Study track

Two Thousand Years in Twelve Steps

From twelve frightened men to a global church.

Who this is for

Anyone who has never been taught church history and suspects they should have been.

What you will be able to do

You will know how the church spread, what the councils decided, what happened in the thousand years most Protestants skip, what the Reformation recovered, what the revivals and the missionary century did, and why the church today is mostly African, Asian and Latin American.

12 stepsabout 2h 18m of reading

1
ApostlesApostle11 min
Peter — from fisherman to the rock of the church
His failure and restoration, his ministry in Rome, his death under Nero, and what the historical record adds beyond the book of Acts.
2
ApostlesApostle12 min
Paul — the most travelled missionary in history
From persecutor to apostle: the Damascus road, three missionary journeys, thirteen letters, the shipwrecks and floggings, and his execution in Rome.
3
ApostlesApostle8 min
The Twelve — what happened to each of the apostles
A source-by-source account of where each of the twelve went and how each died, distinguishing what is well attested from what is late tradition.
4
HistoryHistoryIntermediate12 min
How Christianity spread across the Roman Empire
From twelve frightened men to the official faith of the empire in three centuries — the roads, the martyrs, the plagues, the strategy and the emperors that made it happen.
5
HistoryHistoryAdvanced9 min
The councils and creeds — how the church defined orthodoxy
What Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon actually decided, why the arguments mattered, and what the creeds are for.
6
HistoryHistoryIntermediate10 min
The African and Asian church — Christianity before the missionaries
Ethiopia, Egypt, Nubia, Persia, India and China had established churches centuries before most of Europe. The strongest answer to "Christianity is the white man's religion".
7
HistoryHistoryIntermediate15 min
The medieval church — the thousand years Protestants skip
Between the last great council and the Ninety-Five Theses lie a thousand years that most Protestants could not summarise in a sentence. Monasteries, missions, schism, crusade, scholasticism, corruption and the reformers before the Reformation.
8
HistoryHistoryIntermediate10 min
The Reformation — what actually happened and why
The abuses, the doctrinal recovery, the five solas, the printing press, and the honest reckoning with what the Reformation cost as well as what it gained.
9
HistoryHistoryIntermediate12 min
The Great Awakenings — revival, and what it changed
Pietism, the Evangelical Revival, Edwards and Wesley and Whitefield, the camp meetings, and the movements that came out of them — abolition, Sunday schools, Bible societies. Including the manipulation and the slaveholding.
10
HistoryHistoryIntermediate13 min
The missionary movement — and the colonial entanglement
Carey, Judson, Taylor, Slessor, Moon and the century that took the gospel to most of the world — travelling on the same ships as empire. What the missionaries got wrong, what they got right, and why the churches they planted outgrew them.
11
HistoryHistoryIntermediate14 min
The twentieth century — martyrdom, and the move south
Azusa Street, the Confessing Church, the gulag, the expulsion from China, Lausanne 1974, and the largest geographical shift in Christian history — from a European faith to an African, Asian and Latin American one, inside a single lifetime.
12
TranslationsTranslationIntermediate12 min
From the Septuagint to the KJV — the story of Bible translation
How the Bible travelled from Jerusalem to Alexandria to Rome to England, the theological battles fought over it, and the people who died to make it available.

Progress is tracked on this device only — nothing is sent anywhere and no account is needed. An article counts as read once you reach the end of it.