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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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July 16, 1519: The Disputation of Leipzig, in which Martin Luther argued that church councils had been wrong and that the church did not have ultimate doctrinal authority, ends (see issue 34: Luther's Early Years).

July 16, 1769: Spanish Franciscan friar Father Junipero Serra founds the San Diego de Alcala mission in California, the first permanent Spanish settlement on the west coast of America (see issue 35: Christopher Columbus).

July 16, 1931: Missionary C.T. Studd, one of the famous "Cambridge ...

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