Eric Liddell, the Olympic athlete featured in the film Chariots of Fire, makes his evangelistic debut - April 6

1249 - Muslims take King Louis IX of France prisoner during the seventh crusade, which was supposed to overcome the Muslim political center in Egypt. After showing bravery in the face of torture, he was allowed to buy his freedom for a huge sum in gold – and the city of Damietta.

1528 - Albrecht Durer, German painter, engraver, and designer of woodcuts, dies. Famous for his religious scenes, he was so influenced by Luther (whom he called "the great Christian man who has helped me out of great anxieties") that he converted to Protestantism. His most popular work is "Praying Hands.

1593 - Hanging in London of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, non-conformists who denied that the Church of England had biblical authority.

1743 - Death at Lincoln Inn, London, of lawyer William Melmoth. He had authored the popular tract “The Great Importance of a Religious Life Consider’d” (1711), in which he argued that we should live lives of faith because belief offers us the greatest prospect of happiness.

1801 - The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church recognizes the new African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Blacks who were denied membership and recognition within white Methodist churches, particularly in Philadelphia and New York, formed the original AME.

1828 - Death in Hancock, Vermont, of Jeremiah Ingalls, who had composed and published hymn tunes, including NORTHFIELD (“O, for a Thousand Tongues to Sing”) which he had supposedly written while waiting for a meal in an inn at Northfield.

1894 - Death in Denver, Colorado, of William M. Thomson, a missionary veteran of work in Syria and author of The Land and the Book which illustrated the Bible with photographs of the Middle East. The work enjoyed popularity in the United States and in Britain, where it sold more copies than any other American publication except Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

1932 - Eric Liddell, the Olympic athlete featured in the film Chariots of Fire, makes his evangelistic debut by sharing his testimony to a group of men in Armadale, Scotland. Liddell later returned to the mission field in China, where he was born, and ministered in an internment camp following the Japanese invasion. He died in 1945 from a massive brain tumor.

1956 - Death of Daniel Gee Ching Wu, an Episcopal priest who had worked among the Chinese of San Francisco.

1966 - Death in Zürich of influential Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, who had reaffirmed the tenets of the Protestant Reformed tradition in 20th-century terms, while seeking ground for dialog with moderns holding theories of evolution, idealism, liberalism, and scientism. 

1994 - An aircraft bearing Rwanda's dictatorial President Juvenal Habyarimana is shot down. The nation's majority ethnic group, the Hutus, used the event as an excuse to massacre minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, killing eight hundred thousand in three months. A Tutsu rebellion will kill many Hutus and conquer most of Rwanda by mid-July 1994, establishing a Tutsu-dominated government. Ironically, both ethnic groups subscribe at least nominally to Christianity and some Christian leaders will support and some oppose the genocide and retaliation.

– Sources: Christian History Institute, christianitytoday.com