The History Behind Today's Church Leadership Crisis

In Before Church and State, Andrew Willard Jones describes a time when Christendom's lay rulers were leaders in building the City of God. They “wielded the secular, temporal sword . . . bestowed on the Christian people by Christ himself.” In the medieval era, before sharp categorical distinctions had been drawn among “church,” “state,” and “secular society,” Christians understood their world as “sacramental,” with “the material and the spiritual . . . always present together.”