The place where the Apostles, Paul and John, handed over to the next generation of Christian leaders, which included the “Apostolic Fathers”. One such “Apostolic Father”, Ignatius of Antioch (d.110), passed through Ephesus on his way to martyrdom at Rome, and addressed a letter to the church at Ephesus.

The centre of Greek thought, which Justin Martyr and other Second Century Apologists addressed in their presentations of the Christian faith, proclaiming Christ as the Logos (the Word or principle underlying the universe).

The church in this city was founded by immigrants from Smyrna in Asia around 177. Following intense persecution, this is where Irenaeus was later bishop, combatting the Gnostic heresy. Irenaeus asserted that the material world was the good creation of the Eternal Word. That same Word became “flesh”, and became the head of a redeemed human race, undoing the Fall, and replacing Adam (“recapitulation”).

A place where the church stood firm against persecution in the days of Tertullian and later Cyprian, representative of all the sufferings of Christians and martyrdom. The greatest persecution came to an end in 311, leading to toleration of the Christian faith.

Following toleration of the Christian church in 311 and 313, Nicea was the venue for the First Ecumenical Council in 325 which asserted that the Son is consubstantial (equal) with God the Father. The later Second Council at Constantinople in 381 also asserted that the Spirit is Holy, Lord and Life-Giver. It was at this time that the church found words to express the truth that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Trinity). The 300s were a Golden Age of Christian thinkers with greats such as Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Ambrosius of Milan and others.

The Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon concluded a century of debate around Christ being both God and man (this is called “Christology”), asserting the unity of the single person of Christ in two distinct natures, divine and human. As a result breakaway communions emerged: Nestorians and Monophysites. Two great Christian leaders from this period were, in the West, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), and, in the East, John Chrysostom (d. 407).

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, that part of the world became dominated by semi-Christian Barbarian peoples such as the Goths and Vandals. The church regrouped and survived thanks to the efforts of monks such as Benedict of Nursia, who founded a monastery at Monte Cassino, preserved western culture, and evangelised heretics and pagans. During the sixth and seventh centuries missionaries from Ireland, and later, in the seventh and eighth centuries, from what is now England, travelled abroad to evangelise, converting peoples from paganism to Christianity.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman Empire survived and flourished, particularly under Emperor Justinian. The Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 condemned three erroneous writings on Christology (Three Chapters), and the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 681 affirmed the teaching of Maxim the Confessor (d.662) that there are two wills in Christ. (The Seventh Ecumenical Council approved the veneration of icons.) However, towards the end of this period the Empire of Constantinople was shaken by controversy and discord, leading to a Dark Age which only finally ended in 843. The central monastery in Constantinople was at Studium.

After centuries of instability and Barbarian rule in the West, it was the Franks, a Germanic, formerly Barbarian people, Christian since 498, that assumed a leading role in the western church, with their capital at Aachen. In 800 Charles the Great was proclaimed Emperor of the revived Holy Roman Empire. It was from here that much of Eastern Europe was evangelised, including Poland. From 910, Cluny became the epicentre for a movement to reform monasticism and the church. This was continued by the Cistercian movement in the 1000s and 1100s.

From 843 onwards, the Eastern Roman Empire emerged from its Dark Age, and intensified missionary work in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, Christianising the Slavs inside and outside the Empire. The most famous missionaries were Cyril and Methodius, ministering to the kingdom of Moravia, and Clement of Ochrid (a centre for Christian learning in what was then Bulgaria). The Christian East and West split away from one another in 1054.

Following on from the reform movement centred at monasteries at Cluny and Cîteaux, the western church experienced the height of its power under Pope Gregory VII and Pope Innocent III. This was the age of the Crusades. In the 1200s, new monastic movements such as the Franciscans and Dominicans emerged. In Christian thought this is the time of Thomas Aquinas. The triumph of the church was expressed in the magnificent Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as the one at Chartres.

In the second millennium, the focus of Eastern Orthodoxy shifted from the incarnation to the subjective experience of salvation, crystallised in the concept of “theosis” (become united to God). As Constantinople waned, the new centre of gravity in the Orthodox world became the Principality of Rus’ with its capital at Kyiv, and later Moscow. When the Empire of Constantinople collapsed in 1453, it was the ruler of Rus’ (later Russia) who took on the mantle of the Christian Emperor, Caesar or “Tsar”.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, the western church experienced two crises: the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1309–1376) and the Great Western Schism (1378–1417). For a time, Avignon in France was the residence of the Pope. As a result, there was a general consensus to seek root-and-branch reform of the church. Prominent early reformers at the time included John Wycliffe (1300s) and Jan Hus (1400s).

The Protestant Reformation began with Martin Luther (1483–1546) nailing his 95 theses at Wittenberg in Germany, and later by Zwingli’s ministry at the Grossmünster church in Zurich. The Reformation represented a rediscovery of the gospel, proclaiming the supreme authority of Scripture, justification by faith alone, and the priesthood of all believers.

On the Continent, the Anabaptists represented the radical wing of the Reformation, viewing the Christian faith as requiring a deliberate, personal decision to follow Christ, expressed in believer’s baptism. In Britain, some Protestants, nicknamed “Puritans”, didn’t think the English Reformation had gone far enough. Some wanted a reformed church like in Switzerland, while others formed autonomous “gathered churches” based on voluntary membership and free from the influence of the state (“Independent churches”).

The Roman Catholic response to the Reformation was the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation, reasserting the teaching of the church, and control of territory and the faithful. By the 1600s, the centre of the Roman Catholic world was the kingdom of France ruled by Louis XIV. Starting with Richard Simon, a more liberal approach to the Bible became more and more prevalent. As the tide turned, the Jesuits, staunch defenders of the Counter-Reformation, were officially suppressed in 1773.

In the Orthodox East Cyril Lucaris, a Patriarch of Constantinople, later sympathised with the Reformation, but the subsequent Council of Bethlehem ruled against the teachings of the Reformation. As Moscow came to replace Constantinople as the centre of the Orthodox world, it was taught that “two Romes have fallen, the third stands (i.e. Moscow), and there will be no fourth”.

After the heady days of the Reformation, the following century (1600s) saw a need to consolidate and also to contend for the faith. Protestant confessions such as the Formula of Concord (Lutheran) and the Westminster Confession (Puritan) formulated new orthodoxies, while the Anabaptist movement was continued by the Mennonites, mainly based in Germany and the Netherlands.

In the 1600s, the Netherlands, including the university town of Leyden, was the centre of the Protestant world, and produced the leading theological works, as well as providing toleration for religious minorities. It was in the Netherlands that some English Independents (see above), influenced by the Mennonites, came to embrace believer’s baptism — the first Baptists.

By the end of the 1600s, the years of conflict and controversy, combined with new freedoms, created a need to return to “heart religion”, and the experience of personal conversion, preached by Jonathan Edwards in the American colonies, and advocated in Germany by the Pietists and Moravians (the latter were based at a country estate in Germany called “Herrnhut”). The Pietist movement founded a university at Halle which became a centre first for “heart religion” and later for rationalist doubt (e.g. Christian Wolff d.1754).

Through John Wesley, the Moravians influenced the Methodist Revival in the English-speaking world. The revivals served to rekindle Christian zeal in the Church of England, and also in the independent churches. At the same time, the values of the Enlightenment influenced many churches in a rationalist (liberal) direction.

After the catastrophe of the French Revolution, Roman Catholic faith likewise experienced a revival in France and elsewhere, often driven by folk devotion such as visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

In the Orthodox East, the Philokalia movement revived the Greek Orthodox Church, and also the Orthodox Church in Russia with a renewed interest in the mystical wisdom of Desert Fathers such as Macarius.

Following on from the revivals of the 1700s, during the long 19th century (1789–1914), Christian faith experienced several more periods of revival in the English speaking world both sides of the Atlantic: from 1791 (Second Great Awakening), from 1859 (Third Great Awakening), and from 1904 (Fourth Great Awakening). On the continent of Europe, Protestant faith was likewise revived (Le Réveil / Erweckung). At this time, London was the world’s leading city, and preachers such as Charles Spurgeon (Baptist) held major influence.

The Age of Discovery, begun in the late 1400s by Portugal and Spain, prompted a worldwide missionary movement to newly discovered lands and people — first by the Orthodox and Roman Catholics, and later by Protestants.

Pioneers of Protestant missionary work were the Dutch in South East Asia, the English in North America, and the German Pietists in the Danish colonies.

Mission in sub-Saharan Africa took off in the 19th century, with missionaries such as David Livingstone. By the late 19th century, another “front line” of missionary work was China (despite several phases of Christian missionising since the 600s). At the missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910, China was represented by Cheng Jingyi who died in Shanghai in 1940.