Clear, interesting, applicable Christian history

On Sunday we began a new adult Sunday-morning course called ‘Christian history made easy.’ The course is based on an excellent book by Timothy Paul Jones, called Christian History Made Easy. You can order the 2009 updated version of the book for about ten dollars on Amazon by clicking here. You don’t need to read the book to be part of this course – I won’t assume that anyone has read the book. However, you’ll benefit most if you buy and read the book. It is excellent.

In our first session of the course I laid out five reasons why it is important to study Christian history:

1. Christian history is our story. Christian history shapes how we read the Bible, how we worship, what we believe, even when we don’t realize we’re being shaped by those who have come before us. Knowing our history helps us to understand ourselves more clearly, just as learning something about your own family history can suddenly make sense of how your father or mother acted, or of how you act.

2. Christian history provides us with amazing examples to emulate and can make us hunger for God in fresh and powerful ways. As an example of this, I mentioned the huge effect of David Brainerd’s diary on modern Christian missions and specifically on Henry Martyn, the young English missionary to India. I could have multiplied examples because I love Christian biographies and find them soul-sustaining.

3. Christian history provides us with examples of terrible mistakes to avoid and wrong doctrine to be wary of. I’m thinking here, for instance, of the capitulation of the Christian church in Nazi Germany. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others stood over against this capitulation with courage and prophetic clarity. I’m also thinking of bad doctrine that has already been tried and is now being introduced again – for instance, the recent wrong teaching in some evangelical circles that God does not know the future. This is old error, not new error.

4. Christian history provides great grounds for praising God. The logic here is simple: the more we know about what God has done, the more we can praise God for. The example I used was the terrible but triumphant experience of the Cambodian church in the last forty years. In the genocide of 1975-79 under Pol Pot, ninety percent of the Christian church was killed. Story of story of remarkable courage and Christian conviction is available for us to read. God sustained his church, and as of 1999 there were more than 20,000 Cambodian believers in the Cambodian church.

5. Christian history enlarges our understanding of what God has done and is doing – therefore, it shapes our understanding of God himself. I’m thinking here particularly of the remarkable fact that 62% of the world’s two billion Christians now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Philip Jenkins estimates that by 2050 only one-fifth of the world’s three billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. This shift of the Christian center of gravity to the global south is hugely significant and God, as the sovereign ruler of history, is in control of these events. What does this shift tell us about God and his purposes? This is a question worth pondering.

It is not too late to join this course. Come on Sunday at 9am and engage with your own family history – the history of the church.

Posted by Stephen Witmer on Sep 21, 10:52 AM