Coming up today on Renewing Your Mind, why Church History Matters.

The whole history of the Church has shaped who we are as Christians today and has shaped the churches

to which we belong today. And the better that we can understand that history, the more we can

really understand ourselves.

Hello and welcome to Renewing Your Mind, I'm Lee Webb.

If you're tuning into the program for the first time, welcome.

We are a listener supported outreach of Ligatear Ministries.

Dr. R. C. Sproul founded this ministry in 1971 with a central purpose of proclaiming,

teaching and defending the holiness of God to as many people as possible.

To that end, we offer literally thousands of resources that deal with theology,

biblical studies, Christian living, worldview and culture, and church history.

And it's that last area of study that is our focus this week.

Why Church History? Well, we heard Ligatear teaching fellow Dr. Robert Godfrey touch on a key

reason at the top of the program. Let's join him now, though, as he expands on that thought.

This is the first lesson of the first part of Dr. Godfrey's series, A Survey of Church History.

Some years ago, I read a peanuts cartoon and one of the peanuts

characters was assigned the topic for a paper, Church History.

And she paused and thought a minute and she said,

when writing on Church History, you have to begin at the beginning.

My pastor was born in 1930.

Already shows how dated that cartoon is, but that's the American attitude often, I think,

that 1930 is ancient history because most of us weren't there and it's a long time ago.

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