January 2: Today in Christian History

January 2, 303

According to tradition, Roman Emperor Diocletian orders a slaughter of Christians at an English town which, because of the event, becomes known as Lichfield, “field of corpses.”

January 2, 1492

The Moors surrender Granada to their Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabella.

January 2, 1542

Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances are ratified as church law in Geneva.

January 2, 1792

Death in Canterbury, Kent, England, of Edward Perronet who had written the hymn “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”

January 2, 1849

Seventeen-year old John Norton Loughborough gives his first public talk. Filled with certainty Christ will soon return, he has rented a church in upper New York to lecture on the subject. Eventually he will become an influential leader of the Seventh-day Adventists. 

January 2, 1878

Death near Birmingham, England, of Edward Caswall, author of the hymn “When Morning Gilds the Skies.”

January 2, 1883

Death in Philadelphia of Charles Porterfield Krauth. A Lutheran pastor, editor, and educator, he had spent his life promoting conservative Lutheran theology and a literal reading of the Augsburg Confession.

January 2, 1905

Sergius Georgievich Golubyatnikov, known as “Seraphim,” is consecrated Bishop of Mozhaisk. While serving in a later post at Ekaterinburg and Irbit he will condemn the Bolsheviks’ February revolution, for which he will be sent to the Novospassky monastery in Moscow, becoming its first prisoner when it is turned into a prison. There he will be shot.

January 2, 1909

Ordination of Aimee and Robert Semple by Chicago evangelist William H. Durham. Aimee will marry Harold McPherson after Robert’s death, becoming the founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and one of America’s most popular and controversial preachers of the early twentieth century.

January 2, 1921

KDKA, a Pittsburgh radio station, broadcasts a service from Calvary Episcopal Church to test its ability to make remote broadcasts; this is the first religious broadcast ever made.

January 2, 1924

Death of Sabine Baring-Gould at Exeter, England. An Anglican clergyman, he will be remembered as the author of two popular hymns: “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Now the Day Is Over.”

January 2, 1961

Sri Lanka’s Parliament nationalizes the island’s church schools, most of them Roman Catholic.