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Evangelical Christians like myself, especially in modern times, have gained a reputation for being notoriously detached from the wider history of Christianity — whether that be the history of evangelicalism as a movement or of the church as a whole.

Pleasingly, there are some important efforts underway to correct this blind spot.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age (Zondervan, 2024) calls Christians of all stripes and traditions to push back against what she calls “ahistoricism” and see ourselves as part of a much bigger story.

Similarly, Gavin Ortlund’s YouTube ministry “Truth United”, and his book Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals: Why We Need Our Past to Have a Future (Crossway, 2019) offer a blueprint for how retrieval can enrich the evangelical movement and Protestant theological discourse more broadly.

Organisations like the American Center for Baptist Renewal explicitly list historical and theological “retrieval” and the promotion of “Baptist catholicity” as among their key aims.

Yet for the everyday Christian, a useful personal starting point in this project of historical retrieval is simply picking a good short history of the church.

It doesn’t need to be anything super complex, long, or academic. A simple, well-written survey of Christian history is a great way to deepen your understanding of the various expressions of Christianity, not only geographically, but throughout time. It is also a fantastic way to discover areas of church history — particularly significant events, traditions or movements, or Christian figures — that pique your interest, opening the door for further reading and research.

Here are two of my recommendations.

David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2,000 Years of the Christian Faith

I just completed David Bentley Hart’s ambitiously-named The Story of Christianity (Quercus, 2013). Don’t let Hart’s extremely high-level work in other areas (he can be pretty difficult at times) put you off this little book — The Story of Christianity is genuinely accessible for any thoughtful layperson.

Hart is one of the most interesting Christian thinkers and writers around today. He is a philosopher, theologian, essayist, fiction author, and a scholar of religion, and has written some twenty-four books on everything from theology and church history to philosophy of mind (I am currently reading his magisterial defence of the pre-modern, non-mechanistic conception of reality, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life).

In The Story of Christianity, however, his emphasis is on the 2,000 years following Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, but he fittingly begins with a brief overview of Christianity’s Jewish origins and nature of Jesus’s ministry as the Jewish Messiah and an itinerant rabbi.

The book has very short chapters, which are broken up into even shorter topical sections. While this means that its treatment of any given figure, event, or movement is necessarily fleeting, brevity does have its upside. Rather than investing in one of the countless entire volumes dedicated to, say, the Spanish inquisition or the Carolingian Renaissance, you get a page and half summary of each — enough space to touch on the event’s significance and highlight several important figures.

One of Hart’s strengths is that he has previously done very detailed work in apologetics — see, for example, his spectacular rebuttal to the “new atheists”, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2009). Accordingly, The Story of Christianity has a strong theme of clearing up common misunderstandings and misrepresentations about Christian history, misunderstandings that frequently offer ammunition to aggressive anti-Christians to attack Christianity.

John Dickson, Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History

Another single-volume history of Christianity worth adding to your library is by Australian historian John Dickson: Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History.

Dickson is an Aussie Anglican minister, who currently holds the (extremely prestigious-sounding) position of Jean Kvamme Distinguished Professor of Biblical Evangelism and Distinguished Scholar in Public Christianity at Wheaton College, in Illinois. He holds a PhD in Ancient History from Macquarie University and specialises in ancient Christianity and Judaism. He has held academic positions at Macquarie University, the University of Sydney, the University of Oxford, and Ridley College.

Like Hart’s book, Dickson’s is engagingly written and accessible for non-scholars. Yet Dickson’s main focus, as the title of his book makes clear, is on the often controversial history of the church, and how, so frequently, atrocities have been committed in Christ’s name that stand in stark contrast to the teachings of Jesus himself.

Dickson does not gloss over these tragedies and atrocities. After all, the history of Christians is a history of very fallible, broken people — indeed, “bullies” as well as “saints” as his title suggests. One need go no further than the Bible to find clear examples of the mistakes, disobedience, and sometimes downright wickedness of God’s people.

It is important for Christians to reckon with the ugly side of church history as well as the many wonderful achievements and positive contributions that followers of Jesus have made to this world.

Hence, I wholeheartedly recommend Bullies and Saints and The Story of Christianity to those seeking a better grasp of the Christian story of which we are each a part (whether we like it or not!).

Those are two of my recommendations. Do you have some of your own? If so, leave a comment below to tell us more!