Thomas Martin Lindsay (1843–1914) was a Scottish church historian and principal of the Free Church College, Glasgow. His writing joined careful handling of the sources with a clear, readable narrative of the churches he studied, from the apostolic age to the Reformation. Our library carries The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries (1902); his two-volume History of the Reformation (1906–1907) surveyed the movement country by country and was long a standard textbook.
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Thomas M. Lindsay's study of the church and its ministry during the early centuries, published in 1902. Lindsay traces how the oversight of congregations developed from the apostolic age onward, examining bishops, elders, and deacons in the earliest Christian writings. The book offers a historical account of the origins of church order for readers interested in ministry's foundations.