A World Faith: The Age of Missions | The Church Through the Ages (Ep. 11

Season 2 begins. For fifteen hundred years, Christianity was mostly the faith of one continent. Then, almost all at once, it boarded ships and set out for the ends of the earth. This is the story of how a local faith became a world faith. In this opening episode of Season 2, we follow the great age of missions: the first Catholic wave that rode out with Spain and Portugal, extraordinary figures like Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci, the later Protestant awakening that began with an ordinary English shoemaker named William Carey, and the famous missionaries of the nineteenth century, from David Livingstone to Hudson Taylor. We tell it honestly, facing how the Gospel was at times carried by the hand of empire, and we uncover the twist that changes everything: the most important people in the missionary age were not the missionaries, but the local believers who made the faith their own and carried it across their own lands. This is Episode 11 of The Church Through the Ages, an original series telling the 2,000-year story of the Christian Church with honesty and balance, drawn from the historical record.