Events

The Holy Spirit fell on one hundred and twenty believers, and the church was born. At Sinai, the law was written on stone tablets and three thousand fell dead; at Pentecost, the Spirit was written on human hearts and three thousand were saved.

In 313 AD, Constantine and Licinius reached an agreement in Milan declaring religious freedom across the empire and ordering the return of confiscated church property. The church was freed from persecution — and set on a dangerous path of entanglement with the world.

In 325 AD, over 300 bishops gathered at Nicaea and declared Christ to be of the same substance as the Father — homoousios. The Nicene Creed preserved the church's foundation against Arianism and shaped every orthodox confession that followed.

In 393 AD, the North African church convened a council at Hippo — the first time a church council formally approved a list of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament identical to those recognized today, opening the definitive process of canonical recognition in the Western church.

The councils held at Carthage in 397 AD and 419 AD successively confirmed the biblical canon established at the Council of Hippo, securing the authority of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as the consensus of the entire Western church — while demonstrating the historical posture of local churches refusing to submit to a single centralized authority.

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg's Castle Church, challenging the sale of indulgences and the theology behind it. The Reformation — and with it five centuries of Protestant Christianity — began on that day.

During the English Civil War, over 120 theologians gathered at Westminster Abbey for six years and produced the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, and the Directory for Public Worship — the most influential doctrinal standards of the Reformed Presbyterian tradition.

In the 1730s and 1740s, a wave of revival swept across the American colonies and Britain. Under the preaching of Edwards, Whitefield, and Wesley, the truth of the new birth was put back at the center of the church. It split denominations but shaped modern evangelicalism; it founded Princeton, Brown, and Dartmouth; and on the line of the Lord's recovery it received the torch from Luther and the Moravians — the recovery of salvation, sanctification, and open-air preaching.

The Plymouth Brethren began as a genuine recovery movement, but the separatist logic of 1848 drove it to fracture. This history has a direct lineage with Brother Watchman Nee's ecclesiology and leaves a pattern worth examining.

In the autumn of 1904, the fire of the Spirit fell on the chapels and coalfields of Wales. In less than a year about 100,000 came to the Lord — taverns went broke, courts ran out of cases, and the pit ponies had to be retrained because the miners no longer cursed. The fire jumped the ocean to India, Korea, and Azusa Street, seeding the twentieth century's global mission and revival movements — and it is the direct source of the spiritual line that flowed down to Brother Watchman Nee.