September 27: Today in Christian History

September 27, 1600

John Smyth's Theology Wavered but he Founded the Baptists 

September 27, 1177

Pope Alexander III writes a letter to the legendary Prester John, supposedly Christian king over much of central Asia. He entrusts this to Philip, his physician, to deliver. Philip does not survive the attempt to convey it.

September 27, 1435

Repose (death) of Savvaty. He was the inspiration behind the famous Solovetsky monastery, having settled as a hermit on one of the almost uninhabitable islands of the White Sea in northern Russia.

September 27, 1540

Pope Paul III officially approves the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), founded in 1534 by Ignatius of Loyola.

September 27, 1557

Philippina Graveron, a young Huguenot widow, is martyred at Paris.

September 27, 1604

The Seminario de San Bartolome is established by the Jesuits, their first college in Colombia. Classes will commence January 1st the following year with seventy students.

September 27, 1660

Vincent de Paul (b. 1581) dies. After giving his life to serving the poor, he founded the first Confraternity of Charity in 1617, the Congregation of the Mission in 1625, and the Daughters of Charity in 1633 (the first non-monastic women's order completely given to care of the sick and poor). Canonized in 1737, he was named patron saint of all charitable works in 1885.

September 27, 1674

Death of Thomas Traherne. His poetry, considered worthless at his death, will be rediscovered by William T. Brooke who will point them out to Alexander Grosart much later at an outdoor book stall. Bertram Dobell later will prove the poems were the work of Trahern. Trahern’s poems will come to be recognized as among the best of the seventeenth century minor poets, brimming with childlike delight in God’s works.

September 27, 1680

Iyasu I convenes a church council in Ethiopia at which he deposes leaders of a sect he dislikes.

September 27, 1715

Death at Charterhome, London, of Dr. Thomas Burnet, an English theologian, and author of Sacred Theory of the Earth, popular in its day. He had tried to explain Noah's flood by describing the antedeluvian world as a hollow, oval-shaped object filled with water.

September 27, 1787

Thought to be a runaway slave, George White is arrested while searching for his mother. He will become a famous itinerant African-American preacher.

September 27, 1805

George Mueller, English philanthropist, is born near Magdeburg, Germany. Converted under the Moravians, he devoted his life to caring for orphans.

September 27, 1827

[despite his tombstone, which says September 26] Death of Freeborn Garrettson, for many years a leading Methodist itinerant pastor, later the presiding elder in the state of New York.

September 27, 1839

G. Tradescant Lay, an English physician, asserts at the first annual meeting of the Medical Missionary Society in Canton, China, that he will endeavor while he has life, to create a nearly universal system to freely give the benefits of “rational medicine” (as opposed to pre-scientific medicine) to the world’s poor.

September 27, 1944

Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Church of the Foursquare Gospel and the most famous female evangelist of her day, dies.

September 27, 1947

The Church of South India is inaugurated at Madras by the merger of three denominations: Anglicans, Methodists, and the South India United Church (Presbyterian/Congregationalist).

September 27, 1954

Bishop Dr. David Olaniyi Oyedepo was born. He is a Nigerian preacher, the founder of the Living Faith Church Worldwide, and presiding Bishop of the Faith Tabernacle in Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria. 

Bishop David Oyedepo has been regarded as one of the pioneers of the Christian charismatic movement in Africa, and has been referred to as one of the most influential preachers to originate out from Nigeria. He is the Chancellor of Covenant University and Landmark University, and was named in 2011 by Forbes magazine as being the richest pastor in Nigeria. You can read his full biography here.

September 27, 1970

Pope Paul VI names mystic Teresa of Avila as a “Doctor of the Church,” the first woman to receive that honor.

September 27, 1995

Missionary Sam Sasser died. In 1960 Sasser began serving as a missionary in the Marshall Islands and Samoa, helping to plant 26 churches. He had requ

ested that his heart be buried in the Marshall Islands.