Joy Horn lists some of the Christian anniversaries coming up in 2017
Events
In 1517 Bernard Gilpin was born at Kentmere Hall, Westmorland, into a distinguished family. He became rector of Houghton-le-Spring, Co. Durham, and became known as ‘the apostle of the North’ for his constant tours, preaching the Reformation gospel.
Vavasor Powell was born in 1617 at Cnwclas, Heyop, Radnorshire and became a leading Welsh Puritan and itinerant preacher. For this, he spent about ten years in prisons and died in London’s Fleet prison in 1670.
In 1717, Anne Steele, poet and hymn-writer, was born in Broughton, Hants, where her father, a timber merchant, was lay pastor of the Baptist Society. She wrote many hymns, lines of which were ‘borrowed’ by John Newton and William Cowper. One of her hymns has made it into Praise! and Hymns for Today’s Church.
Jane Montgomery Campbell, who was born in London in 1817, was the daughter of the rector of St James, Paddington. A gifted linguist and musician, she taught music in the parish school and translated from the German the classic harvest hymn ‘We plough the fields and scatter’.
In 1867, Thomas Barnardo, a 22-year-old medical student at the London Hospital, opened a ‘ragged school’ where poor children could get a basic education. It was in a former shed for costermongers’ donkeys in Hope Place, Stepney. This led to Barnardo discovering the huge number of destitute and homeless children sleeping rough every night in East London.
James Denney, a Scottish minister and theologian, died aged 61 in summer 1917. He is remembered for his book The Death of Christ, published in 1902, but frequently republished and highly influential. It argues that the death of Christ cannot be understood except as a death for sin.
The Hon. Roland Lamb, second son of Lord Rochester, was born in 1917. After Cambridge, he became a Methodist minister, and in the 1950s a ‘travelling secretary’ among student Christian unions (IVF, now UCCF). For 15 years, he served in the demanding role of the General Secretary of the British Evangelical Council.
Publications
The Scot Robert Bruce’s Way to True Peace and Rest, published in 1617, is his most famous work, based on 16 sermons on the Lord’s Supper. Bruce exemplified the title of this book as he fell in and out of favour with King James (VI and I), and in 1600 was forbidden to preach publicly anywhere in Scotland under pain of death.
John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, one of the greatest poems in the English language, was published in 1667. As Milton had gone blind in 1652, it was entirely dictated. His aim was ‘to justify the ways of God to man’.
Brother Andrew’s God’s Smuggler was published in 1967. It chronicled the work of a Dutchman, Andrew van der Bijl, in bringing much-needed Bibles into Communist countries at the height of the Cold War. By 2002, the book had sold over 10 million copies in 35 languages.
In February 1967, the first issue of Evangelical Times was published, founded and edited by Peter Masters. Bob Horn took over in 1973 and founded Evangelicals Now in 1986, over issues of editorial independence.
Month by month
JANUARY
Charles Spurgeon, the famous preacher of the Metropolitan Chapel in London, having been given a gift of £20,000, bought a site in Stockwell, south London, in 1867, on which to build an orphanage for boys. Throughout the year unsolicited gifts came in to pay for the building, and Spurgeon’s Home was opened in 1869.
FEBRUARY
11 Arguably the greatest Welsh hymnwriter was born in 1717 about this date in Beulah, Powys, at a small farm called ‘Pantecelyn’ (holly hollow). William Williams Pantecelyn grew up to be one of the key leaders of the 18th–century Welsh evangelical movement. Most of his hymns were written in Welsh, but ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ is known and sung throughout the world.
APRIL
Westminster Chapel joined the British Evangelical Council (BEC) and the Fellowship of Evangelical Churches (FIEC) in 1967.
12 Samuel Marinus Zwemer was born at Vriesland, Michigan, USA in 1867.Though rejected by the American Missionary Society, he became a highly-influential missionary to Muslims in both Arabia and Egypt. For his travels in the Middle East, he was made a Fellow of the Geographical Society, and he stirred Christians to the need for evangelism among Muslims.
JUNE
2 Fifteen children assembled in an Islington drawing-room in 1867 for a meeting led by Josiah Spiers. He taught them lively choruses and told them stories of Jesus in an engaging manner. So different was the meeting from the Sunday Schools of the day that all the children returned the following week, bringing friends! This was the beginning of the Children’s Special Service Mission (CSSM), later the Scripture Union.
JULY
15 Michael Bruce, a gifted Scottish poet and theological student, died of TB in 1767 at his father’s house at Kinnesswood, Kinross-shire, at the age of 21. Some of his hymns, such as ‘Behold the mountain of the Lord’, used to be in regular use, and can still be found in Praise (2007).
25 John Fawcett, theologian and Bible commentator, died at Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire in 1817, aged 76. Converted through George Whitefield, he became pastor of the Baptist church at Wainsgate. It was a small, poverty-stricken congregation, and, for the sake of his family, Fawcett decided to accept the invitation to move to a large London church. At the last minute, he decided that he could not bear to leave his much-loved flock. His hymn ‘Blest be the tie that binds’ is said to reflect this incident.
30 At the age of 18, Joni Eareckson dived into Chesapeake Bay in 1967, misjudging the depth of the water, and became a quadriplegic, paralysed from the shoulders down. After a life-changing encounter with God, she became a speaker at Billy Graham crusades, a prolific author, and a campaigner for disabled people.
AUGUST
25 The scientist Michael Faraday died in 1867 at the age of 76, in the grace-and-favour house given to him at Hampton Court. Despite little education, he trained himself, following the principles in Isaac Watts’s book, The Improvement of the Mind. He made major discoveries, especially in electromagnetism, which he popularised in the famous Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution. A devout Christian and humble man, he refused a knighthood and other honours.
OCTOBER
7 In 1567, the first translation of the New Testament into Welsh was published. It was mainly the work of William Salesbury, and it became the basis of all later translations and laid the foundations of modern Welsh prose. It was published in London by Salesbury’s friend and fellow-Welshman, Humphrey Toy, at a shop called ‘The Helmet’ in St Paul’s churchyard.
31 Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 theses (or topics for discussion) on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. He was provoked into issuing these by the sale of ‘indulgences’ (time off purgatory) to finance the building of St Peter’s basilica in Rome. Underlying the propositions were revolutionary Reform-ation principles. Within a fortnight, they had been translated from Latin into German and their effect was dynamic.
NOVEMBER
2 The British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, declared in 1917 that the British Government favoured ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, provided that the rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine should not be prejudiced. This Balfour Declaration has had many long-lasting consequences.
15 Oswald Chambers, who became famous after his death, died in 1917 following an appendectomy, aged 43, at Zeitoun, Egypt, where he was serving during the First World War as a YMCA chaplain to the British and Imperial forces there. In 1924 his widow published from his notes a daily devotional work, My Utmost for His Highest, a challenging call to personal holiness. It has never been out of print since then and has been translated into 39 languages.
29 On his 19th birthday in 1917, C.S. Lewis arrived in the front line of the trenches on the Western Front with the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, just 12 days after arriving in France. Within four months, he had been wounded, and his Oxford roommate, Paddy Moore, had been killed. Lewis had promised his friend that he would take care of his mother, and Mrs Moore was a dominating factor in his life until 1951.
DECEMBER
16 Amy Carmichael was born in 1867 in a small village in County Down, Ireland. Her life’s work was to rescue girls from temple prostitution in Dohnavur, South India, where she set up an orphanage and a mission. She also wrote numerous devotional books.
