We wouldn't be treated to a solo when we were singing, which would not have been a pleasant experience for you or for me, I have to say. Back home at my home church, unfortunately, most of the people in charge of the sound on a Sunday are young men under the age of about 30. And I discovered some six months ago that they'd been secretly recording my singing from the pulpit. Solos in order at some point they said to put out as a CD of my greatest hits so you can expect that I want to talk this morning about the importance of church history. Clearly, there's a certain amount of self-serving, self-justification in this. My primary salary and my benefits come from the fact that I teach church history. So I have a vested interest in persuading people of the value of church history. But I also want to argue this morning that church history has usefulness for all Christians. And I want to make four fairly simple, I hope fairly simple, points. Pointing to the usefulness of church history for all Christians, no matter what your profession is, Monday to Friday, no matter at what stage you're at in your Christian pilgrimage, how long you've been a Christian, I think church history fulfills numerous functions and I want to pull out just four of them today. I would preface this by saying we live in a very anti-historical age. There's very little in our age that would cultivate us naturally towards the study of history. And I think that's peculiarly the case in the United States of America. America was a country really built on a future vision, an expanding frontier, a nation where the best things were always just over the next horizon in the future. Americans of all people that I've met in the world seem to be the most future-oriented, and therefore to have little concern for the past. Perhaps that's slightly different in the South, because of the history of the Civil War, or, as I noticed it was called yesterday, the Pink House, where I went for lunch, I think the War Between the States, maybe the War of Northern Aggression is another term. Perhaps in the South, there's a little bit more sensitivity to history than one typically finds in the North, because of the tragic history of the United States on that front. But by and large, we live in an era and a nation where history is not something particularly important. We might say history is something to be ignored or even to be overcome when you see all of the campus protests of the last year with attempts to erase history from the United States. History that perhaps is not particularly flattering, but nonetheless exists. And there are attempts now to have that erased. We live in a world, in a nation, which does not think highly of history. I would also say that history suffers from another, perhaps more material disadvantage, and that it is often taught very badly at schools. It's amazing talking to students at seminary. Very, very few students come to seminary to study history. I think that it's useful that I have the accent I have, which Americans always say gives me a 20% advantage when I'm speaking in public, because I have at least a 50% disadvantage because of the subject I teach. which is church history. Very few people go to seminary to study church history. They go to learn the Bible better, they go to learn theology, they go to learn practical theology. Church history is often the thing that people do at seminary simply because it's part of a compulsory curriculum. And therefore, I think as a church history professor, I have to work in some ways that little bit harder to get people to see the usefulness of church history. And I want to do that this morning in four ways. I want to suggest that church history is useful, and my first point will be my simplest, and probably the most easy to grasp, and that is church history is useful because it provides inspiring examples of Christians of the past. That's a very simple, simple point. The second reason for studying church history is it allows us to understand why the church speaks and thinks the way she does in the present. That's a more subtle, but also in some ways I think perhaps an even more important purpose of church history. Thirdly, I think church history, as in all history in fact, fulfills a useful function because it relativizes the present. We get very concerned when Christians talk about relativism. But I think there is an important point to be made that we need to relativize the present. We are not as important as we think we are. And the days in which we live are not as unique as we think they are. And that's useful because that can actually be a very encouraging thing, particularly in times of setback. It's useful to be reminded that the meaning of history does not depend upon the present moment. And finally, and then I'm going to go to a particular writing, I'm going to suggest that because human nature remains the same throughout history, we can learn from the great writings of the past. And if I have time, I want to end by talking about a brief passage from a book written at the end of the 4th century, The Confessions of St. Augustine, where he talks about an incident in his childhood that I think is remarkably helpful to Christians today. I'm just going to use it as an example of how one can read an ancient text written in a very different world many, many hundreds of years ago, and yet find useful insights for how we live today. So the first point then is a very, very simple one, and that is, I think, that church history, at its most basic level, provides encouraging examples from the past. One of my favorite books of church history, is the first volume of Ian Murray's two-volumed biography of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. He became a Christian in the early 1980s in Britain. Dr. Lloyd-Jones was already dead, but his influence dominated the landscape. I happened to be converted into a non-conformist tradition, not an Anglican, not the established church. But the evangelicalism of my late teens and early twenties was profoundly shaped by the life and teaching and thought of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. And the first volume of Ian Murray's autobiography of Martin Lloyd-Jones was one of the first books I read about Christians of the past. It was the recent past. But it was a very inspiring story. If you were to ask me as a professional historian what my concerns about that book would be, I would say, well, it's odd to read a book of three or four hundred pages on a Christian leader and to find virtually no criticism. And for many years that sort of disturbed me. Reading this book, I think, well, you know, Lloyd-Jones must have made mistakes. We're all totally depraved. So there must have been things that he did that were wrong. Why aren't they there that we can learn from them? But over the years, I've come to appreciate that book more. I think we live in a very cynical age, and sometimes it's good to read a book that doesn't dwell on the faults of the great saints of the past, but offers encouragement and inspiration. The first point, then, is really a very, very simple one, and that is, I think it's good for Christians to be acquainted, particularly with Christian biography, but also with the broader currents of church history, because it can be inspiration to us. Even, I think, the faults and mistakes of the church can be an inspiration to us, because we realize that the Lord is able to subvert wickedness for the greater good, as He promises to do in Scripture. The Lord is able to take the mistakes of His people and use them. I would also suggest that the Lord is able to use the mistakes of His people to encourage us by reminding us that even the greatest saints make mistakes. Some of the, you go back to the 19th century and you read some of the biographies of the great churchmen of the 19th century or the biographies of earlier churchmen that were written in the 19th century, they're soul-destroying in some ways because these guys are so perfect. You can never measure up, it seems to me. They were so great and so wonderful. So sometimes it's good to be reminded even of the faults of the great men and women of the past. That can be an encouragement. It reminds us that they're human. I'm going to end by talking about St. Augustine. I love St. Augustine's confessions. Why? I would put it provocatively, it's because he's so mediocre in them. I read the resolutions of Jonathan Edwards and I come away thinking I can just never measure up. I read the confessions of St. Augustine and I think, wow, he's a pretty mediocre guy. I think I can do that. I think that's within the realm of possibility for me as a human being. So the first point then is that Christian biography, particularly, but church history in general, can just be useful for inspiration and encouragement. reading about the great saints of the past, both their strengths and their weaknesses. Luther, I've talked on this weekend, is a good example of both huge strengths and tremendous weaknesses. His tremendously courageous stance at the Diet of Worms in 1521 or in Wittenberg in 1522, remarkable. But then he writes terrible things about the peasants in 1525 and terrible things about the Jews in the 1540s. And even that, I think, can be not an encouragement, but a lesson to us, because there's a sense in which the thing that enables Luther to stand so heroically in 1521-1522 is his absolute confidence in his own correctness at that point. Tragically, it's exactly that same character trait that leads him to write such terrible things about the peasants and the Jews. So it's both an encouragement to us to see the courage of Luther, but it's also a reminder to us that courage and strong will can, in certain circumstances, prove very dangerous to the cause. And to me, that's a reminder of why it's always important to surround yourself as a Christian with people who are not yes-men, people who are willing to tell you the hard truths, but do it because they care for you. Second point, church history, and I hope to end by about quarter past twenty past to throw it open for some questions. But the second point is, knowledge of church history helps us understand why the church is the way she is in the present. I think without wanting to be a sort of radical postmodernist, most people accept these days that stories are extremely important for personal identity, both individually and corporately. Who we are as individuals is intimately related to how we understand our lives. I think one could say that the current Crisis is an overused word, but certainly the current difficulties in American society seem to me, as an outsider having come here 16 years ago, to be intimately connected to the breakdown of any agreed narrative of American history. Americans no longer seem to know who they are as a united nation. And that's when you start to get problems in a nation. I've seen it back in Europe, in Britain. We see it in Britain, where we lose that sense of a strong, unifying, national history, and things start to fall apart. It reminds us that history, that stories are vitally important. It's why every culture in the world tells stories about itself. It's why every culture in the world has a mythology. The Norse myths, the Greek myths, the Roman myths. Every culture in the world tells stories that reinforce, constitute its identity. And the people of God are no different. One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament, for various reasons, occurs in Exodus chapter 11. Found out a year ago I have to wear glasses. It's a, you know, eyesight is a great caliber. I run a lot and getting slower year by year and heavier even though I'm exercising the same. It's a great calibration of getting old. So is losing your eyesight. I was trying to review a book and I was struck by how small the publisher was making the print these days. Put my wife's glasses on for a joke and the print seemed to just expand before my eyes. So anyway, Exodus chapter 12, one of my favorite passages in Scripture, where Moses is instructing the people of Israel on the Passover. And it comes to verse 25, and he says this, And when you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as He has promised, you shall keep this service. And when your children say to you, What do you mean by this service? You shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover. For he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians, but spared our houses." It's a wonderful passage. There's an awful lot I could... You know, I make my argument justifying creeds and confessions in part on that passage. But what does that passage say to us? Well, Moses is aware that when, at some point in the future, the children of Israel have had children who were no longer there in Egypt, when it all went down on the night of the Passover, and they're performing this meal, and their children say to them, you know, why do you do this thing? What he does not do is what I would call the... If you go on holiday in Europe and there are British people there, British like the Americans, we don't learn other people's language as well. And you'll see an English person trying to order something in, say, a German restaurant or an Italian restaurant, and the waiter may not speak the language and he doesn't understand what's being said. So the English person's response is to speak louder and slower. because we have this innate national belief that somewhere in every human being there's this substructure of the English language and if we just shout loud enough we will break through this foreign ignorance and get to it. What Moses does not say here is, well what you need to do is you need to do the ceremony again with more exaggerated actions until finally they get it. What Moses says is, you need to tell your children the history of your people. That's what he's saying in a nutshell here. You need to tell your children the history of your people. If you want them to make sense of the religious practices that you're engaged in, then you need to tell them the history. You need to tell them the story of why this came about. And I think that's a vital lesson for the church. When you think about the Bible, how much of the Bible is telling a story? The biggest part of the Bible, the single largest form of literature in the Bible is narrative history. Narrative history. Why? Because it's so important to understanding who the people of God are. And I don't think it stops with the book of Acts. I think it continues. Now obviously, history since the book of Acts is not written by men who are divinely inspired. But it's still important for understanding who we are. Doctrinally, it's important for understanding who we are. One of the things I like to trick students with early in the ancient church class, Tim may remember, you did ancient church with me, you may remember, maybe I pulled this one year, in order to try to demonstrate the importance of history, is I'll ask the question early on, how many wills does Jesus Christ have? And most students will instinctively respond, He has one will. To which the answer is, that is heresy. You are denying the reality of the Incarnation if you hold that. To which the response is, well where did you get that from in scripture? To which my response is, ah well you need to understand the debates of the first three or four centuries in order to understand why you've given the wrong answer and I've given the correct one. Doctrinally, why the church thinks the way she does is intimately connected to understanding the history of the doctrinal discussions the church has had. It's also, I think, important for understanding the emphases within our churches. I'm a big believer in people learning their denominational history. I'm a minister in the OPC. I have to say, I am not inspired by my denominational history in the way that some of my OPC colleagues are. But I think it's important to know that history, to know why the church thinks the way she does on some crucial issues. And that can be important regardless of whether those issues are ultimately of the essence of the faith or not. Being a member of a denomination is like being a member of a nation. Sometimes it's important to understand the history of your nation to understand the distinctives. Things that in some ways are indifferent in the universal story of things, but are very important to the people who are involved in the denomination, so you know how to talk to them, how you know how to interact, how you know what mind feels to avoid. History is very, very important for understanding the identity of the people of God in general, and the identity of the people of God in particular, denominations and congregations. Terry on Friday Lunchtime was explaining to me why this church is an independent Presbyterian church. That's an important part of your history. That history does not mean that the OPC is wrong by being not independent in terms of its Presbyterianism. But it's an important part of the church's history here. It's important to know the community of whom you're a part. And it's also important to know history, I think, in order to pass the gospel on to the next generation. I use this analogy a number of times, but I get... one of the British magazines I get each week in order to keep up with what's going on back in my homeland is The Spectator. It has some of the best British writing, British journalism. But it also carried an advert, or used to, I haven't seen it for a couple of years now, for Patek Philippe watches. And there'd be a good looking guy there with a Patek Philippe watch, and the byline underneath was, you never really own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation. And I remember one Christmas, Katrina, my wife, said to me, you know, what would you like for Christmas? And I said, you know, there's Patek Philippe watches that look really nice. Maybe one of those. I was thinking, you know, maybe they're like 200 bucks a pitch. I think the entry level was $70,000. I think, wow, I could buy half my house for that. You know, I'm not going to walk around with a 70 grams worth of watch on my arm. I'd be terrified to leave the house. But then I understood the buy line. You know, you don't buy a Patek Philippe to wear a Patek Philippe, really. You buy a Patek Philippe as an investment for your children, as you might buy a painting or a rare vase or something like that. I think that the church is tasked with looking after the gospel for the next generation. That's our primary task. Our primary task is not our own. Our importance, if you like, is entirely derivative on the past, that which we've inherited, and on the future, that to which we pass the past on. We have no intrinsic importance whatsoever. And I think Paul captures that beautifully in his letters to Timothy. I love all the books written on church growth and how to do church. Paul, which I hate that phrase by the way, how to do church, but I use it because it's a convention. Paul manages to put down pretty much everything he wants Timothy and Titus to know in three really short letters. And at the start of his second letter to Timothy, he says this, follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. Take that which has come from the past and been given to you and guard it for the future. second important strand of church history is it's important because it helps us to understand who we are, what our task is, and what we are to transmit to the future generation. Third point, and this is not even a distinctively Christian point, but I think it is peculiarly helpful to Christians, particularly in times when we seem to be suffering great setbacks, and that is a knowledge of history relativizes the present. I've already done that to some extent by saying the present has no intrinsic value other than as it connects to the past and connects to the future. What other ways does church history relativize the present? I think all human beings have a tendency to absolutize their own time. You go back, I spent a lot of my time in the late Middle Ages, in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the complaints that are being made about the days in which those men lived, that we now look back on as a kind of glory time in some ways, are exactly the same as the complaints that are being made today. Why? Because everybody seems to think that the whole meaning of history absolutely hinges on their day and generation. I compare history, history to emigration. Not many people have the privilege that I've had of emigrating and living in a foreign country for a significant part of their life. What happens when you emigrate is interesting. You see things in the country that you've come to that people who've lived there all their lives just don't notice. Because to them, their culture is nature. It's natural. Everybody thinks this way. I think the disconnect becoming as an English person to America is perhaps greater because we're deceived by the common language and the fact that we watch the same movies into thinking that we're essentially the same. But actually, America is very different to Britain. Very, very different. And an English person in America spots things an American wouldn't necessarily spot, because it's the air they breathe. The other thing is, you learn about the place you've left, and you begin to realize that things you did back there aren't nature, but they're actually culture. The other oddest thing is, of course, back there, keeps changing. But in your mind, it never does. People say to me, you know, where's home? And I say, well, I really don't think I have home anymore because I never quite fit in America. But Britain is frozen. I love the 1980s. Britain's kind of frozen in the late 1980s for me. That's a long, long, long time ago. But history allows us to do that without the expense and the inconvenience of emigration. I've used the phrase a couple of times in the seminars this weekend that history involves leaps of imagination. That you have to go back to a different time and a different place and learn to think differently in order to understand what's going on. And so much of the campus problems, I think, that we're currently seeing are reflective of a poverty of imagination. in the contemporary generation that is incapable of thinking of the world in any other terms than those in which they themselves think of the world. If you don't think like them, you are wrong and you are immoral. History done well requires that we go back into the past and learn how to think differently about things. And the great thing about that is it has that knock-on effect on the way you think about the present as well. As I now think about Britain differently to the way that I would have thought about her 20, 25 years ago, so as you do history well, you learn to think about the present differently. you begin to realize that ideas don't just come out of vacuums that people think the way they do because of their historical roots and their historical backgrounds you develop the ability to be a kind of cultural critic in some ways and you begin to realize how much actually is the same with the past I've already used an example of that today I said the complaints about people in the past just the same as the complaints we're hearing today So the third use of history, I think, is the culturally useful one. That it allows us to be self-critical and to be wary of absolutizing things ourselves in our own time. And it allows us, therefore, to free ourselves up from the shackles of the eternal present, if I could put it that way. So my first three things then for studying history. One. It provides inspiring stories. Two, it enables us to understand how the church thinks, theologically, and we might say culturally, about herself today. And thirdly, it allows us to think critically about the world in which we now live. The last point I want to bring out is the fact that human nature remains the same means that texts from church history are often peculiarly helpful to us in understanding ourselves. Big debate goes on, of course, in the literary world about what constitutes a great book. I don't think it's an entirely naive definition, but the way I would define a great book is this way. A great book is one that when you read it, you understand yourself better. And the more often you read it, the better you understand yourself. It's perhaps a somewhat personal definition, but I think it carries a lot of weight. There are certain poems, for example, one can read again and again, and every time you read them you see something different, you understand something different about the world. And there are certain texts in Christian history that do that. Tim, guess what text I'm about to read? The Confessions, and which passage of the Confessions? Not book 9, actually book 2, the pairs. The other one, the other passage. I'm going to read a passage from Augustine's Confessions. Augustine, probably the greatest Christian theologian who ever lived. Late 4th, early 5th century. Remarkable individual. And early in his Christian life, he wrote an autobiography. He wrote a reflection upon how he'd come from paganism. to Christian belief. Westminster, it's a compulsory book. Every student doing an MDiv at Westminster has to read the Confessions because there's a compulsory question on it in the examination. I have been known to say that you cannot have a credible profession of faith if you have not read Augustine's Confessions. I won't go quite that far this morning, but I would say it will massively help your credibility as a Christian if you read this book. And in Book 2, Augustine recalls an incident from his childhood. One of the things everybody knows about Augustine is that he got a downer on sex. Well, it's interesting that in the Confessions, it is not his sex life that he uses as the sort of the narrative account of his fall. It's something very, very different. So I'm going to read you the passage. Unfortunately, it's from a slightly quaint Victorian translation, so bear with that if you can. Surely thy law, O Lord, punishes thievery. Yea, and this law is so written in our hearts that iniquity itself cannot blot it out. For what thief does willingly abide another man to steal from him? No, not a rich thief, him that is driven to steal upon necessity. Yet I had a desire to commit thievery, and I did it, compelled neither by hunger nor poverty, but even through a desire of well-doing and a pampered attitude to iniquity. For I stole that of which I had enough of my own and much better. Nor, when I had done it, did I enjoy the thing which I had stolen, but rejoicing in the theft and the sin itself. There was a pear tree in the orchard next to our family vineyard, well laden with fruit. It was not tempting either for its color or its taste. I and a group of young friends went late one night, according to our pestilent custom, and we carried away a huge pile of pears, not to sate our own hunger, but to feed to the pigs, and maybe we did eat some of them. And all this we did because we would go where we should not go. Behold my heart, O Lord, which you had pity on in the very bottom of the bottomless pit. just to summarize what Augustine's describing there. He's describing what we in the West Country of England would call scrumping. And every child in the West Country is scrumped, and that is stealing fruit from a neighbor's garden. If you're into the Who 1960s rock band, which I am, they refer to scrumpy at one point. It has the same point of origin linguistically. Scrumping is stealing fruit. And Augustine uses this account to then go on and explore the psychology of human sin in a way that I think has never been equaled in Christian literature since. And I want to just pull out a few aspects of this. First of all, I want us to notice the kind of sin that Augustine has chosen. First of all, he's chosen a very trivial sin. First time I read this passage, I'm laughing to myself and thinking, yeah, I remember doing exactly that. The incident I'm thinking of, we clambered over a railway bridge with some friends, broke through a person's fence, and then stole some of his potatoes. Raw potatoes, we threw them away. We didn't eat them, you can't eat raw potatoes, that's disgusting. We threw them away. So I'm reading this and I'm thinking, yeah, I remember just what that's like, that's great fun. If Augustine had written, let's say, about an armed bank robbery, would not have had the same effect on me. I'm reading Augustine say, yeah, one night, a couple of friends and myself, we got hold of a couple of sawn-off shotguns, and we went and robbed the local bank. I'm reading that, and I'm thinking, well, that's pretty exciting stuff. But I'm not being drawn into the story, because I never committed an armed robbery when I was a child. I don't recall ever doing that. So I'm somewhat distanced from the story. The fact that Augustine has chosen an utterly trivial sin draws me right in. Draws me right into the story. The second thing that Augustine does is he goes out of his way to say that there was no intrinsic rationale in the sin being committed. These were foul pears that they fed to pigs. He didn't steal them to eat them. Notice what he's doing there. That's quite clever, because if Augustine had said, some friends and I were absolutely starving, we were fainting with hunger, and we broke into a neighbor's garden and stole some fruit, we'd respond to that by thinking, well, it was wrong for him to do that, he should have asked for permission. It was wrong, but there's a logic to the sin. He's dying of hunger and he needs to be fed. In the same way that, you know, an armed robbery, well, we could turn around and say, you know, armed robbery is wrong, but I could understand somebody wanting to make six million pounds easily. The sin itself has a rationale, has an end that I can understand. Having lots of money is a good thing. You're going about it the wrong way, but I can really understand. But Augustine cuts that off. And what he's doing there, I think, is demonstrating to us something very, very important about sin. Sin doesn't have, ultimately, a logic or rationale to it. It's an irrational thing. And then Augustine, also, just almost as an aside, he emphasizes the fact that he was with a gang of friends. I had two sons, and the interesting thing is, they're both good lads, I never worried when my sons went out on their own. My wife and I worried when they went out with their friends. And their friends were all, they were good guys too. But it's somehow the case that the moral sum of a gang of young men is less than the moral sum of the parts. When young men get together, the moral bar drops dramatically. Dramatically. Augustine's touching on that in this passage. And then of course, he goes on to ask the question, so why did I do it? If I didn't eat the fruit, if I got no intrinsic benefit from the sin, why did I do it? And the answer that comes up with this is this, I did it because it was wrong. I did it because it was committing the sin that gave me the buzz, to use modern language. And you'll go on to think then about, well, why is that the case? Well, the one to whom law does not apply is the one who stands above the law. Who stands above the law? God. Why did I commit this sin? Because in the moment of committing that sin, I was God. I felt like God. But the problem is, of course, that a little bit like a drug-induced high, the effect wears off. Therefore, I need to do it again, and again, and again. It's always fascinating, isn't it? When people are done for serious crimes, generally speaking, it's not a one-off. A few years ago, I was very interested with a case of a woman in New York. She was a high-flying attorney, and she'd run up massive credit card bills on buying things on the Internet. And when the warrant officers broke into her home, They found all of this stuff she'd bought on the internet still in the boxes, unopened. And I thought, what an Augustinian moment. Because we naturally think she was buying this stuff because she wanted to have stuff. But no. She was buying stuff because she wanted to buy stuff. In the moments of the purchase, she felt like God. What Augustine does here is he takes this very trivial incident and he explains the psychology of sin. Sin is done because sin makes us feel like God. When we break the law, we feel we are independent of God. We are God-like. That's why we do it, and that's why we keep doing it. And yet, there is even more brilliance to what Augustine does here, and the last point is this. What is the sin he describes? Stealing fruit from a tree. stealing fruit from a tree, without wanting to sound disrespectful. What is the first great act of scrumping? Genesis 3, the stealing of the fruit in the garden. As you read this passage, and I'm laughing away to myself thinking, yeah, I remember doing that, I remember stealing fruit from trees, from neighbors' houses without permission, getting, I got a kick out of that. and suddenly my mind goes back to the garden. And what Augustine is doing here is springing that trap. Yes, I'm enfolded under Adam's sin. I'm condemned in Adam. It's the most brilliant paragraph. The most brilliant literary paragraph in many ways. And I use it to try to persuade people that old Christian books, even really old Christian books, written at the end of the 4th century, are worth reading. Because when I read that passage of Augustine, I see myself reflected. And for all the talk about diversity, And for all of the truth in some ways, that Americans are different from the British, and they are different from the Japanese, and they are different from the Dutch, for all the talk about diversity, there's also a fundamental unity of human nature, which in the great historical stories of the church, and the great historical texts from the past, are reflected in a way that allows us still to learn from them. So four reasons for studying church history. Most simple. Inspirational. It's great to read inspirational stories about church history. The same as it's great to read inspirational stories about your own nation. It's great. I love to read stories of the Second World War and Churchill and things like that. It's great to read those stories. It's great to read them about church history as well. Secondly, it's important to read church history to understand who you are and why you think the way you do in the context you find yourself. Thirdly, it's important to read church history, and I would say history in general. in order to know how to think about the culture in which you live in in the present. And fourthly, it's important to read church history because the Lord has provided great thinkers throughout church history that we are able to benefit from. I had the pleasure, it's slightly odd, but I interviewed the other week the Roman Catholic Archbishop of of Philadelphia has written a very good book on the contemporary state of society. And at some point I sort of said to him, where do you get this all from? And he said, I get it from Saint Augustine. And he said, I love living in the present day, he said, because Augustine thought it all out for me and I just have to go back and read Augustine. And I thought, yeah, it's great, isn't it? We live in an era where we have hundreds and hundreds of years of Christians who've thought about what it means to be a Christian in the world that the Lord has given us. that we can now build on in order to be better Christians in the present. That's not all I have to say, but it's all I'm going to say. I'll throw it open now for any questions.