Look back with thanks - anniversaries in 2004

General

Robert Bruce, Scottish minister, was born in 1554. Having opposed King James VI's design to introduce bishops into the Church of Scotland, he was banished from Edinburgh and for several years confined to Inverness, but great crowds attended whenever he was able to preach.

James Buchanan, Scottish Free Church theologian, was born in 1804. Like most Scottish evangelicals, he left the established church in 1843, and became minister of St. Stephen's Free Church, Edinburgh, and later professor in New College.

* Sudan United Mission and European Christian Mission were both founded in 1904.

J. Oswald Sanders became General Director of the China Inland Mission (CIM) in 1954, at a difficult time after the Mission's expulsion from China, and oversaw its reorganisation as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. The CIM school at Chefoo, Malaysia, was opened in the same year, and very many children of missionaries have been educated there.

* Trans-World Radio and Radio ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) were both founded in 1954.

Notable books and music

J.S. Bach, aged 19, wrote his first cantata in 1704, when organist at Arnstadt. By the end of his life, he had written 190, based on the Bible passage assigned for each Sunday or festival.

Jonathan Edwards's Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will was published in 1754, prompted by what he saw as incipient Arminianism in New England. With relentless logic, he described salvation by the sovereign work of God.

* Hector Berlioz's oratorio, The Childhood of Christ, was published in 1854.

People and Events

January: A big exodus of English Protestants to the Continent began in 1554, after actions by the Roman Catholic Queen Mary signalled the beginning of pressure on them, later to become persecution. At least 788 individual exiles have been identified, and they went principally to towns in Germany and Switzerland, where they formed communities and congregations. Returning with their Protestant views confirmed, many became leaders in the Church of England under Queen Elizabeth I.

January 14: The Hampton Court Conference began in 1604, having been summoned by King James VI 'for the reformation of some things amiss in ecclesiastical matters'. Virtually its only positive outcome was a decision to commission a new Bible translation - the Authorised Version or King James Bible (published in 1611).

February 5: Andrew Fuller was born at Wicken, Cambridgeshire, in 1754. Later the Baptist pastor at Soham and Kettering, he was one of the founders of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, and its first secretary.

March 1: James Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, landed at Shanghai in 1854 at the beginning of his missionary work in China.

March 1: The evangelist Billy Graham opened his large-scale crusade in Greater London in 1954, preaching on John 3.16 ('God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son') to a packed Harringay arena.

March 7: The British and Foreign Bible Society (now 'Bible Society') was founded in 1804 'to encourage a wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures'. It was initiated by a proposal of the Rev. Thomas Charles of Bala, who had been moved by the girl Mary Jones and her desire for a Bible in Welsh. With the support of William Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, Henry Thornton and others, the society made rapid progress.

April 30: The hymnwriter James Montgomery, editor of the Sheffield Iris newspaper and advocate of the abolition of slavery, died in 1854. His carefully-crafted hymns are full of biblical content, and many, such as 'Stand up and bless the Lord' and 'Angels from the realms of glory' (whose tune, Iris, was named after his newspaper), are still sung with enthusiasm.

April 30: William Holman Hunt's Light of the World was displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1854 which opened then. It had a varied reception, but the art critic John Ruskin's letter to The Times of May 5 calling it 'one of the very noblest works of sacred art ever produced in this or any other age' ensured its subsequent huge popularity, which even included its being taken on tour to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

May 14: Thomas Kelly, Irish evangelist and hymnwriter, died in 1854. Among his numerous hymns are 'The head that once was crowned with thorns' and 'We sing the praise of him who died'.

May 22: On the final day of the Greater London Crusade in 1954, Billy Graham preached first at White City to 67,000 people, and then at Wembley Stadium to 120,000, the greatest religious congregation ever seen before then in the British Isles.

May 25: Augustine, first archbishop of Canterbury, died in 604. The prior of a monastery in Rome, he was a somewhat reluctant missionary, sent by Pope Gregory the Great, but within four years of his arrival in 597 the king of Kent had received baptism and Augustine had established his see at Canterbury.

June 2: Ebenezer Erskine, a leader of evangelical dissent within the Church of Scotland and founder of the Scottish Secession Church, died in 1754.

June 5: John Eliot, evangelist to American Indians, was christened in 1604 in Widford, Herts. Although brought up and ordained in the Church of England, he became a non-conformist and emigrated to America, where he learned the dialects of the Indians and worked among them to great effect. By 1674, 3,600 'praying Indians' were gathered in 14 self-governing communities and Eliot arranged for them to have jobs, housing, land and clothes.

July 18: Heinrich Bullinger, Swiss Reformer, was born in 1504. He became Zwingli's successor in leading the Reformed Church at Zurich, and welcomed many English refugees from the persecution of 1555-8.

July 18: Benjamin Keach, a notable Baptist pastor in Southwark, died in 1704. Like John Bunyan, he suffered imprisonment for his preaching, and was put in the pillory for publishing The Child's Instructor, which was considered contrary to the Book of Common Prayer. He pioneered the gradual introduction of hymn-singing into services in Baptist congregations.

August 6: Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, was born in 1504. After the failure of Queen Mary's attempt to re-impose Roman Catholicism, he restored the Church of England as a 'middle way' between Romanism and Puritanism, reissuing the 39 Articles and promoting the 'Bishops' Bible'.

September 10: William Morgan, translator of the Bible into Welsh and later bishop, died in 1604. His translation, published in 1588, is accurate and in dignified Welsh prose. One scholar declares that it 'has had a more profound influence on modern Wales than any other single book in the nation's history'.

October 27: Sir William Smith, founder of the Boys' Brigade, was born near Thurso, Caithness, in 1854. As a young business man, in addition to many Christian activities, he also joined the 1st Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, and when in 1883 he started a Boys' Brigade in a Free Church in west Glasgow, he used military discipline and drill, together with a simple uniform, to 'instill Christian manliness into unruly boys'.

November 12: Matthew Henry began writing his Commentary (Exposition of the Old and New Testaments) in 1704, while minister of the Presbyterian Church in Chester. It was eventually published in seven volumes and has shaped evangelical ministry ever since. A one-volume abridgement of it is still in print.

November 13: Augustine of Hippo, the greatest of the early theologians of the Church, was born in North Africa in 354. After an intellectual journey through philosophy, Manichaeism and Neo-platonism, he was converted at the age of 33 and his many writings profoundly influenced thought in later centuries. 'You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you' is a well-known quotation from Augustine's Confessions.

December 8: Pope Pius IX declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary as an article of faith in 1854. This is interesting, as, although this belief had long been popularly held, it was not declared necessary for salvation until this relatively late date.

December 31: Douglas Johnson, general secretary of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship) from its foundation in 1928 to 1964, was born in Uckfield, Sussex, in 1904. He was instrumental in founding the Inter-national Fellowship of Evangelical Students (1946), Tyndale House (a centre for biblical studies in Cambridge), London Bible College, and Inter-Varsity Press.

© Evangelicals Now - January 2004
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