A Brief History of the Church: Two Thousand Years. Twenty-Eight Windows. One I AM.

Emperors have risen and disappeared. Empires have expanded and collapsed. Kingdoms have divided. Cities have burned and been rebuilt. Churches have grown powerful, become divided, undergone reform, experienced revival, and carried the gospel into lands their founders could scarcely have imagined.

And still the story continues.

A Brief History of the Church approaches this immense history through an unusual structure: twenty-eight windows of seventy prophetic years. Instead of confronting the reader with an uninterrupted mass of names, dates, councils, wars, and theological disputes, each window opens onto one portion of the Church's journey.

The story begins with Jesus Christ, the apostles, and the Great Commission. It follows the gospel into the Roman world, through persecution and imperial Christianity, beyond the collapse of Western Rome, through the medieval centuries and the Reformation, into global missions, revival movements, modern evangelicalism, and the worldwide Church.

But this book is not merely about what Christians accomplished.

Human beings make real choices, and history bears the consequences. Christians sometimes remained faithful and sometimes failed badly. Political powers sometimes persecuted the Church and sometimes protected it. Institutions were built, corrupted, reformed, divided, and rebuilt.

The pattern of human history is often the same: what is built is eventually torn down, and what is torn down is built again.

There is, however, Someone who does not pass away with the centuries.

Nero could not accompany the Church through two thousand years. Neither could Constantine, Augustine, Charlemagne, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, or any modern evangelist. Each entered history for a time and then departed.

Only the I AM could remain from beginning to end.

That is the larger journey this book invites the reader to see.

Empires rise and fall. The Church moves on. Because the I AM is still there.