Church History resources

One great tragedy of our Sunday School set up we don’t know our history.  We can tell you all about King David, and Paul’s miracles, but do you know anything the Lollards or John Calvin?  We know the famous names from our history, but we don’t know why they are important.

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Why study church history?

As a culture, Americans are divorced from their history, we are a culture of now, and we don’t understand how we came to be who we are now.  To understand our current events we need to understand our history, that is why I spend so much time with my kids teaching them homeschool history.  History explains how we got to today.  Church history explains why Baptists believe certain things, and why England has its’ own church, but none of the other countries have their own church.

But until recently it’s been difficult to find great church history resources.  We had a few random books or stories people would tell, but that was it.  In the last few years, there has been a virtual Renaissance of amazing materials to use with our kids.  At first, I had this insane idea of sharing every single church history resource I could find, and then I realized, that is stupid.  I find those lists overwhelming at times, and instead, I’ll focus on the ones I actually use and who I would use them for.

My favorite church history resources and why I like them

Because I like to have some sort of order to what I share, I’m ordering this by age ranges it would work for.  Starting with the youngest kids.

Torchlighters DVDs
– these feature famous figures from church history from the Roman empire up to modern times.  Each video is about 45 minutes long, and you can find several of them on Amazon streaming and maybe a few on Netflix.  I’ve got a few of them I found at a homeschool convention, and these are great for your more mature preschoolers and early elementary (though your upper elementary kids will enjoy them).

My one caveat, they do vastly simplify materials to fit it into the format and sometimes in the attempt to tell the story leave out important details.

Courage and Conviction– great church history book series, my kids have been reading the chapters slowly this year, and I love how simply and straight forward the books are (this is one of the suggested resources for Cobblestone Path, see below).  I love this series for upper elementary.  This is linked to the third book in the series, the one we are currently reading.

My one dislike is they don’t always follow through with the story to get all of the cool things that person has done.

C.S. Lewis: Master Storyteller– The most recent time I shared this post I asked for any I had missed, and this series was brought up. I’d totally forgotten about it, because at the time I wrote it, the books were just a bit over my kids’ reading level. This is a solid series about a 5th grade and higher reading level.

Cobblestone path– I reviewed Cobblestone Path earlier, and this is an in-depth church history notebooking pages.  You will need a few more books to get going, but it’s super in-depth and amazingly well done.  Our next time through the history cycle I plan on mixing these in with my normal notebooking pages from the Mystery of History 2*.  This can be fairly lengthy so I’d suggest this for middle school and older.

Philosophy of the Western World– this is not specific to church history, but can also explore the context specific Christian theology rose up in. This is a high school course.

The Christians*- I’m currently reading this book series, and I would recommend them for high school or a very mature middle school book.  These are coffee table books and quite heavy, but they are meticulous in covering every detail of church history.  Thanks to this series I can give you a fairly good description of what Aryanism is, and how it relates to several modern day heresies.  I quite like the series.  I need to go back to reading them and finish getting the last few I don’t have.  I’ve linked to the first book in the series.

Looking for some more Church history resources?

I’ve got a Pinterest board on church history, with links to more resources and specific activities on church history.

Specific church history lessons

Since I’m so interested in history, I’ve got a few church history lessons on here:

• Saint Francis of Assissi
• Forerunners to the Protestant Reformation
• Fruit of the Spirit lesson (heroes of the faith)
• 10 Steps from the Protestant Reformation to the American Revolution
• Saint Boniface

“Church history, Cottered” by TheRevSteve is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

“St Georges Church history to 1984 [7]” by Gawler History is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.