What are most of us willing to do to spread the gospel? For Irene Ferrel that meant going into the heart of the Belgian Congo in 1964 right in the midst of a horrendous coup. The Congo was breaking away from its colonial rule from Belgian and Irene, a 42-year-old unmarried teacher and graduate of the Fundamental Bible Institute in …

Who woulda-thunk-it that Yale was formed to counter the liberalism of the Harvard Divinity School? Edward Wigglesworth was appointed the first divinity professor in America on January 24, 1722, and soon after began to have serious questions about Calvinism. This was too liberal of a position for many so they formed Yale College soon thereafter. Wigglesworth held the Thomas Hollis …

One of the founding families of America’s only Catholic colony (Maryland) was the Carrolls. Charles Carroll was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Charles’ cousin Daniel was one of 5 men to have signed both the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution. Daniel’s brother was Father John Carroll, the first Archbishop of the United States. On …

What was the first church song you ever learned? My guess is yours was the same as mine: Jesus Loves Me. It was written by Anna Bartlett Warner who died on January 22, 1915. Raised literally across the street from the US Military Academy at West Point, New York. She and her sister Susan wrote a host of children’s novels …

When is the last time you read the product of An Act for Uniformity of Service and Administration of the Sacraments throughout the Realm? Whether you realize it or not this is the Book of Common Prayer that was approved by an act of the English Parliament on January 21, 1549. It was created after Henry VIII died and the …

Translating the Bible into English was quite a feat. It started with portions being translated by John Wycliffe in 1382 and got an amazing amount of effort from the martyred William Tyndale by 1536. But the guy who actually pulled off the complete printing of the first English translation of the Bible was Tyndale’s compatriot Myles Coverdale who died on …

Just off the west coast of Scotland is the Isle of Iona that was a hub of religious activity since the 500’s AD. It began when St. Columba came over from Ireland and established a monastery there. All that was good until the Vikings murdered 68 priests and destroyed the monastery on January 19, 608 AD in what is now …

Who in the Roman Catholic Church gets to appeal a decision from the Pope? The answer: Nobody. Under his papal bull called Execrabilis, Pope Pius II issued on January 18, 1460, there was no appeal to any council or group of a decision of the Pope. Anyone who tried that would be known as “detestable” and they couldn’t drum up …

Huguenots were French Protestants and while there was no doubt France would remain in the Catholic column, the Queen-Regent Catherine de Medici on January 17, 1562, issued the Edict of St. Germain. The Edict made it clear France was Catholic (Catherine’s great uncle was Pope Leo X) but allowed other religions to be practiced which produced a short-lived sigh of …

The Church of England had a number of detractors in the early 1600s and the Puritans were leading the pack. One of the giants of Puritanism was the president of the Corpus Christi College at Oxford named John Rainolds (sometimes spelled as Reynolds). On January 16, 1604, he asked King James to put together a new Bible “that there might …