On June 5, 1865, Anglican priest and polymath Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the processional hymn, "Onward, Christian Soldiers." The hymn was originally written for children walking to Horbury St. Peter’s Church near Wakefield in Yorkshire, England. Far from the cultural stereotype that the hymn earned Baring-Gould— that of a militant, narrow-minded clergyman fearful of and fighting against new knowledge— he actually led an impressive life, remaining keenly inquisitive about the world God has made.
On this day in A.D. 337, Emperor Constantine died. Many Christians think that Constantine was perhaps the worst thing to happen to the Church. They believe he made Christianity the imperial religion, thus leading the Church to compromise with pagan culture, marrying it to state power, and derailing the spread of the Gospel. The Church, they argue, was better off as a persecuted minority. After all, didn’t the Church father Tertullian tell us that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church?
An ancient Hebrew Bible dating back to the late ninth or early 10th century was sold for $38.1 million Wednesday afternoon.
The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has found an ancient receipt from about 2,000 years ago on the City of David's Pilgrimage Road in Jerusalem.
The 2023 Wilberforce Award recipient is Shodankeh Johnson, a pastor and church planter in Sierra Leone. The award was named after William Wilberforce, whose work as an English politician led to the abolishment of slavery in 1833 in the British Empire. There is an incredible link between Wilberforce and the role Shodankeh’s Sierra Leone played in freeing slaves.
Grigory Kessel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences used ultraviolet photography to read text that had been written on parchment in the sixth century but erased and reused centuries later.
New research in Israel on a 3,000-year-old clay jug supports the biblical story of Solomon receiving a visit from the Queen of Sheba because it suggests the two kingdoms already had a relationship, according to the archaeologist who studied it.
The hymn “O Love, How Deep, How Broad, How High” tells the story of salvation, from Jesus’ Incarnation through His Ascension to the sending of the Holy Spirit to His Church. The lyrics are a translation of a portion of a 23-stanza hymn from the 15th century, likely written by Thomas à Kempis.
Archaeologists in Israel have uncovered the mosaic floor of an ancient church from the Roman era and are opening it up to the public with the hope that hikers and tourists will stop by the site.
One of the primary ways that the early church proved its value and worth was by being a blessing to the people they met. However, blessing others was never their focus. Rather, it was a natural byproduct of a life dedicated to serving God and growing in their relationship with him.
In the same way, there is an important place for Christian service and charity in the church’s purpose. But, as Sanders describes, if meeting physical and emotional needs ever becomes a higher priority than meeting spiritual needs, “the church becomes understandable to the world but loses its mission. It is no longer peculiar, even if it is now coherent to a culture that is anything but Christian. We need that friction, that impossible question of how church works, that puzzlement over what the church does, because what it does is often inconceivable to those outside it.”
