November 14 in Church History

Civil war tore through the Congo in the 1960s, and many missionaries were caught in it. William McChesney of Worldwide Evangelization Crusade stood five foot two and weighed 110 pounds, and his colleagues called him Smiling Bill. He had malaria when rebels seized him on November 14, 1964. Ten days later he was beaten and thrown into a crowded cell, where Catholic priests gave him their clothes because he was shaking with fever. He was dragged out and killed the next day, aged twenty-eight. Before leaving home he had written a poem listing the comforts he wanted, ham and eggs and an ultramodern home, and answering them with the call to follow the lowly Man of Galilee.

The Russian prince Alexander Nevski died on this date in 1263. He beat the Swedes on the Neva in 1240 and the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242, but he dealt cautiously with the far stronger Tartars and saved his people by submission. He took monastic vows shortly before his death. His memory has often been put to political use, by Peter the Great, by Stalin in the Second World War, and in Eisenstein’s film.

Samuel Seabury’s consecration in 1784 mattered for a different reason. American Anglicans needed a bishop after independence, but consecration in England required an oath to the king. Seabury found three Scottish bishops, outside the establishment, who were willing to lay hands on him. The Episcopal Church in the United States traces its orders to that small service in an upstairs room in Aberdeen.