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Anniversaries 2000

A trip into the past - a reminder of millennium anniversaries

PEOPLE

Augustine wrote his Confessions about the year 400, describing his life and conversion - a spiritual classic.

Christianity was established in Iceland in the year 1000.

Westminster Abbey was re-founded by Edward the Confessor as a monastery of Benedictine monks in 1050. The abbey church was consecrated in 1065 and Edward was buried there the following year. Because it was adjacent to the royal palace of Westminster, the abbey had a central place in national life.

In 1300, the Pope, Boniface VIII, announced a Jubilee year for the first time in the Christian era, based loosely on the Jubilee year described in Leviticus 25. The papal jubilee promised a plenary indulgence to all pilgrims who visited Rome within the year.

Richard Cox, one of the architects of the Church of England, was born about the year 1500. He became tutor to the future King Edward VI, was the first Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and helped compile the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552.

John Calvin compiled a complete version of the Psalms for congregational singing in 1550. It included the famous melody known as the 'Old Hundredth'.

Thomas Cranmer's book on the Lord's Supper was published in 1550.

William Bridge, a notable Puritan and non-conformist, was born in Cambridgeshire in 1600. His A Lifting up for the Downcast, giving encouragement for depressed people, is still in print and still relevant today.

Richard Baxter's The Saints' Everlasting Rest, on heaven, was published in 1650.

The first volume of James Usher's work on Scriptural chronology (Annales Veteri et Novi Testamenti) was also published in 1650. This suggested the year 4004 BC as the date of the creation of the world.

Mary Jones, at the age of 16, walked from Llanfihangel to Bala with her life savings, in search of a Welsh Bible to purchase in 1800. This episode was a factor in the establishment of the British and Foreign Bible Society (now simply Bible Society) in 1804, with the aim of making cheap versions of the Bible readily available in different languages.

The Privy Council judgment in 1850 in the case of the Anglo-Catholic George Gorham, declaring that baptismal regeneration was not a doctrine of the Church of England, led Henry Manning and others to join the Roman Catholic church.

DATES
January 19

Henry Twells, the hymn-writer responsible for 'At even, e'er the sun had set', died in 1900.

February

Edmund Calamy born in this month in 1600. A leading Puritan and member of the Westminster Assembly, he opposed the execution of Charles I and welcomed back Charles II. His attempts to secure a broadly-based national church failed, and he was ejected from his church of St. Mary Aldermary in the City of London in 1662.

April 12

Adoniram Judson, United States pioneer missionary to Burma, died at sea in 1850, aged 62. Despite the deaths of two successive wives and several children, he mastered Burmese in order to translate the Bible.

April 25

William Cowper, poet and hymn-writer, died in 1800, aged 68. Prone to acute depression during many periods of his life, he described himself as 'a stricken deer'. He was befriended by John Newton, with whom he wrote the 'Olney Hymns' including O for a closer walk with God.

May 3

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the greatest preacher of the 19th century, was baptised at Isleham, Cambridgeshire, in 1850, at the age of 15, having walked eight miles there from Newmarket. Within one year, he had become pastor of Waterbeach Baptist Chapel and was called to New Park Street, Southwark, in 1854.

May 8

Peter Martyr (real name Pietro Martire Vermigli) was born in Florence in 1500. He became an Augustinian monk and then, through studying the Bible, a Protestant Reformer who made a significant contribution to the English Reformation during Edward VI's reign.

May 26

Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf was born in Dresden in 1700 into a noble Austrian family. He founded the Moravian Church and pioneered missionary work in America and the Caribbean. John and Charles Wesley were strongly influenced by him and translated several of his hymns (such as Jesus, thy blood and righteousness / My beauty are, my glorious dress).

June

Henry Scougal, author of the classic The Life of God in the Soul of Man, was born at Leuchars, Fife, in June 1650.

June

John Morison, Scottish hymn-writer, was born in this month in 1750. He became minister of Canisbay, Caithness-shire - the most northerly church on the mainland - and made important contributions to the final edition of the Scottish Paraphrases (1781).

June 10

John C. Ryle, first Bishop of Liverpool, died in 1900, aged 84. His books, Holiness, Knots Untied and Practical Religion, are classics.

June 13

The Boxer Rising in China against foreigners in 1900 resulted in the deaths by August 14 of over 180 Protestant and Catholic missionaries and more than 49,000 Chinese Christians. (The name comes from the Chinese description of the insurgents as 'Righteous Harmony Fists'.)

July 1

In 1750, Jonathan Edwards preached his farewell sermon at Northampton, Massachusetts, where, under his powerful preaching, the Great Awakening had occurred in 1734-35.

July 17

Evangeline Booth, seventh child of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, died aged 85 in 1950. She too had a distinguished career in the Salvation Army and was General of the worldwide movement between 1934 and 1938.

July 30

Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750, aged 65. One of the greatest composers of all time, the core of his work was daily service music for the Sundays and festivals of the Lutheran Church, based on the gospel for the day.

October 5

Thomas Goodwin was born in 1600. A Puritan, and for a while vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, he later became a dissenter and the President of Magdalen College, Oxford. After the Restoration, he became pastor of a congregation in the City of London.

November 1

Pope Pius XII pronounced the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary to be a dogma of the Roman Catholic church in 1950. Previously the belief had had the status only of 'a pious and probable opinion'.

November 2

Richard Hooker died aged 46 in 1600, having written a notable defence of the Church of England's ecclesiology as set up in 1559 under Elizabeth I.

November 16

St. Hugh of Avalon, bishop of Lincoln, died in 1200. Revered in his lifetime, for example for his concern for lepers, he was canonised in 1220 and his tomb in Lincoln cathedral became a very popular place of pilgrimage - second only to the tomb of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury.

November 18

John Nelson Darby, who later formed the Exclusive Brethren in the Plymouth Brethren movement, was born in London in 1800 to a distinguished Anglo-Irish family and was brought up in Dublin.

Joy Horn