June 25, 1115: St. Bernard founds a monastery at Clairvaux, France, that would soon become the center of the Cistercian religious order. The order had been established 17 years earlier to restore Benedictine monasticism to a more primitive and austere state, but it is Bernard who is most closely associated with it. He founded 70 Cistercian monasteries, which in turn founded another 100 in his lifetime.

June 25, 1580: On the fiftieth anniversary of the Confession of Augsburg, Lutherans publish the Book of Concord, which contains all the official confessions of the Lutheran Church, in German.

June 25, 1744: The first Methodist conference convenes in London. Leaders set standards for doctrine, liturgy, and discipline, giving an organizational framework to the "Evangelical Revival" touched off by John Wesley and George Whitfield in 1739.

June 25, 1865: English missionary J. Hudson Taylor forms the China Inland Mission. Its missionaries would have no guaranteed salaries, nor could they appeal for funds; they would simply trust God to supply their needs. Furthermore, its missionaries would adopt Chinese dress and press the gospel into the China interior.

June 26, 1892: Pearl S. Buck, Presbyterian missionary to China and author of the bestselling The Good Earth (1931), is born.

June 26, 1932: Francis Schaeffer attends a Presbyterian church meeting where a Unitarian spoke out against the truth of the Bible and its teachings. A young lady named Edith had prepared a rebuttal, but before she could speak, Francis stood up and shredded the speaker's arguments. Edith was impressed, and after she read her remarks, Francis was impressed as well. He walked her home-the beginning of their lifelong relationship and ministry together.

June 27, 444: Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria and author of several writings on the dual natures of Christ, dies. He opposed Nestorius, who supposedly taught there were two separate persons in the Incarnate Christ, one divine and the other human. Historians doubt, however, whether or not Nestorius actually taught this. In any case, Cyril deposed Nestorius in 430.

June 27, 1933: James Mountain, English revivalist and hymnwriter ("Like a River Glorious"), dies.

June 30, 1315 (traditional date): Lay missionary, mystic, and philosopher Ramon Lull, who was persuaded by a vision to seek the conversion of the Muslims, is reportedly stoned to death in Bougie, North Africa.

June 30, 1881: Presbyterian preacher and African-American abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet is appointed minister to Liberia. The former slave shocked the abolitionist community in 1843 by calling for violent rebellion. "Rather die free-men than live to be slaves," he preached.

July 1, 1643: The Westminster Assembly convenes for the first time in the Henry VII Chapel of Westminster Abbey. Five years later it published the Westminster longer and shorter catechisms, which the Anglican church rejected, but the Presbyterians accepted.

July 1, 1899: Three traveling businessmen meet in a YMCA building and decide to form an organization to distribute Bibles. The Christian Commercial Men's Association of America, later renamed the Gideons, placed their first Bibles in a hotel nine years later.