The Christian Church is a term for a unique collective encompassing Christians across the world, defined differently by various Christian denominations. In Protestantism, the Church is a body composed of all believers, with "body" and "believer" defined in various ways. For most denominations which pre-date the Protestant Reformation, "the Church" is connected to a particular human institution associated with that denomination, such as the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church. Anglican branch theory holds that Catholicism and Anglicanism are branches of the Christian Church; the souls of dead Christians as members of the Church is part of the Protestant idea of the church invisible, the Catholic idea of the Churches Militant and Triumphant. Ecclesiology is the subdiscipline within Christian theology which studies the nature of the Christian Church. Most English translations of the New Testament use the word "church" as a translation of the Ancient Greek: ἐκκλησία, romanized: ecclesia, found in the original Greek texts, which meant an "assembly" or "congregation".

This term appears in two verses of the Gospel of Matthew, 24 verses of the Acts of the Apostles, 58 verses of the Pauline epistles, two verses of the Letter to the Hebrews, one verse of the Epistle of James, three verses of the Third Epistle of John, 19 verses of the Book of Revelation. In total, ἐκκλησία appears in the New Testament text 114 times, although not every instance is a technical reference to the church; as such it is used for local communities as well as in a universal sense to mean all believers. "Christianity", on the other hand, was first by the Church Father Saint Ignatius of Antioch. The Four Marks of the Church first expressed in the Nicene Creed are that the Church is one, holy and apostolic; the Greek word ekklēsia "called out" or "called forth" and used to indicate a group of individuals called to gather for some function, in particular an assembly of the citizens of a city, as in Acts 19:32-41, is the New Testament term referring to the Christian Church. In the Septuagint, the Greek word "ἐκκλησία" is used to translate the Hebrew "קהל".

Most Romance and Celtic languages use derivations of this word, either inherited or borrowed from the Latin form ecclesia. The English language word "church" is from the Old English word cirice, derived from West Germanic *kirika, which in turn comes from the Greek κυριακή kuriakē, meaning "of the Lord". Kuriakē in the sense of "church" is most a shortening of κυριακὴ οἰκία kuriakē oikia or ἐκκλησία κυριακή ekklēsia kuriakē; some grammarians and scholars say that the word has uncertain roots and may derive from the Anglo-Saxon "kirke" from Latin "circus" and the Greek "kuklos" for "circle", which shape is the form in which many religious groups met and gathered. Christian churches were sometimes called κυριακόν kuriakon in Greek starting in the 4th century, but ekklēsia and βασιλική basilikē were more common; the word is one of many direct Greek-to-Germanic loans via the Goths. The Slavic terms for "church" are via the Old High German cognate chirihha; the Christian Church originated in Roman Judea in the first century AD/CE, founded on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who first gathered disciples.

Those disciples became known as "Christians". For most Christians, the holiday of Pentecost represents the birthday of the Church, signified by the descent of the Holy Spirit on gathered disciples; the leadership of the Christian Church began with the Apostles. Springing out of Second Temple Judaism, from Christianity's earliest days, Christians accepted non-Jews without requiring full adoption of Jewish customs; the parallels in the Jewish faith are the Proselytes and Noahide Law. Some think that conflict with Jewish religious authorities led to the expulsion of Christians from the synagogues in Jerusalem; the Church spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, gaining major establishments in cities such as Jerusalem and Edessa. It became a persecuted religion, it was condemned by the Jewish authorities as a heresy. The Roman authorities persecuted it because, like Judaism, its monotheistic teachings were fundamentally foreign to the polytheistic traditions of the ancient world and a challenge to the imperial cult.

The Church grew until legalized and promoted by Emperors Constantine I and Theodosius I in the 4th century as the State Church of the Roman Empire. In the 2nd century, Christians denounced teachings that they saw as heresies Gnosticism but Montanism. Ignatius of Antioch at the beginning of that century and Irenaeus at the end saw union with the bishops as the test of correct Christian faith. After legalization of the Church in the 4th century, the debate between Arianism and Trinit

Big Oak Tree State Park is a state-owned nature preserve with recreational features encompassing 1,029 acres in East Prairie, United States. The state park was established in a large expanse of drained cropland in 1938 to protect some of the largest trees in the state and in the nation; the park was declared a National Natural Landmark in May 1986, recognized as a rare, untouched wet-mesic bottomland hardwood forest in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain portion of the Gulf Coastal Plain. Big Oak Tree State Park is the home of many current and past state and national champion trees—trees that are, for their species, the largest in the state or in the nation; the park has two trails for hiking through the forest, including an accessible boardwalk trail, plus an interpretive center along the boardwalk and picnicking facilities. Big Oak Tree State Park Missouri Department of Natural Resources Big Oak Tree State Park Map Missouri Department of Natural Resources

The United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania known as Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918. All the school's property, known as the Carlisle Barracks, is now part of the U. S. Army War College. Founded in 1879 under U. S. governmental authority by General Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle was the first federally-funded off-reservation Indian boarding school. Consistent with Pratt's belief that Native Americans were'equal' to European-Americans, the School strove to immerse its students into mainstream Euro-American culture, believing they might thus become able to advance themselves and thrive in the dominant society. In this period, many white Americans believed that the only hope for Native Americans, their population declining in number, was rapid assimilation into White culture. After witnessing the initial success of the Indian students at Hampton Normal and Agricultural School, General Richard Henry Pratt decided to establish the first all-Indian school, Carlisle, in 1879, in a renovated military barracks.

As at Hampton, arriving students were shorn of their long hair, their names were changed. However, "unlike Hampton, whose purpose was to return assimilated educated Indians to their people, Carlisle meant to turn the school into the ultimate Americanizer". At Carlisle, Pratt attempted to "Kill the Indian: Save the Man" through any means necessary. Beyond a typical military regimen, Pratt was known to use corporal punishment on students who exhibited Native behaviors to help students become dependent only on themselves. Carlisle became the model for 26 Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools in 15 states and territories, plus hundreds of private boarding schools sponsored by religious denominations, it has been designated a National Historic Landmark. From 1879 until 1918, over 10,000 Native American children from 140 tribes attended Carlisle. Tribes with the largest number of students included the Lakota, Seneca, Cherokee, Apache and Alaska Native; the Carlisle Indian School exemplified. Some Native Americans believed.

Carlisle and similar schools remain controversial. Since the 1970s, Native American nations have founded their own schools and colleges, thus regaining control of their children's education. At Fort Marion, Florida in the 1870s, Pratt introduced classes in the English language, guard duty, craftsmanship to several dozen Native American prisoners selected from among those who had surrendered in the Indian Territory at the end of the Red River War; the program became well-known. The U. S. Commissioner of Education came to see firsthand what Pratt was doing, as did the president of Amherst College. Pratt's Fort Marion program convinced him that "distant education" was the only way to assimilate the Indian, he wrote. Transfer the savage born infant to the surroundings of a civilization and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit." Witmer writes, If all men are created equal why were blacks segregated in separate regiments and Indians segregated on separate tribal reservations? Why weren't all men given equal opportunities and allowed to assume their rightful place in society?

Race became a meaningless abstraction in his mind. Pratt believed an industrial school model similar to Hampton would be useful for educating and assimilating Native Americans. Give me three hundred young Indians and a place in one of our best communities, let me prove it! Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, has been abandoned for a number of years, it is in the heart of fine agricultural country. The people are kindly disposed, long free from the universal border prejudice against Indians. Pratt and his supporters lobbied Congress to establish the off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans at the historic Carlisle Barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. By October 1879, Captain Richard Henry Pratt had recruited the first students for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School; the Carlisle Indian School formally opened on November 1879, with an enrollment of 147 students. The youngest was six and the eldest twenty-five. Two-thirds were the children of Plains Indian tribal leaders; the first class was made up of eighty-four Lakota, fifty-two Cheyenne and Pawnee, eleven Apache.

The class included a group of students from Fort Marion who wanted to continue their education with Pratt at Carlisle. Pratt believed Native Americans were the equal of whites, founded Carlisle to immerse their children in white culture and teach them English, new skills and customs, in order to help them survive. After the end of Great Sioux War in 1877, the Lakota people were impoverished and confined to reservations... many believed that Native Americans were a vanishing race whose only hope for survival was rapid cultural transformation. Thus the U. S. government urgently sought a'progressive' educational model to assimilate Indians into white culture. Whether this could be achieved and how it could be done was unknown. Pratt