CHRISTIANITY SINCE CONSTANTINE

After Constantine made Christianity legal in 313 AD, the faith continued to grow under the protection of the Roman Emperors. Monks started monasteries and from these centres of work and prayer, missionaries went out to convert the people of northern Europe, including Britain and Germany. In the East, the church was also growing. In 410, the Persian Church (later called the Nestorians) broke with the Roman Church and began 1000 years of missionary work in Persia, Central Asia, India, Mongolia and China.

As the Roman Empire weakened, political power moved east to Constantinople and the Eastern Orthodox Church began to develop separately from the Roman Church. With the final fall of the Roman Empire in the seventh century, Europe moved into the Dark Ages. After the death of Muhammad in 632, the armies of Islam conquered much of the Christian world, including the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. In 1054, years of bad feelings between the Western and the Eastern Church resulted in the Roman Pope (leader of the Catholic Church) and the Byzantine Patriarch (leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church) excommunicating each other.

The Pope called on European Christians to capture Jerusalem from the Muslims and, from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, many went off to fight in the Crusades. Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks in 1453. At the same time, the Spanish Inquisition was busy torturing people who did not agree with the Catholic Church. It was one of the darkest periods in the history of Christianity.

However, there was some light in the darkness. The Slavs of Russia converted to Orthodox Christianity in 987. In the East, the Nestorians continued to make converts among the Turks, Mongols and Chinese. St. Francis of Assisi lived a life of service to the poor and started the Franciscan order of monks. In the fourteenth century, early reformers like John Wycliffe of England and John Hus of Bohemia taught that people should live according to the simple teachings of the Bible, not the traditions of the Catholic Church.

Two centuries later, this challenge to the Roman Catholic Church continued under reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, who taught salvation by faith, not religious works. Under their leadership, the Protestant Reformation took place, resulting in the Lutheran, Reformed and Presbyterian churches of today. In England, the Anglican Church was started when the Pope refused to grant King Henry VIII a divorce. At the same time, the Anabaptist movement (meaning "Rebaptizers" because they did not accept infant baptism) gained many followers in Europe, resulting in the Baptist and Mennonite churches of today. The Catholic Church responded to the Reformation with the Counter Reformation. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were a number of wars between Catholics and Protestants, such as the Thirty Years War in Germany.

Christianity spread to the New World with the explorers and early settlers. Catholicism was brought to Central and South America by the Spanish and Portuguese and to North America by the French. The Non-Conformists, English Christians who did not wish to be Anglican, journeyed to America, beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620. During the eighteenth century in England, John and Charles Wesley led a renewal movement within the Anglican Church which eventually became the Methodist Church. At the same time, the First, Second and Third Awakenings brought spiritual revival to many in America.

During the nineteenth century, Protestants began to send out missionaries, spreading the gospel to Africa, China, India, Japan and Southeast Asia. The nineteenth century was also when the Evangelical movement began to develop in England and some Christians in America began to call themselves Fundamentalists, because they wanted to return to the "fundamentals" of the Christian faith.

The twentieth century began with religious revivals in various parts of the Western world, which led to the establishment of the Pentecostal Church. During the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church continued its reformation with Vatican II and the Charismatic Movement attracted large numbers of people to both Protestant and Catholic churches. Today, about one-third of the people in the world call themselves Christians, including over one billion Catholics, nearly 450 million Protestants, nearly 175 million Orthodox believers and almost 200 million others.