Well, welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. On this episode, we are making our tour around to

unlikely places where the reformation occurred. Last week we were in Seville, Spain. And now we are heading to the east and north. We are in

Turku Finland. This is the story of Michael Agrikala. He was born in 1507. He died in 1557. And of course that was a name he took when he became a student, his Latin name.

Agrikala is a farmer.

So we're talking about Michael the farmer

from Turku, Finland.

In 1536, agrickula was sent to study at Vittenberg.

He had shown much promise as a student, was very capable at the languages and learning,

and was ordained as a priest in making his way up the ranks and so it was decided

that he would go to Vittenberg and their study under Martin Luther and Philip

Melanchthon. In 1539 he received his MA from Vittenberg. He got quite an education as you can

imagine and so he left Vittenberg with two letters of endorsements, one from Martin Luther and one from Philip Melanchthon, and he headed home to Finland.

He immediately began to teach, to preach, and to write the ideas of the Reformation.

In 1543 he published his first book, an ABC book for kids.

Luther had done a similar thing in German.

And so, Agrickula was doing this now for Finnish kids.

In 1545, he published a prayer book.

But his main work that brought the reformation to Finland was published in 1548,

and this is The New Testament in the Finnish language. He initially

tried for years in vain to get the King of Sweden to finance it and we need to

remember that at this time in Finland's

history the Swedish king rolled over the Finnish people and so he tried to get the

...