In 1964, my family left East Kilbride to return to my folk’s home village of Cambuslang. We had outgrown our apartment and were moving to a house. As part of the move, my father had to give up the leadership of his church’s youth fellowship; and the young people marked his departure by giving him a book: A. M. Renwick’s The Story of the Church.
Some years later, we had moved back to East Kilbride and I was part of that youth fellowship which my father had once led. One day, stuck in the house (it was probably raining), I was scanning the bookshelves in our living room. There I found the book and read it. That is where it all began.
The paperback which was given to my father is from the 1963 fifth reprinting of the first edition. The copy which I purchased recently is from the first printing of the fourth edition. To give some idea of this book’s popularity, the first edition came out in March 1958 and by December, IVF had to print another run. By the time the second edition came out in 1985, there had been fifteen reprintings of the first. When the third edition came out in 1999, the second had been reprinted eight times, the last five reprintings being in a new format. The third edition was reprinted three times before being reformatted in 2004. The fully revised and updated fourth edition came out in 2020.
There were some changes over the years. In 1968, Inter-Varsity Fellowship hived off its publishing wing which became Inter-Varsity Press and is completely separate from InterVarsity Press. IVF, then, is replaced as publisher by IVP; the footnotes in the original are now parenthetic references in the text; and Renwick gained first an editor and then a co-author in Allan M. Harman, his former student, and his stepdaughter’s husband.
The original author, Alexander MacDonald Renwick (1888-1965), was a Free Church of Scotland minister who served in two congregations in Scotland, as a chaplain in the First World War, as a missionary to Peru, and as Professor of Church History at the Free Church College in Edinburgh. He wrote the first twenty-one chapters of the fourth edition. His chapter twenty-two in the first edition has been replaced and augmented by chapters twenty-two to twenty-six of the fourth. The new chapters were written by Allan Harman who is now a Research Professor at the Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, after retiring as its Principal in 2001.
In 253 pages, divided into twenty-six chapters, the fourth edition takes the reader from the Apostolic age to the present. The chapters are subdivided into sections each of which makes a succinct contribution to the flow of the narrative. Throughout the book, Renwick’s remarks which were current to a 1958 reader have been brought up to date. Other than alterations of that kind, Renwick has been left to speak for himself. For example:
The Westminster Assembly of Divines met from 1 July 1643 until 22 February 1649, with the object of finding a basis for a united church for the whole of Britain. Its members were mostly outstanding graduates from Oxford and Cambridge, scholars whose piety and learning would have graced any gathering, and the six Scottish representatives were in no way inferior to the rest. These men gave the clearest and most orderly presentation of divine truth ever set forth in a Confession of Faith. The Westminster Confession was adopted in Scotland in 1647, and has remained the symbol of orthodox Presbyterian churches throughout the English-speaking world. It is the finest fruit of Reformed theology.
Written from a Reformed and Presbyterian viewpoint, The Story of the Church was and is directed toward evangelical undergraduates. It might be that the undergraduates of the late 1950s had a deeper pool of general knowledge than their modern counterparts. It might also be that the evangelical students in the late 1950s were more inclined to approach their faith with something of the rigour with which they approached their studies. Perhaps some modern readers will have to do some Googling to keep up with Renwick and Harman. Nevertheless, for a one-volume introduction to the history of the Church, this book has stood the test of time.