Sunday To Society

On March 24, 1621, Elizabeth Winslow died at Plymouth. She was about 27, and she was the last person to die that first winter. A few weeks earlier, Susanna White had buried her husband William, leaving her with a five-year-old son and a baby born aboard the Mayflower. In May, Susanna married Elizabeth’s widower, Edward Winslow, in the first wedding in the colony. That autumn Susanna was one of onl...

On Sunday, July 6, 1924, the 100-metre heats were run at the Paris Olympics without Britain’s fastest sprinter. Eric Liddell was at church. He had known the schedule for months, and he had already decided. Most people know the next part from Chariots of Fire : the folded note before the 400-metre final, the gold medal, the world-record time. But the film ends with the stadium. Liddell’s real story...

On October 31, 1517, a 33-year-old monk and university professor sat down in Wittenberg and wrote to his archbishop. Attached to the letter were 95 propositions about indulgences, written in Latin and meant for academic debate. Martin Luther wasn’t trying to start a revolution. He was asking a question. The famous picture of Luther swinging a hammer at the church door comes to us from later accoun...

On January 3, 1956, five young American missionaries landed on a sandbar along the Curaray River in Ecuador. They had spent months making friendly contact with the Waodani — a tribe known for extreme violence toward outsiders — dropping gifts from a small yellow plane into their settlements. The first face-to-face encounter had gone well. Hope was high. On January 8 all five were speared to death....

In January 1349 Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury wrote a letter to every priest in his diocese. The plague had swept through Bath and Wells so quickly, killing so many of his clergy, that he had run out of ordained men to administer last rites to the dying. His solution was unprecedented — he authorized the sick to confess their sins to laypeople. If no man was present, even to a woman. He had institute...

In the autumn of 1904 a 26 year old former coal miner stood up in a small chapel in Loughor, South Wales and began to pray. Within months an estimated 100,000 people across Wales had converted to Christianity. Taverns closed for lack of customers. Convictions for drunkenness fell dramatically — in Glamorgan alone they dropped by 50% between 1904 and 1907. Magistrates arrived at court to find no ca...

Open your Bible to Matthew 6. Jesus gives instructions on giving, prayer, and fasting — three disciplines treated as parallel practices, each introduced the same way. He says "when you give." He says "when you pray." He says "when you fast." Not if. When. Most Protestant Christians pray. Most give. Almost none fast. Somewhere between the first century and today, one of the three disciplines Jesus...

One morning in Bristol, England, George Müller sat 300 orphaned children down at an empty breakfast table. There was no food in the house. There was no money to buy any. He bowed his head and gave thanks to God for what they were about to receive. A few minutes later a baker knocked at the door. He told Müller he hadn't been able to sleep the night before and had felt compelled to bake bread for t...

Nero burned them as torches to light his garden parties. Diocletian demolished their churches and burned their Scriptures. Ten emperors across 250 years tried to destroy the early church. None of them succeeded. From the time of Nero's persecution in 64 AD until Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313 AD, Christians suffered many periods of persecution, sometimes lasting for decades. They were accused...

In 1604 a king commissioned a new Bible translation. He wasn't motivated by theology. He was motivated by footnotes. The Geneva Bible — produced in 1560 by Protestant exiles in Calvin's Geneva — was the most beloved English Bible of its era. It was the most widely read and influential English Bible of the 16th and 17th centuries, printed from 1560 to 1644 in over 200 different editions. Shakespear...

Someone burned copies of this book to keep it out of your hands. The man who made it paid with his life. John Wycliffe was an Oxford theologian who believed that ordinary people had the right to read Scripture in their own language. In the 1380s his followers began producing the first handwritten English translations of the Bible — distributed by hand across England at enormous personal risk. Wycl...

Someone decided what goes in your Bible. The question is who — and whether you should trust them. The 66 books of Scripture were not delivered from heaven in a single moment. They were recognized through centuries of careful, contested, Spirit-guided discernment by real people under real pressure. Early Christians were being tortured to hand over their sacred texts. Heretics were circulating their...

He was a Dutch factory worker with a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, a car full of Bibles, and a prayer. Andrew van der Bijl grew up in wartime Netherlands, survived the Nazi occupation as a boy, served in the Dutch army in Indonesia, and came home wounded and reckless. He found a Bible on his hospital bedside table, read it out of boredom, and was converted. Nobody would have picked him for what came...

He spent nineteen months chained to an oar in the belly of a French galley ship. When he was released he went straight back to preaching. John Knox came to the Reformed faith late, bodyguarding a Scottish preacher named George Wishart — who was arrested and burned alive while Knox watched. Within months Knox himself was a prisoner, rowing in chains across the Mediterranean. He later wrote that eve...

In 1415 the most powerful church council in the world summoned a Czech priest to answer for his beliefs, promised him safe passage, then arrested him the moment he arrived. Jan Huss had spent years preaching against a church visibly rotting from the inside — bishops buying and selling offices, indulgences traded for cash, multiple men simultaneously claiming to be pope. He had written one of the m...

He had no seminary degree. No mission organization. No sending church. Just a cobbler's bench, a borrowed map of the world, and a conviction that the Great Commission was still in effect. In 1792 William Carey published an 87-page argument — backed by global population data he compiled himself — that ordinary Christians were obligated to go to the nations. The same year he helped found the Baptist...

In this episode of Sunday to Society, Riley Reno sits down with Seth White for a spirited, encouraging conversation about their top Bible stories. From Moses at the burning bush and David and Goliath to Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah, Ruth, and the birth of Christ, they share the passages that have shaped their faith and ministry—and explain why these stories still matter today. Along the way, th...

He never owned a home. He never married. He kept everything he owned in a saddlebag. By the time Francis Asbury died in 1816, he had traveled approximately 300,000 miles on horseback, preached over 16,000 sermons, and watched American Methodism grow from fewer than 600 members to over 200,000. He didn't do it from a desk. He did it on the road — through fever, rheumatism, mountain winters, and fro...

Everyone knows the last eleven words. But almost nobody knows what came before them. On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry stood up inside St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia — not a statehouse, not a town square, a church — and delivered one of the most consequential speeches in American history. The Second Virginia Convention had gathered there because no building in Williamsburg was large enough...

In August of 1776, George Washington's entire army was trapped against the East River with the British closing in. By every military calculation, that night should have ended the American Revolution. Then a fog rolled in so thick that nine thousand soldiers escaped without losing a single man. Washington didn't call it luck. He called it Providence. This Fourth of July, as America turns 250, Sunda...

Have you ever prayed with complete confidence that God would answer... only to hear "no"? Whether it was for healing, a relationship, financial provision, a ministry opportunity, or the salvation of someone you love, unanswered prayer can leave us asking some of the hardest questions of the Christian faith. If God is all-powerful and truly loves us, why doesn't He always say yes? In this episode o...

In today’s world, life doesn’t just feel lived anymore—it feels performed. In this episode of Sunday to Society , we explore why so much of modern life feels performative, curated, and constantly aware of an unseen audience. From social media to everyday conversations, from personal identity to private moments, many of us have slowly shifted from simply living our lives to managing how our lives a...

62% of Americans call themselves Christian. That is roughly 210 million people. But the data tells a very different story about how many of those people actually read their Bible, attend church, hold a biblical worldview, or live in any measurable way differently from their non-Christian neighbors. The gap between Christian identity and Christian reality has never been wider. And the church is lar...

Last week we named it. Church burnout is real, it is widespread, and the church's own culture often creates the conditions for it. But naming the problem is only half the conversation. Today we finish it. In part two of this series Sunday to Society digs into what God's Word actually says about rest, limits, delegation, and sustainable service. This episode is not permission to stop serving. The b...

You used to love serving at your church. You signed up for everything. You showed up early and stayed late. You meant every bit of it. And then somewhere along the way the joy left. It became obligation. You started dreading Sunday. And eventually you just stopped showing up. Not because your faith died. Because you did. Church burnout is real. It is widespread. And the church is largely silent ab...