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Christian History

Today in Christian History

October 15

October 15, 1880: Germany's Cologne cathedral is completed, 633 years after construction began.

October 15, 1900: Charles Fox Parham opens Bethel Bible Institute in Topeka, Kansas, where Agnes Ozman and other students would speak in tongues and begin the Pentecostal movement (see issue 58: Pentecostalism).

October 15, 1932: A small party of supporters gathers in Liverpool, England, to send Gladys Aylward, a 28-year-old parlormaid, off on a dangerous missionary journey to China. Though she'd been turned down by the missions agency she applied to, she went on to become one of the most amazing single woman missionaries of modern history. Her dramatic rescue of a hundred orphans is told in the movie The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman (see issue 52: Hudson Taylor).

October 15, 1949: Billy Graham skyrockets to national prominence with an evangelistic crusade in Los Angeles (see issue 65: The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century).

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April 18, 1161: Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, dies. He repeatedly quarreled with his superiors about church appointments and other political questions, but he the influential French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux supported him. Theobald helped strengthen the English church and build the career of Thomas Becket, whom he recommended as chancellor to England's newly crowned King Henry.

April 18, 1587: English Protestant historian John Foxe, author of Actes and Monuments of Matters Happenning to the ...

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