Enjoyable and Effective Quizzes for Learning and Quick Revision
Because they Believed 1


Because they Believed 1

This Quiz, Because they Believed, aims to (re-) introduce you to the lives of some great and remarkable Christians, who achieved surprising things because of their faith.

Mother Teresa was a 20th-century Albanian Catholic nun who exercised her ministry to the street people of which city?
Calcutta (Kolkata)
New Delhi
Her name is indelibly associated with Calcutta.
The Samaritans (the international telephone and drop-in befriending organisation, offering anonymous help for people who feel alone in difficult life circumstances) was founded in London in 1952, and named after the 'Good Samaritan' in Jesus' famous parable, who crossed the ethnic divide to help a fellow human being in distress.
What was the name of the clergyman who founded the organisation?
Revd David Shepherd
Archbishop Cosmo Lang
Revd Chad Varah
Revd E J H Nash
This was Chad Varah, after he had read in a newspaper about a lonely young girl who had taken her own life (under the mistaken impression that the onset of her first menstrual period was a symptom of STD; a horrifying pre-echo of the 1980s government information slogan, encouraging people not to 'die of ignorance' when AIDS suddenly became a widespread problem). Varah realised that nobody should be alone and ignorant on such a scale, if there were constructive alternatives; so his first telephone line was set up in the crypt of St Martin-in-the Fields Church, just round the corner from Trafalgar Square, a church with a strong, valued and ongoing ministry to those on the 'under-side' of London life.
What shameful and sinful practice was William Wilberforce instrumental in abolishing in Britain, at around the same time as the French Revolution was taking place?
The sending of (what would now be) primary-school-age children up chimneys and down coal-mines to work
The denial of a fair trial to women on charges of witchcraft or as alleged victims of rape
The 'mercy killing' of children born with mental or physical impairment
It might or might not be good to abolish all these other things, but Wilberforce's target was slavery. The particular slavery of uneducated children in the earlier phases of the Industrial Revolution would be addressed later by the Victorians.
Back in the bad old early days of the Roman Empire (so the story goes), in an age where a runaway slave could be punished for the offence of 'stealing themself' from their rightful owner, such a Christian slave named Androcles fled from his master. While on the run he sheltered overnight in a cave, which he was alarmed to find he was sharing with a lion. The lion had a thorn in its paw, and, far from attacking him, approached Androcles hoping he could help pull out the thorn using his more delicate hands, then clean and dress the wound. Androcles did this and in due course they went their ways. He was later captured and sent to the Coliseum (Rome's major entertainment stadium) to be put to death as part of a public spectacle, as was also an accepted custom in those days. What happened next?
He was killed in unarmed combat against a trained gladiator
Androcles was killed by lions very like the one he had befriended
There was a 'round' of 'Christians versus wild animals', on the assumption that the defenceless Christians would be killed and devoured in front of the audience. But the lion facing Androcles was his old friend, recognised him and defended him from all the other animals, to the surprise and delight of the audience
The sky went dark (a solar eclipse) and the Romans thought this was a sign of their gods' anger, so they fled out of the auditorium and Androcles never had to face the challenge
He wrote and performed much music every week, including some of the greatest early masterpiece oratorios and cantatas and a vast rich output of church organ music. Such was his loving attention to Scriptural detail that when setting a passage of the Last Supper in one of his Passions, he uses exactly 11 choral 'entries' at the point where the Disciples ask 'Is it I [who am going to betray You]?'. Yet his sublime, moving and craftsmanly works remained unknown beyond his time and region until a revival over 150 years after his death. Who was he?
Georg Frideric Handel
Johann Sebastian Bach
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Bach was a truly remarkable man and a devout Lutheran (Protestant) through and through. The detailed reference here is to the St Matthew Passion (see Mt.26:22), but we could have used scores of others!
John Newton, author of that widely-loved hymn Amazing Grace, spent the prime years of his life as ...
... a pirate
... a slave-ship captain
... an advertising agent
... a blacksmith
There is a very readable book under the title Amazing Grace which tells his life's story.
Many of Britain's famous family firms of chocolatiers were founded by active members of which religious organisation?
Salvation Army
The Religious Society of Friends (aka the 'Quakers')
Fry, Cadbury and Rowntree (see old films, and thos evocative 'permanent' enamel advertisements at such heritage sites as preserved steam railway stations) were all Quaker families.
Which of the following contains a substantial UNTRUTH about the life of William T Stead?
He was a pacifist, spiritualist and ardent supporter of the 'artificial' international language Esperanto
He became the youngest newspaper editor in Britain at the age of 20
An intentionally sensational, but perhaps timely report he wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette, on the sexual exploitation of London children, sold so many copies that the printers had to buy up more blank paper from rival publications in order to extend their run to meet the demand
He foresaw, in print, on two separate occasions, circumstances disturbingly similar to those in which he would die on the Titanic
Stead achieved all of these things, but we were out by 10% on his age; he was 22 (though still the youngest at this rank in his profession) when he held his first Editorship.
Martin Luther King was a pastor within which branch of the church?
Roman Catholic
He was a 'southern Baptist' (consider his ethnicity, and that his ministry was in Alabama and the southern states in general, below the 'Dixie' line).
Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a practical priest and theologian who devoted himself to work against both the influence of secularism ('the lure of worldly goods', particularly in the relative prosperity boom between the World Wars) and the Nazi regime, of whose policies and horrors he was an unwavering critic. The Nazi system observed, caught up with him and put him to death by hanging at Flossenburg concentration camp ... just how long before Germany surrendered at the end of the War?
One month
One week
One day
One hour
He died (reportedly, very peacefully and prayerfully) on 9 April 1945; Germany formally surrendered 4 weeks later, on 7 May. It perhaps bears passing comparison that the teenage Jewish diarist Anne Frank had died in early March, just two months shy of the surrender.


Author:  Ian Miles

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