How long does it take to heal a church spat? In one case it was 911 years. The Great Schism – as it is known – took place in AD 1095 and was the final straw between the church in Rome and the church in Constantinople. Today we would call it the Roman Catholic Church versus the Eastern/Greek Orthodox Church. …
What does it take to get a Baptist preacher to not preach a sermon on Sunday morning? The potential loss of life seems to be a good reason. William Carey dedicated his life as a missionary to India and came across a local practice of burning widows alive after their husbands died. Fortunately, it had been outlawed and when Carey …
How many Christians today would die for being a follower of Christ. But what about dying for a point of disputed doctrine? Bible-believing Christians debate the issue of infant baptism but how many of us would give our life over it? I wouldn’t but Hans Schlaffer did. A former Catholic priest, Schlaffer converted over to the Anabaptists after his interaction …
It seems to slip the memories of many Americans that the prime motivation for exploring and settling what would become the United States was to spread the gospel. We can think of places like St. Augustine or San Francisco as places that were founded as Christian mission posts. But Chicago? On December 4, 1674, Jacques Marquette began building a small …
Guess how many popes were English? A grand total of 1: Pope Adrian IV who was elected on December 3, 1154. He was born Nicholas Breakspear in St. Albans, England (pictured here) and issued a Papal order (called a bull) telling the King of England to invade Ireland so the Irish can be a part of the church of Rome.
St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, dedicated on December 2, 1697, has been an icon for the Church of England. Designed by England’s most celebrated architect Christopher Wren (who is buried there), it has been the site of the funerals of both Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. The cathedral is still in daily use today and is the mother church of …
When Martin Luther decided to nail those 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517 he was doing much more than coming up with some thoughts on how the church was being run. One thing he did was get in big-time trouble from Pope Leo X who died on December 1, 1521. Leo X …
When Henry II was king of England way back in the 1100’s he began the efforts to curb the power of the clergy and begin to pull away from the influence of the Pope and Rome. He held a conference called the Constitutions of Clarendon on 16 articles that set forth what these restrictions on the church would be and …
King Henry VIII’s desire for divorce can’t be overstated when we discuss how the Bible was put together and how the Protestant Reformation came about in England. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was very powerful in King Henry’s court and held influential government offices while he served as Cardinal – and Archbishop of York. His home near London is called Hampton Court …
Baptist Churches in the US seem plentiful but the first one organized in Poland happened on November 28, 1858. William Weist baptized 8 people in the town of Stolzenberg (which is now called Rozanki) in what at that time was in Prussia which is in Poland today. Don’t look for Stolzenberg, Prussia on Google maps because it isn’t there. This …
