Pentecostalism burst out at 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, today in 1906, in a chapel that had recently been a tombstone shop. Metaphors don’t come much better than this. Inspired by the Welsh evangelical revival of two years earlier, Pastor William Seymour started his own prayer meetings for revival. They erupted with singing, shouting, healing, falling on the floor, and speaking in tongues. Thousands came and took the gift of tongues home to share with friends and family. There are now in excess of 51 million Pentecostals worldwide.
Today in 2017, on Palm Sunday, the church of St George in Tanta (on the Nile delta) and St Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral, the principal church of Alexandria, were attacked by suicide bombers. The bombing in Tanta was especially lethal, as the bomb had been packed with TNT and a large number of screws, and the bomber detonated it at the altar during the Sunday liturgy. The two attacks left 45 dead and 126 injured, and were claimed as the work of ISIS.
Today in 1899, Joseph Stalin left the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia, never to return. The seminary was a training school for priests, but like many seminaries of the Russian Empire of the time, it was highly successful in producing large numbers of Marxist revolutionaries. Stalin was a difficult and rebellious student, and was persecuted by a priest he nicknamed Black Spot, who confiscated his banned books (by authors such as Hugo, Zola and Chekhov), and who drove him to Marxism.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor, theologian and member of the German resistance during World War II, was hanged at dawn in Flossenbürg Concentration Camp on this day in 1945. He was suspected of being involved in the 20 July plot of 1944 to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazis, and was executed alongside six others, some of whom were part of the military resistance to Hitler.
‘God honours some with great suffering and grants them the grace of martyrdom, while other are not tempted beyond their strength. But in every case it is one cross. It is laid on every Christian… Those who enter into discipleship enter into Jesus’ death.’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Discipleship and the Cross’
The expulsion of the Moriscos was decreed today in 1609 by King Philip III of Spain. The Moriscos were descendants of Muslims whose families had converted under duress to Christianity in the previous century. The Moriscos left, taking only the possessions they could prersonally carry, and most of them settled on the Barbary Coast, in northwest Africa. Almost 300,000 people were affected, and the loss of so much of the working population left some regions of Spain severely depopulated and struggling economically.
François Rabelais, the brilliant French writer and scholar, famous for his satirical and bawdy attacks on the failures and abuses of the church, died in Paris today in 1553.
Image: Wikimedia Commons