July 29
1650: Death of John Prideaux, bishop of Worcester, a leading scholar at the time of the Puritan-Royalist conflict. His loyalty to the Royalists costed him his position, and left him in poverty as the Puritans prevailed.
1685: Robert Barclay suggests that repenting prisoners (of good conscience) be allowed to go overseas rather than remain isolated in prisons.
1775: The U.S. Army Chaplaincy is founded; it is the second oldest association of its kind after the Infantry.
1791: Demise of James Manning, the former president of Rhode Island College who took firm stand against the oppression of Baptists in Massachussets and Connecticut.
1833: Repose of William Wilberforce, who raised his voice against slavery in British colonies.
1836: Phoebe Palmer loses her 11 year old daughter in a fire and turns to God in grief; later she became a leading voice of the American holiness movement.
1861: Joseph Zhang Wenlan, Paul Chen Changping and John Baptist Luo Tingyin, three Chinese Catholic men, are beheaded in Yaojiaguan, Guizhou Province, after days of persecution. A Christian woman, Martha Wang-Luo Mande, who followed the men to the execution ground, also met with the same fate.
1866: Birth of Thomas O. Chisholm, American Methodist pastor, teacher, editor and poet, who penned 1,200 hymns.
1905: Birth of Dag Hammarskjoeld, a Swedish diplomat and the former Secretary-General of the U.N.(1953-61), whose spiritual journal Markings was published in 1964, three years after his untimely death in a plane crash.
1918: Father Florentius Troitsky secretly buries the dead bodies of the Orthodox priest Platon Gorgonievich Gornykh and two peasants in the parish cemetery; they were executed by the Soviets in the woods outside Pokrovskoye,
1945: Demise of Robert A. Jaffrey, a zealous missionary who had led a major effort by the Christian and Missionary Alliance to evangelize China and Southeast Asia.
1974: Ordination of the first eleven women priests in the Episcopal Church at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.
2006: Funeral services held for Titus Machingo Chondol, a pastor in the Church of Christ in Nigeria, noted for his efforts to evangelize and educate his people, by planting several churches, forming a youth fellowship and a pastors’ forum, and inspiring several young men to enter the ministry.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org