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Explore Scripture, its story, its people, and what it means for life today.
The church through time
Two thousand years in nine movements — how a small group in one city became a worldwide church, and what it cost and gained along the way.
01 · 30–100
The first generation. Acts describes the movement beginning in Jerusalem at Pentecost and spreading through Judea, Samaria, Asia Minor, Greece and eventually Rome — carried as much by ordinary displaced believers as by named apostles.
02 · 100–300
Two centuries as an illegal minority. Christians met in homes, argued out what they believed, cared for the sick during epidemics, and periodically died for refusing to offer sacrifice to the emperor.
03 · 300s
Legalisation changed everything. The Edict of Milan in 313 ended official persecution, and within a century Christianity had moved from illegal sect to the religion of the empire.
04 · 300–500
The church argued its way to its core definitions in public, at councils attended by bishops from across the empire. The questions were about Jesus: how he can be both God and human without being half of either.
05 · 500–1500
A thousand years usually skipped in a sentence. Monasteries preserved literacy and learning through the collapse of Roman order, missionaries reached northern Europe, universities and cathedrals were built, and the church became the central institution of European life.
06 · 1500s
A movement for reform became a permanent division. Luther’s objections in 1517 were to specific abuses; within a generation the argument had reached authority, salvation, and the sacraments, and western Christianity had split.
07 · 1500s–1800s
Protestantism did not stay one thing. Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Anabaptist, Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian and Methodist traditions all took shape, differing over church government, baptism, and the relationship between church and state.
08 · 1700s–1900s
Waves of revival in Britain and America, and an unprecedented missionary expansion. The Great Awakenings reshaped American religious life; societies sent missionaries to India, China and Africa, and Christianity became genuinely global.
09 · 1900–present
The center of gravity moved. The fastest growth of the last century has been in Africa, Asia and Latin America, while church attendance in Europe and North America has generally declined. There are more Christians alive now than at any previous point, and most of them are not Western.
A closer look
How the movement actually spread — largely, according to Acts, by people fleeing trouble rather than by a plan.
Weeks after the resurrection, the disciples begin preaching publicly in Jerusalem to a city full of pilgrims.
The movement grows around those who had known Jesus, meeting in homes and in the temple courts.
Persecution pushes believers out of Jerusalem, which spreads the message rather than ending it.
A mixed Jewish and Gentile community forms; Acts notes that followers were first called Christians here.
Three recorded journeys across Asia Minor and Greece, planting communities in major cities.
Written to those communities to teach, correct, and encourage. Most of the New Testament epistles begin as ordinary correspondence.
Within a few generations there were communities in most major cities of the Roman world.
One tradition
Mt. Pleasant is a Baptist church. This is what that has meant historically — described rather than defended.
Baptist churches trace their beginnings to English Separatists in the early 1600s — congregations that had concluded the Church of England could not be reformed from within. A congregation under John Smyth in Amsterdam, from about 1609, is usually named as the first.
The relationship to the earlier Continental Anabaptists is debated: there was contact and overlap of conviction, but most historians see Baptists as arising primarily out of English Separatism rather than as a direct continuation.
The distinctive that gave the movement its name. Baptists baptise those who can profess faith for themselves, by immersion, understanding baptism as an act of obedience that follows faith rather than one that produces it.
This is a genuine disagreement with the paedobaptist traditions, which baptise the infant children of believers on a covenantal reading. Both sides argue from Scripture and have done so for four hundred years.
Baptists argued for freedom of conscience early, and at considerable cost, at a time when it was a minority position. Thomas Helwys published an argument for it in 1612 and died in prison; Roger Williams founded Rhode Island on the principle in 1636.
The conviction was that faith coerced is not faith, and that the state has no business enforcing it. Baptists made this argument when they were the ones being jailed, and it later contributed to the American settlement on religious freedom.
Baptist churches are self-governing. The congregation calls its own pastor, sets its own budget, and takes its own decisions, rather than receiving them from a bishop or a presbytery.
Churches associate voluntarily for missions and shared work, and those associations have no authority over a local congregation. It is a deliberately decentralised arrangement, with the strengths and the frustrations that implies.
Baptists were central to the modern missionary movement. William Carey’s departure for India in 1793 and the society formed to support him became a model that many other traditions followed.
The pattern of independent congregations pooling money voluntarily for shared missionary work has been characteristic of Baptist life ever since.
The commitments usually named together: the authority of Scripture, believer’s baptism by immersion, a regenerate church membership, the autonomy of the local congregation, the priesthood of all believers, religious liberty, and the separation of church and state.
Baptists have never had a central authority to enforce uniformity, which is why Baptist churches vary as much as they do. Confessions of faith — the Baptist Faith & Message among them — are offered as statements of common conviction rather than as binding creeds.
The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845, when Baptists in the South separated from northern Baptists over slavery — specifically over whether a slaveholder could be appointed as a missionary. That is the founding fact and there is no honest way to tell the history without it.
The convention formally repudiated that origin in a resolution of 1995, apologising for its defence of slavery and for subsequent racism. It became the largest Protestant body in the United States, supporting missions, seminaries and disaster relief, and has been through significant internal conflict over doctrine and, more recently, over its handling of abuse.
Mt. Pleasant’s own affiliations are listed on the What We Believe page.
