Tell me about your form of Christianity

I would recommend The Oxford History of Christian Worship. There you will find information on the christian churches in the orient from their earliest days, as well as the christian churches in the West. It's published by Oxford University Press, and it's ISBN 0-19-513886-4.

I am an Orthodox Christian in America. We account for about 1% of the US population at most. We came here via Alaska when it was owned by the Russians and Orthodoxy came to Russia via the Greek missionaries in the 10th century.

We've not changed our worship (at least significantly) since the 5th century. Christianity is not contained solely within the Bible. Our last major theological issue was in the 8th century over the issue of images in worship. Basically, we've been mostly unchanged in a long time. We get along with the Copts, Armenians, Ethiopians, Syro-Malabars (collectively known as the Oriental Orthodox) better than we do any other Christian group. What makes them different is the result of a schism in 451 over, what at the time were, Christological issues, but what latter turned out to be problems with language and culture at the time.

The best way to know about the Oriental Orthodox is to visit their churches. They have a fairly large number in North America and if you'd like I could find some links of where to find them.

Sure. Personally, my history is I've never known leadership to stay corruption-free for even 5 years. The Lord usually brings me into a place to achieve sweeping change in short order, and moves me along. I'm usually gone before perfection is achieved, or even approached.

Currently I'm involved in a tiny little store-front Church, right downtown in an area only settled in the late 1800's. The Word of G-d is preached! Services are so uber-simplistic, it's pretty hard to say anything done is actually wrong. (Unless of course you adhere to the idea that Jesus Himself gave instructions for Liturgical worship, an idea that is still pretty new to me.)

David Evarts said:

Thanks EC. I'd love to visit, learn from and worship with both the Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox folks. Please feel free to send some links. I hope that many can get a refreshing taste of just how large and diverse the body of Christ is from posts like yours. And, yes the Orthodox can be proud of how long and well your liturgy has been preserved. It has certainly helped make your churches resistant to the latest (and sometimes destructive) Christian fads, such as todays anti-evolutionary movement. By the way, I've always loved your icons.

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Certainly!

Here is a site for (almost) all of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the USA, Canada and Mexico. It is as accurate as they can be and is divided up between jurisdictions (Greek, Russian, etc). They are all in Communion with each other, but have different bishops and most of them typically worship in English: Orthodoxy in America - Home

Coptic church directory for the USA: Directory of Coptic Orthodox Churches in the United States and Canada :: All Churches (lovely people; good food too)

Armenian Orthodox church site for the Eastern USA: Armenian Church
Same as above, but for the Western USA: Western Diocese | Home

Hope this helps! Sorry, but I have yet to find an accurate website of Ethiopian churches in the USA.

The consistency of our Liturgy does help, yet not as much as the fact that the last major theological issue happened in the 8th century. In fact, a great number of converts come from Evangelical backgrounds because they get tired of all the flashy stuff which lacks real spiritual depth to it. I recently read an article by an Orthodox priest who talks about how people, such as himself and most of his parish, are leaving the Protestant churches in droves because of all the emotionalism with no substance to it. That is not to say that all Protestant churches are like that, but a great many of them appear to be. As for myself I came from Catholicism, so I can't comment too much on that.

Hi!
I'm a Roman Catholic. We are the first Christians to enter what is now the USA. (Haha, we beat you all. )
We are the Largest church in the world, so our cultural practices vary a lot. Most Catholics in the USA are probably from Irish, Italian or even Polish Families. My family's from Bavaria.

There are also the eastern Catholics, who are very similar to the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christians, while still recognizing the pope. They share liturgy and many traditions with the Orthodox.
The Roman rite of the liturgy has been reformed in recent years to hearken back to early Christian liturgy.

I am what I would call nondenominational, the charismatic/prophetic kind. In my life I have belonged to
United Methodist
Episcopal
Baptist
Assembly of God
Mennonite
and nondenominational
churches.

I have also attended
Lutheran
Catholic
Pentecostal Church of God
and even (gasp!) Mormon and Unitarian
churches
but was never drawn to join those.

I was raised in the United Methodist Church by parents who when I was a child were involved in the charismatic movement of the 1970s. I was pretty much bored with the Sunday services, but I loved the home prayer meetings we went to, and I was sort of raised with an Us (charismatic fruit-cakes, LOL) and Them (stuffed-shirt Sunday service types) kind of take on the Church.

When I went off to a (Methodist) college, I led my Japanese suitemate to the Lord, and she wanted to go to the local Episcopal church, so we did, and I fell in love with the liturgy. I stayed with that denomination through college, when I went to church, though I did visit Methodist and Lutheran churches sometimes. By my fourth year in college my life was really spinning out of control, and somewhere in there I realized that the only stable thing I knew was that liturgy. It represented for me God as my Rock.

After college, in the town where I took my first teaching job, the Episcopal church that I belonged to started a second/informal service, and I was on what I guess I would call the worship team. It was fun to kind of break new ground by bringing (ohmygoodness!) instruments besides the organ.

Also in that town, not far away, was a Baptist church that had so many people attending it that the parking spilled onto the adjoining residential streets from the parking lot. I wondered what was attracting people, and a friend and I decided to go and check it out. I was enthralled as I looked around during worship at all the people seeming to be wholeheartedly worshiping, some like this and some like this or this or even this - and not being inhibited by the others around them. I wanted what they had. So I started attending there and later joined. I was in a time of returning to the Lord after a period in my life full of questioning and unbelief and anger and rebellion, and this church was just what I needed - especially the awesome teaching! I also went on some evenings to a little nondenominational church for MORE teaching - an elderly man with a REMARKABLE gift for answering spiritual and biblical questions brought the Word six days a week there.

I attended that church for a while, and then I heard about a "revival" at an Assembly of God church outside of town. When I went, I fell in love with it. It was very different from where I had been since I left home, but many of these people had come out of the same movement my parents had been involved in so long ago, so it was also homey for me. This was the first time I was in a seriously charismatic church, and it was so refreshing! I'll never forget being in a predominantly white church led by a bass-playing African American named Nero, and the home groups with worship led by the accordion player, LOL! I loved being able to dance and sing at the top of my lungs, and I loved the PRAYER times.

When I got married, my husband and I moved to another state, and he took me to his home (Baptist) church. But we didn't fit in there, because we were not cessationists. So then we began to hunt for a church. One that we went to was an hour's drive away, a nondenominational (WOF?) church, but there was something that seemed "off" to us.

In the midst of our search, we were invited to a mid-week "cell group" that met at a B&B - this was what you might call an "uncool" group - a farmer and his wife, an elderly man verging on Alzheimers, the B&B owner, a few others. And we loved it. The farmer's wife made a mean chocolate cake, and there was love. We soon visited their church, which was so far out of town that it had a view of a sorgum field, and seeing the pastor's heart for Jesus, we joined the church, finding out later that it was a Mennonite church - not the horse and buggy type, but we met people who were! The worship was accoustic contemporary but not cutting edge (you know, "Lord I Lift Your Name On High...." and "Power of Your Love"). After a while, this church left the Mennonite denomination because of a toleration-of-sin issue that we weren't willing to accept. This church was comfortable. Except that as we grew in our respective relationships with the Lord, we found ourselves called to do things that this church was not ready for (me in prophetic song and hubby in prophetic painting). I was on the worship team, but I was told to stick to the words on the page and eventually they took away my microphone because, well, I guess I couldn't help myself. We started to feel squeezed, and I prayed for a release.

It's really interesting how we found ourselves at the church that we still call home (though we are now missionaries on the field), but I'll spare you that. Two things impressed me when we visited this place. First, I noticed the worship team, which was (for me) huge - 13 people on the platform on a Friday night - and populated with people who were obviously very different in styles. Second, I noticed the way the pastor interacted with people, and the thought bubbled up in my heart and mind - I could submit to this man. I had found my spiritual father. Harvey will always be very special to me. He's a bit old fashioned in some of his beliefs, but he carries a great authority and has a very sweet pastor's heart. And he is a pastor of the prophetic - which hubs and I were looking for. Prophetic people NEED pastors! I went through an intense ministry training with him and prophetic training with the in-house prophet, and I joined the worship team too, where I was allowed to freely exercise my giftings in that area.

On the field my husband and I have worked with a handful of Honduran churches, all to some degree charismatic, and for our own sanity we also belong to an English-speaking church - which is part of the CCI network, which used to be Mennonite, actually. The English-speaking congregation that we belong to is more charismatic than the overall group is, but I still feel somewhat restrained, partly because we only have the facility for an hour and a half.

We are friends with missionaries of several stripes, and it has been wonderful to get to fellowship with them all. In the end, it's all about worshiping Jesus and knowing Him more.

There's one other form of Christianity to think about. It's not clear whether it fits your original question, because it's largely Western. But not the traditional Western Christianity.

That's what I'm coming to think of as the second Reformation. As the first Reformation resulted from renewed Biblical scholarship, and a better understanding of classical culture, in the last couple of hundred years or so' there's been a similar change in understanding, starting from a skeptical Enlightenment perspective, but more recently driven by a new understanding of ancient Judaism.

This second Reformation is messier, because it hasn't been as visible. It's mostly been changes within existing churches, while the first one resulted in new churches being created. It's also even more controversial, in part because some of the early scholarly work was done by skeptics. This leaves it open to the misunderstanding that it's basically people who don't take Jesus seriously, when in reality it's people who take Jesus more seriously than traditional Christianity.

Organizationally, it consists of much of the older "mainline" denominations. But parts of the evangelical community are also starting to get involved. The mainline denominations aren't doing well numerically (largely, I think, because of their aversion to doing the kinds of things you need to do to grow). But it seems likely that by the time the mainline dies, the more liberal wing of evangelicalism will take on much of the same orientation, but in a way that will allow it to grow rather than shrink.

DIfferences between the 2nd Reformation and both traditional waves of Christianity are at quite a basic level: sources of authority, and the basic purpose of religion. The second Reformation, like the first, is based on Scripture, but a more accurate reading of Scripture. It has learned from Jesus and the prophets that what the Gospel is about is not human purity or saving ourselves from hell, but God's rule, grace, and obedience.

I'm actually a fan of the first Reformation. I'm guided a lot by Calvin, both in theology and Biblical interpretation, and over time I've come to have a greater appreciation for Luther. They both did good things. But they expected the Church to be reformed on a continuing basis, while their followers largely constructed another scholastic movement.

The biggest challenge for the 2nd Reformation, in my opinion, is distinguishing itself from simple skepticism and "anything goes" ethics. It certainly is not either of those things, but it's easy to misunderstand (or misrepresent it) that way.

I belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria , It is the Church of Alexandria found by St. Mark in 42 AD
Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

my church i s Suomen ev lut. it is Lutheran church o f Finland. my church beleive i n baptism and real preseance of Jesus in eucharist. many people in my church do good works in mission for people in different countrys. our ministre and elders work much in our community. my ministerium verksamhet meet after service and i like this group becuase it make our faith strong with Jesus.