What if your Christian story began earlier than you thought?
You may know where you worship today.
You may know what your parents believed.
You may even know the church your grandparents attended.
But have you ever kept going backward?
Not ten years.
Not a hundred.
Five hundred years. A thousand years. Fifteen hundred years.
All the way back toward the Apostles.
Today Christianity appears as Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, Evangelical, non-denominational and many other communities.
But Christianity did not begin with this landscape.
So an extraordinarily simple question can open an extraordinary journey:
What did Christians believe before today's denominations existed?
This Is Not an Attack on Your Christianity
Perhaps someone taught you to love Jesus.
Someone placed a Bible in your hands.
Someone prayed with you.
A pastor helped your family through suffering.
A congregation showed you Christian friendship.
Those gifts should not be mocked.
This journey asks something different:
How far back does the Christianity you inherited go?
Start Walking Backward
Move backward through the twentieth century.
Some familiar Christian movements disappear.
Continue through the nineteenth century.
More disappear.
The eighteenth.
The seventeenth.
Then the sixteenth.
You eventually reach the Protestant Reformation.
Keep going.
The Reformation disappears.
Christianity does not.
Keep going toward AD 1000.
The modern denominational names disappear.
But Christians are still worshiping, baptizing, celebrating the Eucharist, appointing ministers, defending doctrine and asking what the Apostles handed down.
Now the investigation becomes fascinating.
One Rule for the Journey
Do not begin with:
Which church feels most familiar to me?
Begin with:
What is true --- and how can I know?
We will examine Scripture, history and early Christian witnesses.
We will also acknowledge disagreements, complexity, Eastern Christianity, failures within Catholic history and genuine areas of Christian common ground.
There is no need to manipulate history.
If Catholicism's claim is true, history should be able to withstand examination.
Your First Question
Before traveling 2,000 years backward, locate yourself on the timeline.
When did the Christian tradition you know begin?