This week on Cultivate, Charlie and Abigail begin a new series on church history. Before getting into the people and events, they start with a simpler question: why should a Bible-centered church spend months studying what happened after the Bible was written?

Abigail explains that every era's view of God is shaped by its circumstances, including war, money, and who held power. She draws on her history minor and her love of bottom-up history, the idea that you can understand a society better through the fairy tales it told than through its official records. She also makes the point that what looks like a new question almost always has a very old answer.

Charlie then makes the case in three parts. First, church history pulls us out of a "just me, God, and my Bible" faith. None of us studies Scripture in a vacuum, and we have all been shaped by 2,000 years of Christian thought, whether we realize it or not. Second, it shows us what the church has believed everywhere and always. Those anchor points have held steady across centuries and cultures, and they are what to hold onto when faith is being rethought. Third, and maybe most importantly, it keeps us from reinventing old heresies. Many "new" ideas about God turn out to be ancient ones with a fresh coat of paint and a soothing TikTok voice.