This website is intended to provide resources to point people back to historical Christianity. Originally the term Christian was applied only to people who were disciples or students of Jesus, meaning that they had a relationship with Jesus that was focused on imitating and learning from him. Jesus was understood to be the Christ, which is just the English form of the Greek word christos/ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ/χριστος, which means “anointed one”. To anoint means to apply oil to something, which was done to appoint kings and priests into their positions.
Throughout Jesus’s ministry, it was understood that his claim to be the Christ was a claim to be king. It was for this reason that Jesus’s enemies were able to have him executed at the hands of the Roman army. Sadly, over time, this understanding of Jesus as king (including the obvious implications of that claim) has been largely lost from most of the groups who claim to be Christian. This had led to a large-scale ignoring or minimizing of one of the most central themes of the New Testament, the authority of King Jesus and the good message of his kingdom. This ignoring of his authority is associated with a failure to recognize Jesus’s teachings, and especially his commands, as central to Christianity. The result of this is that many people who claim to be Christian (including many who have claimed to be so for many years) have very little idea what Jesus commanded and therefore they rarely obey him or live like him. However, shortly before Jesus left the earth, he summarized the disciple-making mission he had for his disciples with three points: 1. go and make disciples of of all nations/people groups, 2. baptizing them in the name of the father, son and holy spirit, and 3. teaching them to observe all that Jesus had commanded them (Matthew 28:19-20). Not surprisingly, when Jesus’s early disciples went and did this, they produced very different results from what most “Christian” groups produce today when they fail to emphasize baptism or teaching people to obey Jesus’s commands as foundational aspects of making disciples. It is our hope that you will be inspired by the materials on this website to return to the original focus and seriousness of early Christianity.