"A faithful remnant.
At least a few people in church history continued to hold onto the apostolic doctrine and the apostolic experience.
In Matthew 16:18, Jesus said, “On this rock I will build my church,” speaking of the rock of the revelation of who He was, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God. He said “the gates of hell will not prevail against” the church, so as a matter of faith we can affirm that God has always had a people throughout history. (See Romans 11:2-5.) He has always had a church.
The apostolic church as defined by the experience and message of the Scriptures has never entirely faded away. This belief does not mean that as a matter of history we can necessarily identify a fully apostolic group known by a particular name at every decade throughout the hundreds of years of church history. It does not mean we can trace an unbroken historical succession of an organization or series of organizations. It does not mean that at every point in time a group of people taught every doctrine... We can find in various centuries, however, people who baptized in Jesus’ name, people who received the Holy Spirit with the sign of tongues, and people who enunciated various doctrines important to being truly apostolic. At some times, great numbers of people adhered to the apostolic faith; at other times, perhaps just a handful did so. For certain decades we may not have a historical record of anybody who was identical to the apostles in experience and teaching. But as a matter of faith, even when there may be historical gaps, we can affirm that God had a people born of water and the Spirit, believers who experienced biblical salvation.
A circular pattern.
We can discern a trend of events in church history, and we can represent it by a circle. The church began with great evangelistic growth, with a great burst of power and fervor as recorded in the Book of Acts. Then came a gradual falling away into false doctrine, and as this falling away intensified, for the most part the visible church fell into apostasy, having little or no real experience with God. This apostasy was not permanent, at least not in a historical sense. Over the centuries, particularly after the medieval period, we find a step-by-step restoration of various doctrines, beliefs, and experiences, returning closer to the original apostolic pattern. Excerpt from "A History of Christian Doctrine", Bernard)
