Christian History Institute

What Christian History Institute is

Christian History Institute is a nonprofit publisher and educational ministry that has produced Christian History magazine since 1982 and a catalog of historical documentaries since the 1980s. The flagship product is the magazine — a quarterly print publication with each issue built around a single theme: a person (Wesley, Calvin, Luther, Augustine, Hildegard), a movement (the Reformation in Scotland, the missionary century, the early monastics), a region (Christianity in China, the Coptic church), or a question (How we got the Bible, the church and slavery, women in the early church).

The archive is the headline. Every issue from the magazine’s history is available as free PDF and as fully readable HTML on the CHI website, with the original images, sidebars, and timelines intact. Alongside the magazine sit the documentary catalog (DVDs and streaming, mostly via the related Vision Video imprint), a daily devotional drawing on writings from across church history, and a steady stream of free study guides for churches and schools. The throughline is the founder’s conviction — Ken Curtis built CHI on the idea that ordinary Christians should have access to their own history.

Why pastors and homeschoolers keep coming back to CHI

The single biggest practical difference between Christian History Institute and almost every other church-history resource on the web is that CHI commissions real historians to write for real readers, then refuses to put a paywall in front of the result. Christianity Today’s history coverage is excellent but mostly behind a subscription. CCEL has the primary sources but no popular-level explanation. Academic journals have the rigor but assume seminary training. CHI is the rare site that splits the difference — the byline at the top of a CHI essay is usually someone who teaches at a seminary or has published with Eerdmans or Oxford, and the prose is written for an interested adult with no background in the field.

The other thing CHI does that is unusual: it covers all of it. The early church period, the Eastern church, medieval Catholicism, the magisterial Reformation, the radical Reformation, missions, revivals, the African and Asian churches, modern movements — each tradition described on its own terms by someone who knows it. That ecumenical breadth is the thoughtful person’s answer to the denominational tunnel-vision that dominates most free Christian content. If you want the Catholic side of the Reformation, CHI has an issue. If you want the Anabaptist side, CHI has an issue. If you want the global south story of the 20th century, CHI has an issue.

The 200+ themed magazine issues: a free church-history library hiding in plain sight

The Christian History magazine archive is the headline asset and the reason most people who know about CHI tell other people about CHI. Every issue from the 1982 launch onward — currently north of 150 numbered issues plus an older series — sits on the site as a free PDF and as readable HTML. Each issue is themed: Issue 17 on Women in the Early Church, Issue 34 on Bonhoeffer, Issue 41 on the American Puritans, Issue 79 on the African Apostles, Issue 122 on the People’s Bible, Issue 147 on Mary in the Imagination of the Church. The themes alternate between figures, movements, regions, periods, and big-question issues — a deliberate editorial mix designed to keep the back catalog usable as a reference library, not just a magazine run.

In practice this is the asset that gets pastors hooked. Preparing a sermon on the Reformation? There is an issue. Teaching a youth class on the Crusades? There is an issue. Trying to understand why your friend converted to Eastern Orthodoxy? There is an issue. Each one runs roughly 50 pages with a lead essay, several supporting articles, a sidebar of primary-source quotations, a recommended-reading list, and a timeline. The recommended-reading lists alone are worth the visit — they are curated by working historians and will steer you to the best book on almost any topic in the field. Most users do not need the print subscription. The free archive is the product.

Documentary video series: the Ken Curtis catalog and Trial and Testimony of the Early Church

Before CHI was primarily a magazine, it was a film studio. Founder Ken Curtis produced documentaries for decades — most famously Trial and Testimony of the Early Church, a five-part series tracing Christianity from the apostolic age through Constantine that is still a standard adult-education tool. Other titles in the catalog cover the Waldensians, John Wycliffe, the English Reformation, Candle in the Dark (the story of William Carey), and a long list of biographical and movement studies. The films are not glossy by 2026 standards — many were produced in the 1990s and early 2000s — but the historical content holds up, and the dramatizations are restrained in a way that modern Christian video sometimes is not.

Distribution is split between the CHI site itself (where you can preview and purchase) and the related Vision Video imprint, which handles the wider catalog of Christian historical films. Many titles are available as DVD, digital download, and streaming rental. Churches and schools can typically purchase a license for group viewing — the Ken Curtis catalog has spent forty years as a quiet backbone of confirmation classes, homeschool co-ops, and adult Sunday school. If you remember watching a black-and-white-feel Christian history documentary in a church basement in 1998, there is a very good chance it was a CHI / Vision Video production.

Popular-level scholarship: the rare resource that is rigorous without being academic

The thing CHI does that almost no one else does for free is consistently land in the narrow zone between academic monograph and Wikipedia summary. The contributor list for any given issue typically reads like a graduate-seminar bibliography — Mark Noll on American religion, Bruce Shelley on church-history surveys, Justo González on the Latin American church, Edwin Yamauchi on the ancient Near East, Diana Butler Bass on modern Christianity, Timothy George on the Reformation. These are people who write technical work for academic publishers and are willing to write at a popular level for CHI because the magazine’s editorial standard is genuinely high.

What that means for a reader is that the essays are footnoted (lightly), the claims are sourced, and the bibliographies at the end of each issue will get you to the real scholarship if you want to go deeper. This is the model that respects your work — CHI assumes its readers are capable of handling real history, including the parts that are messy, contested, or unflattering to whichever tradition the reader belongs to. That assumption is increasingly rare in popular Christian publishing, and it is the main reason CHI has held its audience for four decades.

Pricing

Where Christian History Institute falls behind

No modern app or mobile-first experience. The site is browser-only, the design is dated, and reading a 50-page PDF on your phone in 2026 is technically possible but not pleasant. Competitors that started later have leapfrogged CHI on UX.

Search is functional but shallow. The site search will find articles by keyword, but there is no faceted browsing by century, region, or theological tradition, and no semantic search. Power users learn to use Google with a site:christianhistoryinstitute.org filter.

Update cadence is slow. The magazine ships quarterly and the rest of the site updates gently around it. If you want a steady drip of new content, you will exhaust CHI’s new-publication feed quickly — the value is in the back catalog, not the front page.

Video catalog is aging. The Ken Curtis documentaries are historically valuable but the production values reflect the era they were made in. Newer streaming-era Christian history content from outlets like BibleProject, Ligonier, and the Gospel Coalition is more polished, even when it is less rigorous.

No commentary, exegesis, or Bible-study integration. CHI is purely a history resource. If you want to connect a church-history question to a specific Bible passage with cross-references and original-language notes, you will need a separate tool — Logos, Bible Hub, Blue Letter Bible, or similar.

Christian History Institute vs. CCEL vs. Christianity Today (history coverage)

Different strengths. CHI is the popular-level survey resource — themed magazine issues written by working historians for ordinary readers, free and searchable by topic. CCEL (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) is the primary-source library — the full texts of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Wesley, the Cappadocians, the Anglican divines, and hundreds of others in free public-domain editions. Christianity Today is the modern journalism arm — current reporting on the global church, with a serious history vertical that runs feature essays from many of the same writers CHI commissions.

CHI is better at the survey. If you want a 50-page themed treatment of the Reformation, the early church, or a single figure like Wesley or Calvin, that is what CHI is built for. CCEL is broader and deeper for primary sources — if you want to read what Augustine actually wrote, not what historians say about him, that is where you go. Christianity Today is better for the modern church, current movements, and contemporary historical journalism, but most of its archive is behind a subscription paywall, where CHI’s is entirely free.

For most readers, the three are complements, not competitors. Use CHI for the popular survey of a topic. Use CCEL when CHI’s footnote sends you to a primary source you want to read in full. Use Christianity Today for the modern half of the story and the journalism. None of the three is trying to be the other two, and the combined free coverage of those three sites is, in practical terms, a small seminary’s church-history library on the open web.

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