Church History: Not Just for Historians

Back again with "Thoughts on a Blog Thursday". This time we've got a post from a week or two ago saved in my RSS reader that I stumbled upon.

It's an encouraging post from Tim Challies regarding church history. Challies lists seven reasons why its important that we study church history:

1. God Tells Us To
2. To Understand Today
3. To Understand Tomorrow
4. To Understand Providence
5. To Understand Error
6. To Understand People
7. To Understand Endurance

It's very interesting to me how little we know about the church throughout history sometimes. I certainly don't know very much after Acts, aside from the Reformation and some stuff about the Puritans. Maybe its because history is branded as such a boring subject, but Challies makes some excellent points regarding how applicable, useful and relevant church history can be. This is definitely an area that I want to inject into my reading at points (I'd written a bit more about this here).

Let's expand our reading to take in more church history. I know none of us will probably be curling up in our favorite chair to break open some huge academic tome, but there are plenty of more managable resources available today (The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World by Stephen Nichols is a great example of a book that is informative while remaining engaging). Ask around, check in the bookstore or check out good publishers like Crossway. Find some way to learn a bit more about the church (even reading on the web). It will help you to analyze current issues in our culture today as well as encouraging you with God's faithfulness to his people throughout the ages.

HT: Tim Challies