How do you determine whether you follow the correct denomination or faith? How can you be sure your denomination is the right one and all the others are wrong and full of lies that have deceived you?
Having been in many denominations at times for services, and attending 3 distinct denominations at least 100 times each (2 in youth, and now another in middle age), and reading fully through scriptures more than once, and now looking at all the doctrines of many large denominations I notice
one can always find ways any of them depart from instructions in the New Testament/Gospels.
So that is unavoidable if you are going to attend a church.
But, you would find after a few years and enough conversations where the people feel safe to say what they really think that
denominations are partly an illusion.
You can find
a lot of people that would seem more aligned with some other 'denomination' in any church, and I don't mean one or two or three, but instead some significant portion, and perhaps if one really surveyed everyone in this extremely safe and neutral way, even a majority of any congregation.
Why? Because people come to church many of them for Christ, for the gospel, for God, and not in order to only follow men. Many, correctly, are not very concerned if they have lined up with the local gatekeepers, because many, correctly, think of Christ Himself as the only real gatekeeper, and not some men. They think of His Words as the Truth, and not the local doctrines that seem so picky and not gospel. Of course a "doctrine" could be sometimes merely a direct transcription or direct paraphrase of scripture, which is very good, but many times they can instead have elaborations that include picky guessing and ways people choose to divide apart over...well, things they should have not judged others about. Some churches, especially some big old churches are good at the correct attitude that a great diversity of practices and beliefs that are not contradicting the center of the gospel, such as stated in the Creeds for example, are tolerated. If you eject people from your church that truly believe and are in accord with the central elements of the Gospel only because they are thinking differently on some unimportant interpretational guessing like how old the Earth is, that's not being Christian in my view. Every church has this trouble in that some would try to make themselves the gatekeeper in a way that shows an eagerness to judge others over anything available.
But a church doesn't necessarily have to be old to do this correct "love one another" above the impulse to 'control one another'.
A younger church could, in theory. An older church could fail at it.
One has to just look to see. Are the people mostly doing "love one another", or not? Are they falling into the sin of instead judging/condemning one another? If that is the case in a church, and sin is always a danger, then prayer is a good plan! Remember, this moment in time is only the temporary situation in this temporary mortal body, and we are all aiming to the ultimate goal!
