Memorabilia - Some Christian anniversaries in 2010

Famous books

John Knox’s book, God’s Eternal Predestination, was published in Geneva in 1560.

The Geneva Bible was published late in 1560 by a group of English people who had been exiles there during the persecution of Queen Mary I and led by William Whittingham. A handsome quarto volume, convenient for personal and family use, it had illustrations and marginal explanatory notes. It became the most widely used Bible of the English Protestants.

The infamous Essays and Reviews, the manifesto of modern liberal Anglicanism, was published in February 1860, generating enormous controversy. It sold 22,000 copies in two years, more than The Origin of Species in its first 20 years.

The first volume of The Fundamentals was published in 1910. This series of small volumes (12 were published by 1915) aimed to reaffirm in essays and articles Christian truths in the face of biblical criticism. 64 authors eventually contributed to the series, including B.B. Warfield. They gave rise to the term of opprobrium, ‘fundamentalist’.

IVP completed publication of D.M. Lloyd-Jones’s two volumes, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, in 1960.

Famous events

John Bradford, Reformer, was born in Manchester in 1510. Despite being a prebendary of St. Paul’s, he was arrested early in Mary I’s reign and burnt at Newgate in 1555. He is said to have originated the saying, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I’.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (mainly Congregationalists) was set up in 1810.

J.O. Fraser, pioneer missionary to the Lisu people with the China Inland Mission, arrived in Yunnan Province, China, in 1910. By 1918, there were 60,000 West Yunnan tribal Christians.

Youth With A Mission (YWAM) was founded by Loren Cunningham in 1960, with the aim ‘to know God and make him known’. It now has operations in over 160 countries and many thousands of full-time volunteer workers.

January

6 Brownlow North was born at Winchester House, London, in 1810. From an aristocratic background, he lived for shooting and fishing until he was converted at the age of 44 and subsequently became an evangelist.

8 John ˆ Lasco (born at Lask in Poland) died in 1560. A much-travelled figure of the European Reformation, he was superintendent of the ‘Strangers’ Church’ in London in 1550. He fled persecution in England in 1554 and returned to work in his native land.

February

26 Paul White was born in 1910 in New South Wales. His vivid Jungle Doctor books for children arose out of his experiences as a missionary doctor in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and have been translated into over 80 languages.

March

10 Henry Thornton was born in Clapham, London, in 1760. He became a banker, philanthropist, MP and campaigner (with his close friend and cousin, William Wilberforce) for the abolition of the slave trade.

31 Rodney (‘Gipsy’) Smith was born in 1860 in Epping Forest, where a commemorative stone near Waterworks Corner, Woodford Green, marks the place where his parents’ tent stood. Despite his lack of education, he became an effective travelling evangelist in Britain and the USA, and was awarded the MBE for his services to the front-line British troops during WWII.

April

19 Philipp Melanchthon, collaborator with Martin Luther and first systematic theologian of the Reformation, died aged 63 in 1560 at Wittenberg. Shortly before his death, he wrote, ‘Thou shalt be delivered from sins and be freed from the acrimony and fury of theologians’.

May

5 Alexander McLaren, minister of Union Chapel, Manchester, died in 1910. His warm and expository style of Biblical preaching influenced many 20th-century preachers.

9 Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf died in 1760 at Herrnhut, the Christian community he had established on his own land for Bohemian and Moravian refugees from persecution. During his life, he had encouraged the sending of missionaries to the Caribbean and to native Americans. John Wesley was profoundly affected by them.

10 Anna Laetitia Waring, hymnwriter, died at the age of 90 in Clifton, Bristol, in 1910. Her hymns were simply and elegantly written, among them being ‘In heavenly love abiding’.

24 Ida Scudder died aged 90 at Kodaicanal, Vellore, in 1960. The daughter and granddaughter of American medical missionaries to India, she was moved by the desperate plight of Indian women to train as a doctor and to found Vellore Hospital for women, which in 2003 was the largest Christian hospital in the world.

25 Charles II landed at Dover in 1660, and the monarchy was restored after the Civil War and Commonwealth. Although he promised ‘liberty to tender consciences’ and declared, on being presented with a Bible by the mayor of Dover, that he loved it ‘above all things in the world’, this marked the start of a reaction against Puritanism and steadily-increasing persecution.

29 Andrew Alexander Bonar was born in 1810, a younger brother of the hymnwriter Horatius Bonar. A close friend of Robert Murray McCheyne, he travelled with him to Palestine and wrote an account of his life. Andrew was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland and supported the mission of D.L. Moody in 1873-5.

June

14 The 1910 World Missionary Conference opened in Edinburgh. Characterised by optimism, it represented the high-water mark of the Western missionary expansion that had taken place during the 19th century.

21 Henry Grattan Guinness died, aged 74, in 1910, having been a leading evangelist during the Ulster Revival of 1859 and having founded the East London Missionary Training Institute (Harley College), which is now Cliff College in Derbyshire.

August

17 The Scottish Parliament voted almost unanimously in 1560 to adopt the Confession of Faith, drawn up as a statement of Reformation beliefs by John Knox and others. This marked the foundation of the Church of Scotland.

12 David Jones of Llangan died aged 74 in 1810. Ordained as an Anglican clergyman, he became one of the leading Methodist preachers and was influential in the development of Calvinistic Methodism in Wales.

14 Samuel Sebastian Wesley, grandson of Charles Wesley, was born in St. Marylebone, London, in 1810. Successively organist of Hereford, Exeter, Winchester and Gloucester cathedrals, he composed numerous anthems and hymn tunes, such as his setting of his grandfather’s ‘O thou who camest from above’, called ‘Hereford’.

24 The city of Rome was sacked in AD 410 by the forces of Alaric the Visigoth, 1,163 years after its foundation. ‘The city which had conquered the whole world was itself conquered’ (Jerome). This shattering event for citizens of the Roman Empire provoked Augustine to write The City of God — describing the eternal, glorious and heavenly city, which people should enter ‘without further delay’.

October

7 Henry Alford was born in London in 1810. He eventually became Dean of Canterbury and a notable New Testament Greek scholar. He is remembered as the author of several hymns, including ‘Come, you thankful people, come’.

12 F.F. Bruce, biblical scholar and teacher, was born in 1910 in Elgin, Scotland. With a prodigious knowledge of the Bible, facility in all the ancient and classical languages, modern European and Celtic ones too, and an encyclopaedic memory, he was the leading evangelical scholar of his generation, but still able to communicate with ‘ordinary’ people and students. An active supporter of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now UCCF), he was a driving influence in the founding of the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research.

November

5 Donald Gray Barnhouse died in 1960 at the age of 65. He pioneered radio preaching in the 1920s, founded Eternity magazine and was pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for 33 years. He is remembered for a memorable mission in Cambridge in 1946.

12 John Bunyan was arrested for attending an illegal gathering at Lower Samsell, Beds., in 1660. He was charged with ‘devilishly and perniciously abstaining from coming to church to hear divine service’ and was kept in Bedford jail until 1668.

December

2 C.T. Studd was born in 1860 into a wealthy family. He played cricket for England in the 1882 match which was lost to Australia and gave rise to the Ashes. He declared, ‘If Jesus Christ is God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him’. He became one of the Cambridge Seven missionaries to China, and later established the Heart of Africa Mission (now WEC International).

20 The first General Assembly of the Church of Scotland was held in 1560.