Christianity: A Guide for the Curious and the Perplexed
2000 years ago something truly odd happened. A man who was clearly dead and buried was reportedly seen alive again by a large number of people. His grave was noted to be empty. Stories circulated that maybe his enemies stole the body for nefarious reasons. Then, his closest followers, who had returned to fishing or had fled and were in hiding, suddenly stepped out into the daylight of 1st century Jerusalem. They boldly and openly proclaimed that God had raised this man from the dead.
The man was Jesus of Nazareth. Heretic to some. Healer and prophet to others. Most have heard of him in some manner. His followers, those 12 disciples and their associates, were subsequently willing to die for what they believed. To them, he was “christus” or “messiah” – God’s “anointed one” (or for those Star Wars fans out there, “the chosen one”).
Their message “turned the world upside down”. Christians for thousands of years afterward have continued to proclaim that Jesus was and is the great "chosen one", whose birth, life, and death were necessary to heal an ancient breach between a holy God, and a wicked and corrupt humanity. They have continued to believe that he was raised again from death, and ascended to the hidden realms where dwell the angels. Christians have a story to tell.
This entire website is dedicated to telling that story. I invite you to browse the links to the right (or below) and elsewhere on this site. We truly hope that whether you are a lifelong Christian or this is your first time thinking of such things, that you will find our site to be a helpful tool.
Since you are reading this, you clearly have begun in the "Basics of the Faith" section. The Christian's main source of information about God and his works is a collection of writings from antiquity that we now call The Holy Bible. The various creeds and confessions of the church reflect the early Christians' attempts to define and explain what they believed about Jesus and what he did. An A to Z guide to words and concepts may help you by explaining what is meant by religious jargon like "atonement" or "baptism". You can find explanations of some of the symbolism that creeps into Christian art and architecture.
Don't neglect the other sections. Christians of some varieties use calendars that help them relive in a cyclical manner some of the major aspects of the Christian story, and that recall at various times the lives of great "saints" and exemplars. We plan to expand our section on the calendar and information about Christian feasts and seasons.
You can learn a lot about people of faith also by how they worship and pray, and therefore we have "daily worship" materials, as well as collections of prayers of Christians through the ages. Christians pray in different ways, of course, and I can't claim that this is all there is to find--more a scraping off the top of a very deep well. Besides prayer, some Christians practice other spiritual disciplines to try to grow in their faith, and information about this is provided.
May God bless you on your own spiritual journey.