[b]Where Is the Church (2)?
Statistics say that there are around 30,000 Christian denominations in the world, a big and confusing number. Someone might ask, which of these 30,000 is really the Church established by Christ and His disciples?
Recent individual freedom of establishing churches practice even makes it more confusing, because any person or couple of people could start a church that does not belong to any Christian denomination, give it an attractive name, and establish on unsound theology. To make matters worse, sometimes those founders have very little background on Christianity, the church history, and no one ordained them, but they announced themselves as pastors ordained by friends or family members! I remembered a famous TV evangelist who attracted a big crowd and became a famous evangelist. Eventually, he was imprisoned. In his cell, he started to read the Bible. After his release, he wrote a book in which he said that when he read the Bible in the prison he discovered that he was telling the people the opposite instructions of what God really meant to say to people!
Given a big web of tens of thousands of churches, people need to ask where the true Church is. Where can I find it? Where can I go to find a deep spirituality and pure Christianity? This is what I am going to address on this page.
Victor Beshir
To introduce your Non-Copts friends to the Orthodox Church, please pass this article and direct them to visit the following face book page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Looking-For-a-Church-As-Old-As-Christianity/164218050278580?v=box_3&ref=ts#!/pages/Looking-For-a-Church-As-Old-As-Christianity/164218050278580
Comments
it just so happens that yesterday i was reading all about the baptist guy in usa who does all the research on collecting religion and denomination figures from all the countries. i can't find the webpage now, but basically it was explaining that this number of 3000 (i remember it being 3000, not 30,000) was calculated by working out the number of groups in each country and then counting each group in each country as a separate denomination.
e.g, if in uk we have (among orthodox), armenian, indian malankara, indian syrian, syriac orthodox, eritrean, ethiopian, british, antiochian, greek, russian, russian orthodox outside russia, romanian, serbian, ukranian, bulgarian, macedonian, greek melkite (arabic-speaking) and czech, and in france, all of the above (but french, not british orthodox), then the stats would count 36 orthodox denominations in just these 2 countries!
the stats count about 200 catholic 'denominations' as well.
the people doing the stats only count groups, they don't take into account any inter-communion agreements.
so if you count orthodox as only 1 (or 2, depending on your preference) denomination, then 'classical' protestants actually have about 33 denominations, not 3000.
modern statisticians count the new independant churches, such as house churches in china or africa as a fourth 'independant' Christian category, to recognise (rightly, i think) that they are not closely related to the traditional protestant churches.
they probably have many more denominations (i forget the number, but it was maybe around 100).
we also need to realise that these stats people count mormons, jehovah's witnesses and other non-Christian groups as Christian, so this will also affect the figures.
so i think you are raising a good point, but it will be better if the figures are modified. accuracy will help people to relate better to your ideas.
several people on this site have quoted these high figures, so i wanted to explain why these are not accurate.
may God bless you and enrich your work, it's really great to see enthusiasm about evangelism :) :)