A new history of the Christian church aims to put two thousand years of faith within reach of ordinary readers. Kevin DeYoung's Church History for Everyone: The Story of Christianity from the Fall of Jerusalem to the Dawn of the Reformation (Volume 1), published by Crossway in 2026, covers the church from AD 70 to the eve of the Protestant Reformation, according to a review by historian John Fea in Christianity Today.

DeYoung, a Presbyterian pastor who holds a PhD in history, takes a different path from most church history textbooks, Fea writes. Rather than telling the story as one long narrative, he builds the book around the lives of people — an approach that lets readers meet the faith through the men and women who shaped it.

The volume introduces most of the major early church fathers and medieval Christian thinkers, including Irenaeus, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, Benedict, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas. It also includes political figures whose decisions influenced the church's growth, such as Titus Vespasian, Constantine, and Charlemagne.

Fea notes that DeYoung writes as a pastor for Christians, not simply as a scholar for other scholars. Church history, in DeYoung's telling, is meant to build up the church. The book is largely celebratory, the reviewer says, but it does not look away from the tragedy and failures of Christian leaders during these centuries.

The review also credits DeYoung with bringing current scholarship to a lay audience. His "Notes on Sources" at the end of the book offer rich resources for readers who want to dig deeper, Fea writes. In his foreword, historian Mark Noll praises the book as a "gift of advanced scholarship, a gift of patient distilling of that scholarship, [and] a gift of readable prose communicating complicated material clearly."

For churches and small groups, the book's design may be its greatest strength. The chapters are short and each ends with discussion questions, Fea notes, adding that if he were asked to teach a Sunday school course on early Christianity, he would seriously consider using this book.

Fea's review pairs DeYoung's volume with two books on American history: Eric Metaxas's Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World and the late Daniel Walker Howe's Pulitzer Prize-winning What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. In the reviewer's judgment, Metaxas forces a "Christian nation" reading onto the Revolution story, while Howe, writing as a trained historian, shows how roads, canals, telegraphs, and newspapers knit scattered settlements into a nation — and how the gospel spread through those same networks during the Second Great Awakening.

Together, the three books raise a question every generation of Christians must answer: how do we tell our own story honestly — celebrating what God has done through His people, without hiding where His people have failed?