#1 The History of Christianity in Britain

Introduction

The British Isles was one of the earliest places to be evangelized.  The Ancient Britons, who were the original inhabitants historically of Britain, were first evangelized by missionaries from Judea in the 1^st century AD.

Britain has a 2000 year history of Christianity incorporating the Brittonic-speaking church, the Celtic Church and the Saxon church which were Orthodox churches; the Roman Catholic Church of the Normans and the Middle Ages; and Protestant churches of The Reformation which were the Anglican Church of England and various Evangelical churches.

In this article I seek to understand and describe the different churches of the British Isles that grew up between the 1^st and the 19^th century.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ was brought by missionaries to:

• Ancient Briton pagans who were the constructors of megalithic stone circles in Britain and Brittany.  These were stone calendars calibrated to the summer and winter solstice.  Rituals may have been centred on a sun god.
• Gaelic-speaking Gaels of Celtic lands whose religion was centred on druids and the veneration of oak trees.  They worshipped in sacred groves of trees.  They also believed that sprites inhabited springs and wells.
• Saxons and Angles were pagans when they invaded England, but were converted to Christianity.
• Vikings were pagans who invaded Christian Saxon England from Denmark and Norway.  They believed in the god Thor, god of thunder and storms.

Conversion to Christianity took place through missionary monks celebrating the Lord’s Supper or Communion in open air gatherings in each small place where they arrived on their travels.  Many stories of miracles and healings have been told of these  itinerant preacher priests known for their asceticism.  In this way the people were evangelized, but evangelization also came through the conversion of kings and royal households of the many kingdoms of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

All of the peoples of Britain had been Christianized by the 9^th century or sometime prior to the Norman takeover of the 11^th century.

The Norman invasion of 1066 brought the Roman Catholic Church to England, whose centre of power and authority was Rome and the Pope.  Catholicism has various facets which had a huge influence on life in Britain during the Middle Ages, not only in terms of religion, but also in running the economy.

Reformation in Britain was a sweeping away of most of what had come before.  It was the return to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that had become overlain with many layers of ritual and  dogma.  Difficult choices were debated on what to retain and what to remove of the old religion.  These debates and disputes took place between Anglican mainstream ministers and the purist Puritans.  There emerged liberal and evangelical factions belonging to the new Church of England in Tudor times.

Reformation brought huge Christian revivals in England, Scotland and Wales with Evangelical preachers going on missions to the common people, speaking to them in their own languages whether dialects of English or in Welsh or Gaelic.  The religious language  Latin was banned by the head of the Church of England, Queen Elizabeth I.  Latin was only used by Catholics whose priests were in hiding, celebrating Latin masses in secret at the houses of ‘Recusants’.

The King James Bible of the Anglican Church helped shape modern English.  High literacy in England came from Protestant families reading the Bible.  It shaped culture and helped bring in the modern era we now inhabit.

Christian revivals shaped the British nations where they took place and probably prevented all-out secular revolution from taking place in Britain as it had done in France.

The 19^th century saw the development of the Anglican Church into a wider communion as the British Empire took it to other continents and countries.  There was Roman Catholic emancipation in the mid-19^th century that brought Catholic churches and very successful Catholic schools back to England.

Evangelical churches sprang up of various sorts such as Baptists, Methodists, United Reformed often conserving fundamentals of Christian belief  in an increasingly secular world through the 20^th century.

Most inhabitants of Britain would describe themselves as Christian and a very high proportion were regular church-goers up to the First World War.  It becomes more complicated after this, but my article ends here.