January 1
Circumcision and Name of Jesus
379 Basil
the Great, early Eastern church father, died (b. ca. 330).
837 Peter of
Atroa (773–837),
an abbot who was later canonized as a saint and an opponent of iconoclasm,
died (b. 773).
1484 Ulrich
(Huldrych) Zwingli, Swiss reformer, was born at Wildhaus,
Switzerland (d. 11 October 1531).
1504 Caspar
Creuziger, a co-worker of Martin Luther, was born at Leipzig
(d. 16 November 1548, Wittenberg).
1519 Martin Luther was invited to
appear at Altenburg. Karl
von Miltitz had come with letters to princes and prelates to
arrest Luther.
1536 The Reformation was
established in
Denmark.
1536 Robert
Barnes (1495–1540),
Bishop Edward
Foxe (ca. 1496–1538)
of Hereford and Archdeacon Richard Heath come to Wittenberg to discuss
the Augsburg Confession (until April).
1559
King Christian III, who had established the Reformation in
Denmark, died (b. 12 August 1503).
1649
Tobias Clausnitzer (1619–1684), Swedish chaplain
and hymnist, preached a thanksgiving sermon for the Peace of Westphalia.
1723 Christian Gregor, hymnist, was
born at Dirsdorf, near Perlau, Silesia (d. 6 November 1801,
Berthelsdorf).
1750
Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg, Lutheran pastor,
congressman and speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was born
in Trappe, Pennsylvania (d. 4 June 1801).
1782
Johann Christian Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach, hymnist,
died (b. 5 September 1735, Leipzig).
1802 In a letter to the
Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson
popularized the famous metaphor
“a wall of separation between church and state.”
1819 Philip
Schaff, hymn translator and American church historian, was
born in Chur, Switzerland (d. 20 October 1893, New York City).
1825
Milton Valentine, professor and president at Pennsylvania
College (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania) and president of the Lutheran
Theological Seminary (Gettysburg), was born near Uniontown, Maryland
(d. 7 February 1906).
1830
Leonard Woolsey Bacon, hymnist and translator, was born in
New Haven, Connecticut (d. 1907).
1842 Thomas Morely, composer, was
born in Oxford, England (d. 1891). The son of a bookbinder, he studied
music under L. G. Hayne and became an accomplished organist. He served
for a time at Saint Albans, Holborn, London, and contributed many tunes
to the St. Albans Tune Book. [The
Handbook to the Lutheran Hymnal, comp. W. G. Polack (Saint
Louis: CPH, 1942): 549]
1844 Wilhelm
Sihler (1801–1885),
pastor and founder of Concordia Theological Seminary (Fort Wayne,
Indiana), preached his inaugural sermon in Pomeroy, Ohio.
1845 A small body of Swedish
immigrants arrived in the Mississippi Valley in 1845, settling near
Lockbridge, Jefferson County, Iowa, where cheap land was still very
plentiful and calling their community New Sweden. In January 1848 they
organized a congregation. Because no ordained pastor was available,
they called one of their own number, M. F. Haakanson (Hokanson), to
preach and administer the sacraments. He was a shoemaker who once had
planned to be a missionary to the Laplanders. Though lacking
theological education and somewhat vacillating doctrinally, he was a
fluent preacher. From the outset the congregation was beset by
proselytizers who tried to shake the convictions of Haakanson and
disrupt the flock. Haakanson served the group until 1856, having been
ordained in 1853. Only the timely arrival of stronger spiritual leaders
from Sweden saved a remnant. New Sweden became the starting point of
the future Augustana Lutheran Church.
1863 American President Abraham
Lincoln freed all slaves in the Confederate states by issuing the
Emancipation Proclamation. Churches throughout the North held
candlelight vigils commemorating the event. Slaves in the Union were
not freed until such amendments were added to the U. S. Constitution.
1865
James Rowe, American hymn writer, was born in Devonshire,
England (d. 10 November 1933).
1871 The
Church of Ireland was officially disestablished.
1878 The Ohio Synod (a member of
the Synodical Conference) conferred an honorary doctor of divinity
degree on C.
F. W. Walther (1811–1887).
Several years later the Ohio Synod accused the Missouri Synod of “Crypto-Calvinism.” This erupted
into the Predestinarian Controversy, which caused the Ohio Synod to
withdraw from the Synodical Conference.
1881 Fred Wahlers was born in
Deepen, Hanover (d. 18 February 1965, Columbia Heights, Minnesota). A
graduate of Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis) in 1904, he served as a
professor at Immanuel Lutheran College (Concord [1904–1905] and
Greensboro[1905–1919],
North Carolina); as pastor at Remsen, Iowa (1919–1922); and as
professor at Concordia College (Saint Paul, Minnesota) from 1922 until
his retirement in 1951.
1882 The first issue of The
Lutheran Witness was published.
1883
George Henry Trabert (1843–1931),
hymn translator, began English work among Lutherans in the Twin Cities.
1886
Nathan Brown, Baptist missionary to India and linguist, died
(b. 22 June 1807 at New Ipswich, New Hampshire).
1887 Vincent Taylor, British New
Testament scholar and Methodist clergyman, was born (d. 1968). He
started his first pastorate in 1909 and in 1930 moved into education,
thereafter associating with such schools as the University of Leeds,
London University and the University of Wales. He authored many
scholarly works, specializing in the Gospels.
1907 The Methodist Episcopal Church
mission work was transferred to the Board of Home Missions and Church
Extension. Before that time the chief agencies through which the home
missionary work of the church was conducted were the Missionary
Society, the Board of Church Extension, the Woman’s Home
Missionary Society and the National City Evangelization Union.
1907 American Congregational
missionary
Howard A. Walter (1883–1918),
while teaching English at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, penned the
words to the hymn, “I
Would Be True, for There Are Those Who Trust Me.”
1908
Johann Friedrich Köstering, author of a history of the Saxon
Immigration (Auswanderung der sächsischen Lutheraner im Jahre
1838), died (b. 20 February 1830).
1919
Lewis Hartsough (b. 31 August 1828), American Methodist
clergyman and hymnist, died.
1923 Evangelist
Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944)
opened the famous 5,000-seat Angelus Temple in Los Angeles.
1937 J.
Gresham Machen (b. 28 July 1881), American Presbyterian
scholar and apologist, died.
1940
Maximilian Christopher Immanuel Fritschel, president of
Wartburg Seminary (Dubuque, Iowa), died (b. 21 February 1868, the son
of Sigmund at Saint Sebald, Iowa).
1949
Frederick Brand, vice-president of the LCMS (1917-1929), died
(b. 9 September 1863).
1951
Henry Frederick Schuh (30 May 1890–21 December
1965) became president of the American Lutheran Church.
1955 English scholar and Christian
apologist C.
S. Lewis (1898-1963), after nearly thirty years of teaching
at Magdalen College, Oxford University, assumed the newly created
professor's chair of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge
University.
1959 Delmar Glock arrived in
Okinawa to open LCMS work.
1959 The LCMS Foundation
was incorporated in Missouri.
1961 The new
American Lutheran Church began functioning. It was
constituted in a convention on 22-24 April 1960 in Minneapolis. The new
ALC resulted from the merger of the old American Lutheran Church, the
Evangelical Lutheran Church and the United Evangelical Lutheran Church.
1961 The
Church of the Lutheran Confession formally elected its first
officers in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota.
1963 The
Lutheran Church in America began full operation. It was
formed from a merger of the American Evangelical Lutheran Church, the
Augustana Lutheran Church, the Suomi Synod and the United Lutheran
Church in America.
1964 The
National Evangelical Lutheran Church (Finnish) merged with
the LCMS.
1971 The
Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (Slovak) joined the
Missouri Synod.
1988 The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
began operations, bringing together The American Lutheran Church
(1960), the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches and the
Lutheran Church in America.
1989 The
Lutheran Church—Canada came into being as an independent
church body. It was made up of the former Canadian districts of the
Missouri Synod.
2004 Mikko Einar
Juva, president of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), died
(b. 22 November 1918 in Kaarlela, Finland).
