On September 9, 1925, a Christian prayer movement in Lagos, Nigeria, took an important step toward becoming one of Africa's most distinctive independent churches. At its center was Christiana Abiodun Akinsowon, a seventeen-year-old Yoruba woman whose reported visions helped launch what became the Cherubim and Seraphim movement. Its emphasis on prayer, prophecy and divine healing attracted thousands, but some of its beliefs and practices also troubled Catholics, Anglicans, and other Protestants who questioned whether the movement remained within historic Christian boundaries.

Education was not an afterthought for the Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay. Within only a few years of establishing their colony, they began planning an institution of higher learning that could educate the next generation of ministers. On September 8, 1636, according to the calendar then in use, the Massachusetts General Court voted £400 toward the establishment of what would become Harvard College—the first institution of higher education in the English colonies of North America.

When Robert Morrison reached Canton on September 7, 1807, he entered a country where the work he had come to accomplish was officially forbidden. The 25-year-old English missionary had been sent by the London Missionary Society with an ambitious assignment: learn Chinese, translate the Scriptures, and establish a Protestant missionary presence among the Chinese people. Morrison would see relatively few converts during his lifetime, but his work in translation, printing, education, and language study helped establish a foundation for the Protestant missionary movement in China.

George Blaurock’s death on September 6, 1529, came only four years after he participated in an event often associated with the beginning of the Anabaptist movement. A former Roman Catholic priest who became one of the most active leaders of the Radical Reformation, Blaurock spent his final years preaching, baptizing converts, establishing congregations, and repeatedly fleeing authorities. His execution by burning at Klausen in the Tyrol reflected the intense religious conflict surrounding Anabaptism during the early Reformation.

The public whipping of Obadiah Holmes in Boston on September 5, 1651, became one of the most notorious examples of religious persecution in colonial New England. Holmes received thirty lashes with a three-corded whip after refusing to pay a fine imposed for his Baptist activities. His punishment exposed a fundamental conflict developing in the English colonies: whether civil governments possessed the authority to enforce religious conformity or whether individuals and churches should be free to follow their own convictions.

By the evening of September 4, 1666, one of medieval London’s greatest landmarks had become an inferno. Flames engulfed Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, melting the lead from its roof and leaving the centuries-old church a burned-out ruin. Its destruction was one episode in the catastrophic Great Fire of London, but it also opened the way for Christopher Wren to create the cathedral whose great dome remains one of the most recognizable symbols of the city.

On September 3, 1905, his sixteenth birthday, Sundar Singh was baptized as a Christian in Simla, in northern India. The baptism marked the public culmination of a remarkable conversion that had already cost the young Sikh his place within his family. In the decades that followed, Sundar would become known internationally as “Sadhu Sundar Singh,” combining the traditional appearance and lifestyle of an Indian holy man with an explicitly Christian message.

On September 2, 1973, J.R.R. Tolkien died at the age of eighty-one while visiting friends in Bournemouth, England. By then, the Oxford professor and philologist had become one of the most influential fantasy writers of the twentieth century. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had introduced millions of readers to Middle-earth, yet the religious convictions of the man who created that world were considerably less obvious. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and although Christianity rarely appears explicitly in his best-known fiction, he acknowledged that his faith profoundly shaped the stories he told.

On September 1, 1159, Pope Adrian IV died at Anagni, bringing to an end a five-year pontificate that unfolded amid some of the most important struggles between church and political authority in medieval Europe. Born Nicholas Breakspear in England around 1100, Adrian remains the only Englishman ever to have served as pope. Yet the importance of his career extends well beyond that distinction. His work in Scandinavia and his confrontations with rulers in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire placed him near the center of the twelfth-century expansion of papal authority.

One missionary whose work shaped both Native American and colonial history was John Sergeant. Ordained on August 31, 1735, Sergeant dedicated his ministry to the Mahican people of western Massachusetts and the Hudson River Valley. Rather than serving established English congregations, he lived among the Mahicans, learned about their culture, and sought to share Christianity through preaching, education, and Bible instruction.

One of the most violent outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution in modern history occurred during the Boxer Rebellion in China. Beginning in 1899, members of the secret society known as the "Boxers" sought to rid China of foreign influence, targeting diplomats, merchants, missionaries, and Chinese Christians. Fueled by economic hardship, drought, resentment toward foreign powers, and growing nationalism, the movement spread rapidly across northern China. By 1900, many local officials and elements of the Qing government were supporting or tolerating the violence.

John the Baptist's imprisonment and execution became one of the earliest examples of a faithful believer suffering because he refused to compromise God's moral standards. According to the Gospels, John publicly condemned the marriage of Herod Antipas to Herodias, who had previously been married to Herod's brother. His bold rebuke led to John's imprisonment.

Campus Crusade for Christ—known today as Cru—grew out of a commitment made by Oklahoma couple Bill and Vonette Bright. In early 1951, they wrote and signed a personal covenant dedicating their lives to God's service and promising to follow wherever they believed He led them. Two years later, on August 28, 1953, Campus Crusade for Christ was officially incorporated.

Few modern Christians have become as widely recognized for serving the poor as Mother Teresa. Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 27, 1910, in Skopje (then part of the Ottoman Empire; later within Yugoslavia and today the capital of North Macedonia), she felt called to religious life as a teenager. At age 18, she joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, took the name Teresa, and soon departed for India, where she would spend nearly the rest of her life.

One of the most influential English Bible translations of the twentieth century was the American Standard Version (ASV), published on August 27, 1901. The ASV grew out of the English Revised Version (1881), which was the first major revision of the King James Version since its publication in 1611. American scholars who had participated in the revision process believed that some of their preferred readings had not been fully incorporated into the British edition. Their work was therefore published separately as the American Standard Version by Thomas Nelson & Sons.

At 84 years old, Elizabeth Vander Kerk became one of the many victims of the religious turmoil that engulfed the Netherlands during the Reformation. On August 25, 1568, she was executed in Utrecht under the authority of the Duke of Alva, the Spanish governor sent by King Philip II to suppress Protestantism and rebellion in the Low Countries.

The Act of Uniformity, passed by the English Parliament on May 19, 1662, required every minister serving in the Church of England to use the revised Book of Common Prayer and to publicly affirm conformity with its teachings and forms of worship. Those who refused would lose their positions and could face additional legal penalties. The deadline for compliance was August 24, 1662—St. Bartholomew's Day.

Following the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain in 1898 and established a new colonial government. One of its highest priorities was creating a modern public school system. On August 23, 1901, approximately 600 American teachers—later known as the "Thomasites" after the U.S. Army transport Thomas that carried most of them—arrived in Manila to begin that work. They joined several hundred teachers who had arrived earlier with the U.S. military, but the Thomasites became the best-known group because of the scale and organization of their mission.

According to a biography written about a century after St. Columba’s death, the Irish missionary encountered a dangerous creature near the River Ness in Scotland. When the creature approached a swimmer, Columba reportedly commanded it to stop. At his voice, “the monster was terrified and fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes.” Tradition places the event on August 22, 556.