Oh, welcome to five minutes in church history. We've all experienced these weeks of

upheaval and challenge as we have been through this global COVID-19 pandemic. I've

always believed that church history is helpful for the church today and I think

that's true in this moment. We of course as Christians need to look to the pages of scripture as our authority and as the place

on which we stand but we can also look to the pages of church history to learn

from those who've gone before us and what we see as we look through church history is that the church has been

through many times of crisis. In fact, some of those crises came right at the beginnings

of the church. One big crisis came before we even get out of the pages of the

New Testament. In AD 64, there was the great fire in Rome, and Nero, the Caesar at the time, affixed the blame to the Christians, probably to cast the suspicions

off himself for starting it.

And Nero then launched a serious and horrific moment of persecution of the church.

He would use Christians as living torches to light up his gardens at night as he would have chariot races.

And all of this persecution, well, it had a backlash for Nero.

It began to win over the populace as they began to have a great deal of sympathy

for Christians. And Christians coming out of this persecution by Nero were seen as those who stood strong in their faith in Jesus Christ.

We also see a moment of crisis at the time of the four hundreds and the sack of Rome.

By now, of course, the Roman Empire is the Christian Empire, and this was a moment

where many saw that Christianity was inextricably linked to the Roman Empire.

And so with the collapse of Rome, the question came about, well, what would happen to the church?

Well, one such church father was Jerome.

He was a brilliant scholar translated the Vulgate. We've talked about him before and five minutes in

church history. Well when he heard of the sack of Rome, he went into a cave, he gave up, he said,

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