Church History Lesson

I had an enjoyable time the other day pulling up a chair at our homeschool table and becoming a student myself!  While studying our history timeline as part of our Classical Conversations homeschool community, we have touched on many church history timeline points.  Quite honestly, I was unfamiliar with many of these, even having grown up in church and being a very involved member of my Christian community (in truth, my evangelical background is probably to "blame" for this, as many litergical churches do a much better job teaching Christian history and the Church calendar...but that is for another blog post, dear friend!).  So, I took it upon myself, with a little assistance from my oldest daughter, to piece together a church history double lap book, starting from the birth of Christ to the present-day church in North America.

So, today I'd like to invite you to take a little tour of the lap book with me!  Feel free to click on the pictures to enlarge them and familiarize yourself with two millennia of church history at a glance!  Here is the front cover...

Open the first flap (which bears the cross of Christ), to learn about Constantine and the legalization of Christianity in the West, and the first Council to combat heresies that had popped up about the Trinity...

Some facts about Jerome completing the Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek) and another council which met to discuss the dual nature of Christ...

Continue on to the second part of the lap book to learn about the East-West Schism of the Church and the Crusades...

 An up-close view of my personal favorite depiction of Martin Luther and the five "solas"...

 A peek into the Counter-Reformation by the Catholic Church...

 And lastly, on the back, check out the continuation of Protestantism in Europe, and then on into the Americas through the Puritans and the First and Second Great Awakenings...

I hope this tour has been enjoyable for you and perhaps inspired you to take a deeper look back into the significant occurrences in Church history!  As the old cliche goes: you will never know where you are going until you know where you've been!