The Story of the Church

The Story of the Church
A. M. Renwick
IVP

I recently read this very old edition of this book, which is a whistle-stop tour of Church history from apostolic times through to the 1950s. I understand that a later edition with a co-author is now in print that takes in later years of church history, but this was an old secondhand copy I picked up dating from the 1960s.

I have to admit I haven't read a lot of church history, except for the Reformation period, and I found it very interesting to learn more about the period from the first century through to the middle ages. There was much that I really didn't know about this period. For example, I hadn't realised that for centuries the Celtic Church regarded itself as quite separate from the Roman Catholic Church and not under papal authority.

As a summary of nearly two thousand years of church history in under 200 pages, this book was really excellent.

The author, A. M. Renwick, was a professor of church history at Free Church College in Edinburgh.