This subject is dear to my heart and as a Christian and someone who wants to commit himself completely as a disciple of Christ, it's concerning to me as the oneness my Lord prayed for has not occurred.
I attended a Coptic church for a few weeks. I finally got a job with Sundays off, so I'm concerned with finding a spiritual home to worship God and commune with other disciples. It was more based on an Egyptian culture and although no one was ever anything but kind towards me, it felt like there was an invisible wall that I would have to work hard to penetrate and I just wasn't interested. Today I attended a church more in line with my evangelical, Bible based upbringing. I had a great time and different churches emphasize different things.
The Coptic priest, in a class after Liturgy a few weeks ago, said about the Protestants, "we are united in love, but not in faith" as an expression of why Eucharist is denied them. That's a sad reality of the Christian world. I personally subscribe to the Branch theory (that all orthodox churches are expressions of Christ's faith and work on earth) despite its inherent contradictory conundrum. Many churches contradict each other, so to say they are all serving Christ in their own expression seems contradictory to the work of God and also undermines the claim of two church organizations which claim that they are the One and Only. That's why those churches have rejected this claim. Evangelical protestants generally don't have a problem with it.
I think in my case, the search for a perfect church experience is fleeting and ultimately vain unless I was to combine Protestant and Orthodox Divine Liturgy into one experience every Sunday. In my case, I have a need for a grand, majestic, weighty, holy, and formal experience of worshipping God. I feel the Catholic Mass is so climactic, especially as you approach the liturgy of the eucharist. I get their logic, that the Word of God leads to the "real event" which is Eucharist. Orthodox feel the same way, even though their liturgy is different.
I will stay Protestant because that's where I'm happiest. I decided to not become Catholic because the two most important ingredients in my conception of a Christian life were not there, nor were ever there for me. Joy and peace. Majesty, weightiness, reverence, and history were there. But not the peace of the Holy Spirit. That would be like marrying a woman who had beautiful fashion and incredible sophistication and social ability but lacked the gentle, quiet character that the Holy Spirit gives a woman. It would be a less than satisfying marriage. It's all about priorities.
Unfortunately, no one institutional church on Earth fulfills all the desires I have. No church checks "all the boxes." Reverence, majesty, cathedrals and beautiful iconography are generally not a part of the world I love, which is Protestant evangelicalism. I need those things, but my tradition emphasizes the words of Scripture as the front and center and an encounter with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit and among each other instead of reliance on ritualistic worship and the Eucharist.
I believe in general the churches are trying to achieve the same goal but have different ideas of what that culmination might be. For Catholics and Orthodox, taking the bread and wine is the culmination of experiencing Christ. From my point of view, that doesn't make sense and is actually kind of shallow, when you think that people are chewing on a wafer and thinking that that will somehow magically make them a disciple of Christ in the same way as a Christian who daily feasts on God's words, prays, fasts, does good, and fellowships with others.
Although we have lukewarmness and people attending church out of a sense of tradition in Protestantism, I believe this tendency is more pronounced among the Catholic and Orthodox because of the emphasis on tradition and this tendency to think that somehow chewing on a piece of bread is all you need to do to be a good Christian.
I know the John 6 interpretation and the fact that some early writers, even Paul, speak of the body and blood literally. I just think it's shallow to base the entire Christian life around that. Even the taking of communion at love feasts in the 1st century were done as a sign of community and shared love and commitment to Christ in my opinion, not as some sort of solemn ritual.
I don't believe there is any church alive that accurately represents the original Christian church because the original Christian church died. The church at Jerusalem, led by James the brother of Jesus, was the original Christian assembly. Probably Mary the mother of Jesus and some of the 12 apostles were part of this congregation. But the church died because it got too focused on Jewish observance and less on evangelism. We can see in the New Testament how Paul was really the one who spread the gospel across the known world. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul directly links the presence of evil Judaizers who influenced Peter and Barnabas to play the hypocrite by distancing themselves from Gentiles while eating, with the Jerusalem church. "Before certain men came from James, Peter would eat with the Gentiles. But once they came, he separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision." The Jerusalem church didn't come against Judaism from my understanding. They were more focused on preaching Jesus as Messiah and living peacefully among the Judeans. Eventually, the judgment of Jerusalem prophesied by Jesus came upon Jerusalem as Titus destroyed the city.
The reason we have Paul as the main promulgator of the gospel in the New Testament is because he was the one working the hardest to spread it to the known parts of the earth. A lot of the early believers in Jerusalem were content to just stay there and worship. We read in the book of Acts that it was only persecution that drove them out of the city and into other areas.
I've written a lot here, and I can write about 50 more pages, but I have come to realize that there is no Christian church which "has it all" for me. That's because there's a Savior who "has it all" for me. Like the dying thief on the cross, I don't want to cry out to the Orthodox or some other institutional, historic organization to save me. I know who will face me when I die and it won't be Rome, the pontiff, or the Orthodox leader in Antioch.
