestant minister to dedicate himself to the conversion of native Americans to Christianity.

Authority for the date: Slosser, Gaius Jackson, ed. They Seek a Country. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955.

1783

Robert Raikes publishes a letter on the success of his Sunday schools in the Gloucester Journal which is seen by William Fox, who promotes a national Sunday school movement.

Authority for the date: Morgan, Robert J. On This Day. Nelson, 1997.

1805

A painter defaces the statue of King William III in Dublin. The statue is hated by Catholics because William had secured Ireland for Protestantism, and hated by Protestant students because the rump of its horse faces their university. The culprit will  never be apprehended. In 1928 the statue will be blown up.

Authority for the date: Chambers Book of Days (1881).

1818

Pliny Fisk sets sail for Palestine aboard the Sally Ann. Ordained by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Fisk became the first American missionary to journey to the Near East.

Authority for the date: Bond, Alvan. Memoir of the Rev. Pliny Fisk, A.M.: Late Missionary to Palestine. Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1828.

1869

Isabella Thoburn sails with Clara Swain from Boston harbor for India, where she will found a school for women.

Authority for the date: Dictionary of American Biography. New York, C. Scribner’s sons, 1928-58.

1917

Death of Canadian Methodist Albert Carman, the last and greatest of the holiness Methodist leaders in Canada. He had broken a hip some time before and never recovered.

Authority for the date: Kleinsteuber, R. Wayne. More than a memory; the renewal of Methodism in Canada. Light and Life, 1984.

1929

Orthodox priest Alexander Vasilyevich Nikulin serving in the village of Bolshaya Sosnova is arrested “for anti-Soviet agitation,” and will be sentenced to three years in the prison camps. After his released he serves churches secretly despite a warrant for his arrest.

Authority for the date: Moss, Vladimir. Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia.

1946

E. E. Zachary organizes the first Australian Church of the Nazarene (in Sydney with 20 charter members).

Authority for the date: Glen O’Brien. North-American Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia. p. 79

1960

Lutheran bishops prepare The Christian in the DNR to show Lutherans how to live under communism with obedience but without violating their consciences.

Authority for the date: Hutten, Kurt. Iron Curtain Christians. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1967.

1970

Death of Charles Chidongo Chinula, a pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Malawi, who had translated Pilgrim’s Progress into the Tumbuka language. He had been expelled from the Presbyterian church for his combative spirit and founded a “Free Church,” but eventually rejoined the Presbyterians, deploring the schism he had caused.

Authority for the date: Dictionary of African Christian Biography.

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