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All Kinds of Christians 2
All things bright and beautiful!

All Kinds of Christians 2

Like its companion Quiz, this All Kinds of Christians quiz aims to broaden your awareness of the great diversity of Christian people down the ages. Stand by for some more surprises!

1 .
John Wesley (the founder of Methodism in the mid-18th century) was an indefatigable travelling missionary: according to reasonably reliable statistics, which of these would most accurately represent his average workload over half a century of ministry?
Riding 100 miles (~150km) per week and preaching two or three times per day
Riding 3,000 miles (~5,000 km) per year and preaching 10 or 12 sermons per week
Riding 200 miles (~ 300km) per month and preaching 10 times per week
Riding 1,000 miles (~ 1,500km), and preaching 500 sermons, a year
The given statistics are 250,000 miles (~ 400,000km; the equivalent of once round the world every five years, but ten times over altogether in the 50 years) and 'over 40,000 sermons'.
Among very much else, Wesley (perhaps tellingly) appears to have been the coiner of the phrase about people 'agreeing to disagree'!
2 .
Chapter 20 of the Acts of the Apostles reports a rather unusual case in which St Paul, during his final night at Troas, brings back to life a young man called Eutychus who has unexpectedly died.
How had his death come about?
Eutychus was involved in an accident with a cart or chariot
He had drowned in the harbour
He had fallen into the street from the windowsill of a crowded top-floor meeting room, after dropping asleep momentarily during a long preaching session by Paul
He had been poisoned by a creature in the hold of a cargo ship
A splendid story, and a reminder of the perils of late-night prayer meetings, however worthy the circumstances!
3 .
The composer Handel had already set a famous version of the story of Saul (the Old Testament king; from a libretto by Charles Jennens, who later proposed Messiah); but St Paul, as in our immediately previous Question, had his life story set to music by a later Anglo-German composer with British royal patronage. St Paul had begun his life as a Jew (Saul of Tarsus) and became, of course, one of the most famous early (or ever) Christian converts; the father of the composer in question had actively renounced Judaism in favour of Christianity. Who was he?
Richard Wagner
Felix Mendelssohn
Thomas Linley
Ignaz Moscheles
Abraham Mendelssohn had changed faiths, partly perhaps for political reasons at around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The background is readably explained on the Wikipedia page for Felix Mendelssohn.
Meanwhile Wagner (Answer 1) was famously anti-Semitic in his outlook, and this also found its way into his music and mythology, but he never set any oratorio texts so far as we know.
4 .
Also in the Acts of the Apostles is the story of St Peter's vision at Caesarea, in which he believed God was telling him that The Way (Christianity as we now know it; he wouldn't yet have recognised that term) should be open to all people, whether or not they happened already to be Jewish first. In what form did this vision appear to Peter?
A big party at which people of all races, genders and ages were mixing entirely freely
A large cloth, like a sail, descending from the sky and containing a complete mixture of ritually 'clean' and 'unclean' creatures
A garden full of many fruits, flowers, herbs and vegetables
A lion lying down with a lamb
Peter's vision is reported as being like Answer 2 (bearing in mind that Peter had formerly been a fisherman, this image makes better sense than might at first glance appear). Answer 4 is an out-of-context quotation from one of the Old Testament prophets.
5 .
The Letter of James (in the New Testament) warns believers about, and against, potential lack of self-control with respect to one particular part of the body. He writes:
'A bit in the mouth of a horse can turn the whole animal; a small rudder can turn a ship wherever the pilot wants it to go ... All kinds of animals have been tamed by humankind, yet none of us can ever tame the ( - ) : it is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.'
To which part of the body is he referring?
The heart
The tongue
The loins / genitals / (male) private parts
The hand
A most interesting and persuasive passage from Chapter 3 of James' letter.
6 .
In the early 15th century, this French girl saw blessed visions and was emboldened to fight (cross-dressed) as a soldier in the wars against English rule, in which she was notably successful on a number of occasions. Eventually, though, she was captured, put through a captors' trial and sentenced to be burned at the stake ~ and all, we believe, before she had probably turned 20 years of age. She is now venerated as a national saint. Who was she?
St Bernadette
St Therese of Lisieux
St Joan of Arc
St Marianne
Her young and cause-driven life encompassed more drama and adventure than most of us would rightly expect in four times the span.
7 .
Revd William Archibald Spooner was a most unusual man. Consider the following details:

He was Warden of New College, Oxford, for over 20 years (1903-24), and as such, the portrait of this little albino man hangs to this day in the college dining hall.

He was the first famous person to suffer from the habit of 'spoonerism' (duly named after him) in his speech: typically an articulatory bungle in which two sounds are pronounced in each other's place, usually with a humorous result, e.g. 'You have hissed all my mystery lectures' (instead of 'missed / history').

These slips, even in an eminent brain, were not confined to pronunciation. There is a story of Spooner seeing his old mother off on a train from Oxford station, where he absent-mindedly kissed the porter goodbye and gave his mother a shilling for having carried the luggage; on another occasion, just after the Great War, he allegedly spotted a familiar face among the people on an Oxford street and said, 'Ah, yes, now, Carruthers: remind me, was it you or your brother that died in the trenches?'.

On the other hand, Spooner was firmly convinced that all members of the College who fought and fell should be commemorated on the wall of the Chapel. A separate memorial was installed for three German New College men who 'having entered into our heritage, returned to fight for their own country'; and letters of strong objection were sent to The Times by critics of such a gesture.
Only one of these paragraphs contains any truth at all
No more than half of the above is true
All but one of the paragraphs is essentially factual
Everything in the article is substantially true
The third section is less well attested than the others; there are many, probably slightly too clever and comical 'Spoonerisms' that he probably never uttered, though one of the most famous attributions is quite likely true, when he mis-announced the first line of the chapel hymn Conquering Kings as 'Kinkering Congs'. The non-linguistic lapses (or less essentially linguistic ones) may well be genuine, including the momentary confusion about the dead soldier. Our final piece about the memorial ~ with its lettering carved by Eric Gill, no less ~ is splendidly and movingly true, and a great tribute to Spooner's lateral thinking and breadth of spirit.
On balance, a verdict of 'three-quarters true' is probably the fairest outcome here!
8 .
In an age when British children were automatically expected to go at least weekly to church (at greater length and discomfort than today), much store was set on putting the Christian stories and values into readily memorable verse for their use, usually in the form of 'children's hymns' ~ which (though of their period) are, in the best cases, clearly-expressed and enduring models of doctrine. Many a young Christian then and since has grown up with such items as the following, well in the foreground of their formative aural influences. One of these is attributed to the wrong author: which one?
'It is a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be,
That God's own Son should come from Heaven and die to save a child like me'
('The Children's' Bishop Waltham How)
'All things bright and beautiful ... The Lord God made them all'
(Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander)
' ( ... ) With the poor and mean and lowly
Lived on earth our Saviour holy ( ... )
For He is our childhood's pattern ... '
(Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander; from Once in royal David's city)
'There is a green hill far away, outside a city wall,
'Where our dear Lord was crucified, who died to save us all.'
(John Ellerton)
Answer 4 is also by Mrs Alexander, in her Hymns for Little Children, which apparently ran just one short of 70 editions or printings between its first issue in 1848 and the turn of the following century. But she still didn't write absolutely every hymn that some of us may treasure from childhood!
9 .
Harry Webb was born in India in 1940 and came in on the emerging British rock scene between Elvis Presley (to whom he was compared) and the Beatles (by whose John Lennon he was hailed as the first worthwhile British [pop/rock] musician). Over more than 60 years in the public eye and ear, he has trodden a careful Christian path through a field all too easily associated with 'sins of worldly excess'.
By what performing name is he better known?
Graham Kendrick
Adrian Snell
(Sir) Cliff Richard
Larry Norman
Yes, this is Cliff as you might not have initially recognised him: he of Summer Holiday, the Eurovision Congratulations, of the community-singing on wet Wimbledon days and of the Millennium Prayer. An early agent or mentor suggested the forename 'Cliff' as an analogue for 'rock', and 'Richard' as a tribute to Little Richard. Cliff also worked on mission events with Billy Graham (see All Kinds of Christians Quiz 1).
10 .
Even well-intentioned, fallible Christians occasionally make mistakes ... 'to err is human; to forgive, divine'. There is a rather lovely consolatory saying from an old bishop, for circumstances where someone has made an unhelpful and probably innocent error of judgement:
'The Kingdom of Heaven won't get built without ... ' (?)
... the occasional donkey braying when it should be praying'
... the odd brick getting dropped'
... someone napping on the job'
... a lost log here and there'
What a splendid motto! (Not that any of us should claim it as an excuse ...)

 

Author:  Ian Miles

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