Turing Points is a good book to use for your lessons.

I’m currently taking a church history class for my seminary degree and remembering how much I love this topic. It’s not just interesting, but it shows where our theology came from, and as my professor says, “Church history is the history of the exposition of the scriptures.”

Ever since I took church history during undergrad I wanted to incorporate church history into youth ministry. When I am teaching I try and make references to people like Bonhoeffer, Augustine, and Luther. But why don’t we teach church history in our youth ministries (or our churches for that matter)? Has anyone ever done a study with their youth group about church history? What materials did you use?

And if you have thought, like me, that we need some church history in our youth ministries, what might it look like? Would you be willing to collaborate on an open source curriculum?

I’m thinking that Mark Noll’s Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity might be a good text to base a curriculum from. In the book he has a chapter on what he thinks are 13 defining moments in Christian history, which would make a great outline for a semester’s study:

1. Fall of Jerusalem
2. Council of Nicaea
3. Council of Chalcedon
4. Benedict’s Rule (Monasticism)
5. Coronation of Charlemagne
6. The Great Schism
7. Diet of Worms
8. “English Acts of Supremacy” (1534 – The English church breaking from the Roman Catholics)
9. Catholic Reform & Jesuits
10. Conversion of John Wesley
11. French Revolution
12. Edinburgh Missionary Conference
13. Further turning points in the 20th century

What do you think about the list? Does he pick the right big ticket items? What would you change out? My only thought is that he leaves out Augustine, and I love me some Augustine. I’d like to incorporate him into the mix somehow. The other approach would be to study figures rather than events (Athenasius, Augustine, Luther, Wesley, etc.).

What other books would be good foundational texts to build a church history curriculum from? What do you think about the whole idea? Am I nuts to want to teach teenagers church history?