#Lai Manping martyred by communist Chinese police

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Today in Christian History

Today is Friday, March 27th, the 86th day of 2019. There are 280 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

853: Death of Haymo, a Saxon monk and scholar, and founder of the library of Halberstadt.

1329: Pope John XXII issues In Agro Dominico condemning twenty-eight propositions of the Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart.

1378: Death of Pope Gregory XI, the last internationally-agreed-upon pope to reign in Avignon. Antipopes will reign there, however, because rivalries for the papacy after his death will result in the “Great Schism,” in which popes and antipopes vie for control of Christendom.

1555: Nineteen-year-old William Hunter is burned to death in Brentwood, England, for refusing to accept the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. He had resisted both threats and bribes.

1683: King Christian V of Denmark commissions pastor and poet Thomas Kingo to prepare a new hymnal for use in Danish churches.

1716: Death of George Keith, an Anglican rector. As a young man, Keith had joined the Quakers but later withdrew from them, believing their doctrine had drifted from truth, and became instead an Anglican priest. He had served as a missionary to American Quakers before becoming a rector in Sussex, England.

1837: Death at Bancoorah, India, of James, a convert from Hinduism. After his conversion, he had superintended a string of Christian schools and evangelized his own people as he had opportunity, overcoming the prejudices of his father, brothers, and some others who became Christians.

1889: Death in Britain of John Bright, an English Quaker parliamentarian, famous for his speeches and advocacy of reforms.

1920: Death of Francis Nathan Peloubet, American Congregational clergyman known for his annual volumes of Select Notes on the International Sunday School Lessons.

1929: Death in Lausanne, Switzerland, of Charles Henry Brent, an Episcopal priest active in the ecumenical movement. Two years before his death, he had presided over the 1927 World Conference on Faith and Order, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

1930: Bolsheviks shoot Basil Feofanovich Infantyev, a priest of the Bratskaya Church, for “anti-Soviet activity” because he had opposed communist renovations in the teaching and practice of the Russian Orthodox Church. They will harrass his widow after his execution.

Bolsheviks shoot Orthodox priest Basil Borisovich Chubinsky in Barabinsk on accusation of counter-revolutionary activities, and they exile his family.

1981: Alfred Selepe, Nazarene church-planter, pastor, and evangelist in South Africa is attacked by two young men, probably gangsters, and suffers eleven stab wounds but will recover after treatment.

1991: Missionary Lynda Bethea is beaten to death by robbers in Kenya when she and her husband stop to help a “wounded” African lying in the road.

1993: Security officers in Shaanxi Province, China, descend on a house church and beat the leaders. They then force the lay Christians to beat the leaders, too. They beat and expose some of the church’s women, hang some Christians from beams and beat them again, before forcing Lai Manping and several other badly-beaten Christians to crawl eighteen miles to a police station. Fearing than Lai will die in custody, they order him to leave. He is found dead on a roadside, having tried to crawl home.