Divisions among Christian communions have sometimes arisen from and are often sustained by vastly different accounts of the origins and development of important historical events. Telling the Churches' Stories takes a critical look at the practice of writing church history and challenges historians of Christianity to be self-consciously ecumenical in the practice of their craft.
The result of a study done by the Faith and Order Working Group of the National Council of Churches from 1988 to 1991, which studied the interaction between views of the history of Christianity and problems in ecumenical relations, the essays in this volume evaluate and employ fourteen principles for writing Christian history from an ecumenical perspective.