not donut-ists

I started doing some research into church history yesterday, in preparation for a lesson I want to do at church here. No one wanted to tackle Augustine (maybe because he's been done to death on a variety of topics). But I found something interesting, and think I can lead a discussion on "Augustine, the Donatists, and the 'invisible church.'"

Most people don't know much about the Donatists (whenever I mention them, Heather keeps suggesting that the dispute was over what to serve at coffee hour between services...), but they were an influential group that broke from the 'catholic' church right around the time that Constantine made it the official church of the Roman empire. And some of their beliefs and complaints about the church of their time were shared much later by the Anabaptists, who were even labeled "neo-Donatists" (there's a favorable article about the Donatists on this anabaptist website). So their story might be interesting to people here.

I'm more interested in how the dispute, and Augustine's response, led to the concept of "the invisible church." An unfortunate name for it (which I think Calvin came up with, not Augustine), but a pretty good idea, I think. I'll have to write more about it later.