Introduction: So Many Churches
When I was a little boy we moved from Marburg, Germany, to a small village in Bavaria. We were Protestants - Lutherans, to be precise, and I attended a Catholic kindergarten. At some point, even at a young age, I figured that there were two churches in this world: Catholic and Lutheran. Later I found out that there are not two but literally thousands of different religious denominations, groups, and organizations.
In my later home town of Stuttgart I counted dozens of denominations, beyond the usual Lutheran and Catholic variety: Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, Jehovah's witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Anglican, New-Apostolic, Pentecostal, Fundamentalist churches, Russian Orthodox, and, of course, all the non-denominational variations, and later mosques and Hindu temples arrived.
My phone book (yes, I still have a phone book) lists some 5 pages of hundreds of churches in a town of 30,000 - including Happy Hill Baptist church. Here in America you can practically walk from one church to another. How confusing - imagine being
an alien - or atheist - wanting to go to church. Which one do you go to? Even within denominations you will find so much variety, from music to dress to preaching style to theology. Confusing indeed. Why so many churches?
I will approach this question from three different angles. I have not watched any YouTube videos on this topic. I simply thought through this question very carefully and came up with these three categories. I will not discuss a lot of Bible texts, but the
ones I do bring up, I hope they will hit like a hammer hits a nail. [I apologize to the translators - this presentation might be a little more difficult to translate than others].
In the question Why so many churches we see the battle between good and evil played out. We call it The Great Controversy. Satan wants to sow confusion. If he can't keep people from the Bible and from church, at least make it so complicated, with so many options to choose from that you might as well give up on religion altogether. He's been pretty successful with that. God, on the other hand, plants truth where people are accepting of that truth. We are so stubborn that one group embraces this aspect of truth, and another group that dimension of truth....
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