June 17
362: Emperor Julian ‘the Apostate’ makes it mandatory for all professors and schoolmasters to obtain a license before teaching and thus ousts Christians from educating the youth.
1703: Birth of John Wesley, the English founder of Methodism. He also founded a systematic discipline called the ‘Holy Club’ with his brother Charles, which got the nickname ‘Methodies’ from their critics.
1714: Performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s first sacred cantata “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis,” BWV 21 (“My Heart Was Full of Heaviness”) in Weimar.
1791: Demise of Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, a lifelong supporter of revival leaders and Methodists.
1822: Ordination of the first elders of the newly founded African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church in New York City.
1855: James Theodore Augustus Holly, who later became the first African-American missionary-bishop of the Episcopal Church for Haiti, is ordained a deacon.
1922: Paul Rader, an Evangelist preacher, makes his first radio broadcast to get publicity for his evangelistic meetings in Chicago
1956: Jerry Falwell and his associates found the Thomas Road Baptist Church.
1981: In an armed aggression, the Muslims in al-Zawya Al Hamra, a Coptic district of Cairo, attempt to seize the land of a Coptic businessman in order to build a mosque. They went on assaulting Christians and destroying their properties and murdering more than a hundred Christians, even by burning them alive. The foreign correspondents were prohibited from photographing the carnage and interviewing the relatives of the victims or eyewitnesses.
2004: Jiang Zongxiu, a 34 year old Christian woman, is arrested and beaten for distributing Christian literature at a marketplace in China. She succumbed to her injuries the next day.
2012: Three churches in Kaduna State in Nigeria come under bombing by Islamic terrorists, who killed dozens of Christians, including children, and injured many.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy:Â www.studylight.org