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The Army Appears in the Heavens — Gustave Doré (1866), public domain

Church History

The Great Cloud of Witnesses

Hebrews 11 names the witnesses who ran before the cross. The line did not stop there: this section walks through the two thousand years since.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off every encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with endurance the race set out for us.”

Summary

The church has kept going for two thousand years. It has been hunted, split, and wrong at times, and the record of all of it was written down. This section walks that record era by era and says where the evidence is thin.

  • The line runs from the apostles to this morning. No century is missing.
  • Ten eras divide the years. The divisions are this site's own, not fixed history.
  • 16 outpourings have their own pages, from Hezekiah to Azusa Street.
  • 358 witnesses hang on 8 walls, grouped by what God used them to do.
  • Every page names its sources and says where historians still argue.

Walk the line: ten eras, one race

  1. 1The Apostolic AgeThis is the church's first breath. The men and women who had walked with Jesus took His message out of Jerusalem, and within one lifetime it reached the capital of the world.to AD 100
  2. 2The Martyrs' ChurchFor two hundred years, being a Christian could cost you your life. This is the era when the church had no legal standing, no power, and no protection, and, for most of it, no building of its own. It grew anyway.AD 100–313
  3. 3The Fathers & the CreedsThe persecution stopped and the arguments started. In these three centuries the church put into careful words who Jesus is, and recognized which books were Scripture.AD 313–600
  4. 4The Long MiddleNine hundred years, and the usual summary is "the dark ages." It is not that simple. The institution grew corrupt in places, and at the same time monks copied Scripture by hand, missionaries walked into pagan Europe, and God kept a lamp burning.AD 600–1500
  5. 5The ReformationOne monk's conscience, one printing press, and one open Bible. In a single century Scripture went from a chained Latin book to something a farmhand could read in his own language.1500–1600
  6. 6The Puritans & PietistsThe Reformation had opened the Bible. Now came the harder question: has it opened you? This is the century of the examined heart, the family altar, and the prayer meeting that would not quit.1600–1730
  7. 7The Great AwakeningsGod poured out His Spirit on two nations at once. Whole towns stopped talking about anything else, and the preaching moved out of the buildings and into the fields.1730–1800
  8. 8The Missionary CenturyAwakened people looked at a map and could not stay home. In a hundred and twenty years the gospel was carried, at enormous cost, to India, China, Africa, and the islands.1790–1910
  9. 9The Revival StreamsAt the opening of the twentieth century God moved again, in Welsh mining villages, in a shabby Los Angeles building, in Korea and India, and the church rediscovered the power of Pentecost.1900–1950
  10. 10The Church Under Fire & Into All the WorldTwo counts of the twentieth century's Christian dead are in circulation and they are built differently, so the page gives both. David Barrett and Todd Johnson put the figure near forty-five million in the World Christian Encyclopedia, first edition 1982 and second edition 2001. They counted every believer whose life was cut short by human hostility. That takes in whole populations killed in wars and famines where faith was one cause among several. Thomas Schirrmacher, working for the International Institute for Religious Freedom, puts the yearly figure near seven to eight thousand, counting only deaths documented case by case as killings for confessing Christ. Barrett and Johnson's own Center for the Study of Global Christianity revised the annual rate down in the third edition of 2019. The wide number and the narrow number measure two different things, and even the narrow one is large. The same century saw the church grow faster than it ever had. Both are true of the same hundred years.1930–today

The gallery walls: the cloud hung by calling

358 witnesses on the wall; a figure may hang in more than one gallery.

The Fathers

209

The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.

The Martyrs

38

The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.

The Reformers

16

The men who put the Bible back into the people's hands and the church back under it.

The Puritans & Pietists

19

The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you.

The Awakeners

31

The preachers of the Great Awakenings, fields for pulpits, nations for parishes.

The Missionaries

35

The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home.

The Revivalists

32

The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed.

The Hymn Writers

31

The poets who taught the church to sing what it believes.

Portraits: Wikimedia Commons and resident public-domain plates: full attribution on every witness page.

The History of Revivals

16 outpourings

From Hezekiah’s reopened temple to Wales and Azusa Street: what marked each outpouring while it burned, and what was left standing afterward. The pattern is older than Pentecost.

Enter the room →

The Hall of Faith

12 stops

Hebrews 11: the witnesses who ran before: Abel to the unnamed martyrs. The door into everything here.

The Voices

95 profiles

The teachers and commentators this site quotes: many of them witnesses in these very eras, from the fathers to the revivalists.

The Spread Maps

2 plates

Where the faith went: the apostles’ world on Scott’s 1800 engraving, and the church’s growth era by era on Shepherd’s atlas plate.