CHURCH HISTORY TODAY

What happened in the church today.

May

May 1
1816
Birth of Fidelia Fisk, American missionary to the Nestorians in Persia and the first principal of the women's seminary at Oroomiah.

1886
The United Holy Church of America is founded in Method, North Carolina, a suburb of Raleigh. This predominantly African-American holiness denomination emphasizes Spirit baptism and sanctification (both regarded as works subsequent to salvation) as essential for the Christian life.

May 2
373
Death of St.Athanasius the Great bishop of Alexandria (328-73). Known today as "the father of Orthodoxy," Athanasius was the first Christian writer to list the twenty-seven books of the New Testament that we have today.

1959
After several years on the Continent studying and writing, John Knox returns to Scotland to help lead the Scottish Reformation. The movement takes hold the following year, when queen regent Mary of Guise dies. Afterward, Knox and others drew up the Scots Confession, which Parliament approved in 1560.

May 3
1850
Death of John Herr, Pennsylvania-born religious leader and founder of the Reformed Mennonite Church. primarily in western New York and Ontario.

1987
Three Lutheran bodies (the Lutheran Church, the American Lutheran Church, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches) merge to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States. The new denomination is officially formed on January 1,1988.

May 4
1923
Death of William Robertson Nicoll, British religious journalist and editor.The son of a Scottish Free Church minister, Nicoll edited the British journal The Expositor and the fifty-volume Expositor's Bible (1888-1905).

1988
Biloxi-born Catholic prelate Eugene A. Marino, SSJ, is installed as archbishop of Atlanta. He is the first African-American archbishop.

May 5
1813
Birth of Sdren A. Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher and theologian widely regarded as "the father of existentialism." Kierkegaard attacked organized religion, holding that an individual chooses truth on the basis of (subjective) faith.

1901
With special permission from the pope, Father Luke J. Evers conducts the first Catholic Mass for night workers at the Church of St. Andrew in New York City. Church law previously did not permit Mass before sunrise.

May 6
1809
Birth of William Walker, Southern American music teacher and inventor of the seven-shaped-note musical system. Walker spent much of his life collecting traditional tunes of the southern Appalachians.

1986
The Reverend Donald E. Pelotte is ordained as the first Native American Roman Catholic bishop in Gallup, New Mexico.

May 7
1787
The New Jerusalem Church is formally established by five ex-Wesleyan preachers in London. The church's theology, known popularly as Swedenborgianism, is based on the writings of Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).

1907
Birth of Kathryn Kuhlman, American itinerant evangelist and spiritual healer. She discovered her gift of healing while pastoring a small church in Pennsylvania, when people in her congregation began reporting unexpected healings during her services. Kuhlman's best-known book is her 1962 autobiography, I Believe in Miracles.

May 8
1655
Death of Edward Winslow, English-born Puritan separatist and Mayflower pilgrim. A signer of the Mayflower Compact, Winslow later became governor of Plymouth Colony (1633, 1636, 1644).

1816
In the Dutch Reformed Church in New York City, delegates from thirty-five Bible societies meet to establish the American Bible Society, which seeks to promote a wider circulation of the scriptures, unaccompanied by notes or comments.

May 9
1760
Death of Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf, German Pietist reformer and pioneer in missions, who reorganized the Unitas Fratrum into the Moravian (Bohemian) Brethren

1983
Pope John Paul II announces the reversal of the Catholic Church's 1633 condemnation of Galileo Galilei, the seventeenth-century scientist who first espoused the Copernican (heliocentric, or sun-centered) theory of our solar system.

May 10
1939
A Declaration of Union reunites the Methodist Church in the United States after 109 years of division. The recombined denomination comprises more than 8 million members.

1886
Birth of Karl Barth, Swiss Reformed theologian. Asked to summarize the essence of his theology, Barth once replied, "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

May 11
1825
The first national tract society in America, the American Tract Society, is organized in New York City by the merger of fifty smaller societies. By 1975 the ATS was publishing 30 million tracts a year.

1851
Birth of James M. Gray, Bible teacher and clergyman. Gray was one of the editors of the Scofield Bible (1909) and also served as president of Moody Bible Institute. In 1931 he helped organize the Evangelical Teacher Training Association. Gray also penned the hymn "Nor Silver Nor Gold Hath Obtained My Redemption."

May 12
1861
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic," written by Julia Ward Howe, is first performed at a flag-raising ceremony for Union recruits at Fort Warren (near Boston), during the American Civil War.

1907
English mystic Evelyn Underhill concludes in a letter, "An entire willingness to live in the dark, in pain, anything—this is the real secret. I think no one really finds the Great Companion till their love is of that kind that they long only to give and not to get."

May 13
1917
Three shepherd children near Fatima, Portugal, report that the Virgin Mary appeared to them. Our Lady of Fatima—the popular title given to the visions—is said to regularly appear to the three children on the thirteenth of each month between Ma)' and October.

1963
Death of A. W. Tozer, American Christian and Missionary Alliance clergyman and Christian writer. He served as pastor of Chicago's Southside Alliance Church for thirty-one years. Tozer's best-remembered writing is The Pursuit of God (1948).

May 14
1607
In Virginia priest Robert Hunt presides over the first Anglican worship service held in the New World, on the first Sunday after the arrival of the 120 settlers comprising the Jamestown expedition.

1752
Birth of Timothy Dwight American colonial clergyman and educator. The grandson of Jonathan Edwards, Dwight served as a chaplain in the Revolutionary War, a Congregational clergyman in Connecticut, and later was elected president of Yale College.

May 15
1889
The Epworth League of the Methodist Episcopal Church—the forerunner of youth ministry programs found in the United Methodist Church today—is organized during a two-day conference in Cleveland, Ohio.

1948
Death of Father Edward J. Flanagan, Irish-born parish priest, who founded the Boys Town orphanage near Omaha, Nebraska, in 1917.

May 16
1540
German reformer Martin Luther remarks, "In the worst temptations nothing can help us but faith that God's Son has put on flesh, is bone, sits at the right hand of the Father, and prays for us. There is no mightier comfort."

1805
Anglican missionary Henry Martyn steps ashore in Calcutta, India, where he is met by William Carey. Carey soon influences Martyn to do translation work, and Martyn translates the Bible into three languages, including Hindustani, before his premature death in 1812.

May 17
1838
Birth of William H. Hare, American Episcopal prelate and "apostle of the Sioux." He served as missionary bishop of Niobrara (Nebraska and the Dakotas) for thirty-seven years.

1881
The New Testament of the English Revised Version is published in England, the first modern English translation of the scriptures published since 1611. The product of ten years of work by fifty-Tour biblical scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, the ERV provided the scholarly foundation for the publication of the American Standard Version of the Bible in 1901 and 1905.

May 18
1843
Nearly half the member congregations of the National Church of Scotland secede to form the Free Church of Scotland. Renowned clergymen associated with this reformed Presbyterian denomination include Thomas Chalmers, Horatius and Andrew Bonar, and William Robertson Smith.

1920
Birth of Karol jozef Wojtyla, Polish Catholic cardinal, who in 1978 was elected the first non-Italian pope since the Renaissance, taking the name John Paul II.

May 19
1775
Anglican clergyman and hymn writer John Newton notes in a letter, "I hope you will find the Lord present at all times, and in all places. When it is so, we are at home everywhere; when it is otherwise, home is a prison, and abroad a wilderness."

1971
Godspell, a musical based on the Gospel of Matthew, opens at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York City.

May 20
325
On the site of modern Ankara, Turkey, the Council of Nicaea convenes the first ecumenical council of the Church, attended by nearly three hundred bishops. The council is called by Emperor Constantine, who seeks to establish peace and unity in the Christian Church.

1690
Death of John Eliot, English-born clergyman, Congregational missionary to colonial America, and "apostle to the American Indians," who worked with the Pequot people in Massachusetts for thirty years. Eliot's Indian language catechism {1653) was the first book printed in English in America, and his translation of the Bible into Pequot (1661-63) was the first Bible published in America.

May 21
1738
Charles Wesley is converted from a legalistic to an evangelical Christian faith. Charles entered the ministry the following year and became a gifted and tireless hymn writer known as "the sweet singer of Methodism."

1813
Birth of Robert Murray McCheyne, Scottish Presbyterian clergyman, whose pastoral letters carried spiritual influence even after McCheyne's premature death at age twenty-nine.

May 22
1541
In Germany the twenty-six-day Ratisbon Conference—seeking to unite the ideas of three Catholic theologians and three Protestant theologians—ends with tentative doctrinal agreements reached. Subsequent opposition from Martin Luther prevented any lasting reunion. After the failure of the Ratisbon Conference, the Protestant movement became permanent.

1868
Birth of William R. Newell, American Plymouth Brethren pastor and Bible teacher associated with Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Newell is remembered today as the author of the hymn "Years I Spent in Vanity and Pride."

May 23
1955
The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States announces that it will permit the ordination of female clergy.

1974
Russian Orthodox liturgical scholar Alexander Schmemann reflects in his journal, "The most important question is how does objective faith become subjective? How does it grow in the heart to become a personal faith? When do common words become one's own? The faith of the Church, the faith of the Fathers comes alive only when it is my own."

May 24
1930
Linguistic pioneer Frank C. Laubach, serving as a Congregational missionary to the Philippines, comments in a letter, "As one makes new discoveries about his friends by being with them, so one discovers the 'individuality' of God if one entertains him continuously."

1950
During its annual meeting in Boston, the Northern Baptist Convention formally changes its name to the American Baptist Convention. In 1972 the denomination renamed itself the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.

May 25
1868
Death of "Billy" Bray of Cornwall. Welsh Methodist preacher, who for forty-three years had preached, built chapels, and taken orphans into his home.

1876
The Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland unites with the Free Church of Scotland to form the new Free Church of Scotland.

May 26
735
Death of Anglo-Saxon theologian the Venerable Bede, a monk at a monastery in Jarrow, Northumberland, also known as "the father of English history." Bede was the first great English scholar. He invented the BC/AD dating system, and his Ecc/es/ast/co/ History of the English People (731) was crucial to England's conversion to Christianity.

1808
In Baltimore the Fifth American General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church closes. During the three-week gathering, William McKendree was ordained as the first American bishop of the Methodist Church.

May 27
1564
Death of John Calvin (born Jean Chauvin), French-born theologian and Swiss ecclesiastical reformer. Called "the organizer of Protestantism," Calvin built on the premise that the Bible is the only trustworthy source of knowledge, and thereby unified the scattered reform theologies of Europe.

1917
Pope Benedict XV proclaims the Codex Iuris Canonici (Code of Canon Law) by papal bull. This comparatively small volume of canon law is divided into five books and 2,414 canons. It is the first redaction of the canon law to be made in the Roman Catholic Church in modern times.

May 28
1640
Scottish clergyman Samuel Rutherford writes to a grieving parent, "Now the number of crosses lying in your way to glory are fewer by one than when I saw you; they must decrease."

1954
President Dwight Eisenhower signs into law the Congressional Act, Joint Resolution 243, which adds the words under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. In a speech given soon after, Eisenhower declares, in support of the new bill, "In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future."

May 29
1819
While visiting his father-in-law's church, Anglican bishop Reginald Heber pens the poetic stanzas to the hymn "From Greenland's Icy Mountains."

1874
Birth of Gilbert Keith "G. K." Chesterton, English journalist, novelist, poet, and apologist. Called "the prince of paradox" for the religious dogma underlying his light literary style, Chesterton was credited by poetT. S. Eliot with doing "more than any man in his time.. .to maintain the existence of the [Christian] minority in the modern world."

May 30
1871
American Quaker holiness writer Hannah Whitall Smith remarks in a letter, "We Quakers are so thrifty that we do not like to live 'from hand to mouth' as the expression is. We like a stock of goodness laid up ahead, and a stock of wisdom and of patience and of all the other graces. But.. .God's plan for us is different. God has laid it all up for us in Christ, and we have to draw it each moment as we need it."

1971
The Provincial Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, meeting in Zagorsk, elects Metropolitan Pimen as patriarch of Moscow and all Russia.

May 31
1699
Birth of Alexander Cruden, Scottish bookseller and compiler of Cruden's Concordance, first published in 1737 and still a standard reference today for the King James Version of the Bible.

1821
The Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary—the first Catholic cathedral in the United States—is dedicated in Baltimore by Archbishop Ambrose Marechal.