You all need to check out this brief article at Reformation21 written by Dr. Michael Haykin on the importance of studying the Early Church Fathers. This is something really that no Christian can do without reading!
Also, keep in the back of your minds that the next issue of Eusebeia: The Bulletin of the Andrew Fuller Centre for Reformed Evangelicalism will be dedicated to the Early Church Fathers. For information on that, please feel free to contact me.
Working out Salvation with Fear and Trembling 
Bravo! Yes, we do need to read and study and take notes on the early church fathers. In 1963 I began taking notes in church history, due to the inspiration of a Black Historian, Dr. Lorenzo J. Greene of Lincoln Un.(Mo). At the time I was trying to prove Linked chain session. I proved it wrong due to I Cors.12:13, but I got into e church fathers in that research. Across 6 yrs I took 3000 5×8 notecards covering more than 250 sources (th cards have notes on both sides so about 6000pages of notes). John Gill’s Cause of God and Truth deserves to be considered in any such discussion. However, while I took notes on the church fathers in translations of their works, I was more focused on the Middle Ages, esp. the Waldensians, et. al. Interetingly enough one of the Inquisitors, Reinarius Sacchho (sp?), noted in the 1200s that they had churches in
Constaninople (?), and in Philadelphia (yes, that one of Rev.3)We also need to take notes on our Baptist Church Records here in America. Had we done so, no one would have made that failure which some have made of claiming that Sandy Creek Assn leaned toward Arminianism. True the records burned up in a fire in 1801 (Assnl Clerk’s home), but the individual churches kept their own records of their beliefs. I recently read the minutes of Mt. Pisgah Church from which Matthew Tyson Yates, the first Southern Baptist Missionary to China, came. That church founded in 1814 in its Confession was clearly a high view of Sovereign Grace. However, Sovereign Grace is more liberal and more radical than most believers imagine. But I leave that for some other time.