BaptistGirl101 said:
Hey even though I am a Baptist I am not to happy in the church I am in they have some views that I don't agree with and I am looking for a new denomination to go to.I need to know some details of the other denominations than just Baptist so if you don't care could you state your denomination and tell all you can about it.Please do not think that I am putting down Baptist because I am not I just want to explore some different denominations for some advice.The church I'm in now does not give me any bit of a spiritual feeling there is to much fighting and arguments over power and people being mad because they are not in the spotlight and I feel like my spirituality is slipping.So I need a new church that can help me learn more about God so I can grow in religion. Sorry that this is so long God Bless Ya TTYL
I agree with what emphraimanesti said above. Please let me add my own two cents.
While I can best tell what it means for
me as an Anabaptist to become Orthodox, I can safely say that my unique experience has elements shared by many thousands of other Protestants. One thing that I have found very common is that so many come to the Orthodox Faith as a result of learning about the early Church. Before I talk about that, though, since I sometimes write with a style that may sound like I'm teaching a class, let me tell you a little bit about Orthodox worship.
It's majestic and spiritual, deeply moving, and all but solely focused on the experience of worshipping God--IOW, it's God-centered, Christ-centered, not human-centered. It's quite beautiful, and since Jesus Christ sanctified the material world and our human senses by His Incarnation as a man, something material in the service is directed to each of the senses to aid in worship--sights, sounds, smells, tastes, movements--this is to glorify God and involve each person in that glorification. Nearly the entire liturgy is sung by the congregation and the choir together, and even the Scripture readings and prayers are sung. (The sermon is spoken, of course.) I've been to the services of a number of denominations, but this was by far the richest in Gospel symbolism, spiritual depth, and the most Scripture-filled I've ever attended.
Now in studying the early Church, I discovered that early Christians believed the authority and gifts of the apostles had continued after their deaths and had been passed on to the bishops they had appointed over the churches. There is no evidence I know of showing congregations were independent or governed themselves by themselves alone in early Christian history. Instead, the churches were ruled by bishops who had either been appointed directly by an apostle, or appointed by other bishops that an apostle had ordained directly, and so on.
I also learned that the early Church believed in baptismal regeneration as the norm--that someone is "born of water and of the Spirit" (John 3:5) "for the remission of sins" (Acts 2:38), being "saved...by the washing of regeneration" (Titus 3:5).
Church history shows that the early Christians, unlike the Anabaptists, had highly liturgical worship (an elaborately ritualized service done in a specific order every week), part of which was based on Old Testament patterns of worship, and part of which focused on the Eucharist (the Lord's Supper). (See Acts 13:2 for an early example of liturgy, where the word "ministered" is
leitourgeo, which means to carry out sacred rites in service to God). Most evangelicals are non-liturgical; they do in fact have orders of service they usually follow, but they are relatively simple and also easily alterable. The Orthodox liturgy follows the same order of worship universally practiced in the early Church, altered very little since around A.D. 400.
The Old Testament canon (table of contents) used by Protestants is comprised of the same 39 books as today's Jewish canon. These 39 books were selected by
unbelieving Pharisees during a Jewish council at Jamnia in A.D. 90, about 60 years
after Pentecost. There had been several competing Old Testament canons up to that point, but until the year 90,
most Jews around the world used the
same Bible as the apostles and the early Christians did: the Septuagint, the Greek translation almost always quoted in the New Testament. The Septuagint contained more like 50 books. The unbelieving Jews rejected books in the Septuagint that contained very strong prophecies early Christians used to prove Jesus was the Messiah. The larger (Christian) Old Testament canon was largely settled on shortly before A.D. 400, after being in almost continuous and universal use since the time of the apostles. This larger Old Testament remained the standard until the Protestant Reformers adopted the Jewish canon of 39 books in the 1500s. The reasons those Reformers rejected books that Christians had considered part of the Bible for well over a thousand years weren't very convincing to me. The Orthodox still use the Old Testament found in the Septuagint version (in English here, of course).
The Church decided which books belonged in the
New Testament well over 300 years past Pentecost, which was after the time I had been led to believe that the Church had fallen into corruption under Emperor Constantine, and had begun persecuting the "true" Christians (who allegedly believed like Protestants), and this Church was the same official religion that was supposed to be the "bad guy," the Roman Catholic Church. One difficulty with that idea, though, is that during the first 1000 years of Christian history, the one undivided worldwide Church was administered by geographic regions, with bishops having oversight for their region only; Rome's bishop was just one among five, so there
was no Roman Catholic Church yet. A second difficulty is that there wasn't a shred of historical evidence I could find of any underground, persecuted Christian group resembling Protestants from Constantine's time until the late Middle Ages.
None!
Looking at early church history even as far back as the very first mentions of the Lord's Supper outside of the New Testament, also reading how Christian writers consistently treated the subject from there forward, and looking at all of that with the apostle Paul's statements about people getting sick or even dying when partaking of the Supper unworthily, I was forced to agree with the early Christians. Every writer and source I could find in early church history regarded by fellow believers as non-heretical in other doctrines and practice believed that the bread and wine truly became the body and blood of Christ, just as the apostle Paul had written, and were
not mere symbols. They didn't teach "transubstantiation," a doctrine invented by Catholic theologians in the late Middle Ages, but they
did confess that somehow, mysteriously, the bread and wine were truly Christ's body and blood by the power of the Holy Spirit.
I'm a historian. My research has not been exhaustive, but the Orthodox make the most historically valid claim I've seen of being the same Church that was founded by Christ and the apostles. That makes it the same Church that assembled the New Testament. The Roman Catholic Church makes that claim too, but in reality, it divided from Orthodoxy in 1054, when the bishop of Rome tried unsuccessfully to assert his authority over all the Eastern bishops of the Church. Every Protestant denomination (except maybe Anglicanism, which is a special case) has a human founder and a human beginning--Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Quaker, Mennonite, Pentecostal, Disciples/Churches of Christ, Baptist, and so on--but the only place to trace the historical origin of the Orthodox Church is back before 1054, back through the seven worldwide church councils, back through the persecuted victims of pagan Rome, back through the personal disciples of the apostles, and finally back to the apostles and to Jesus Christ. The succession is completely traceable and unbroken; there was no sudden "Fall of the Church" under Constantine that led to a group of underground Christians escaping the persecution of the official church--no historical evidence at all.
Infant baptism was a very big stumbling block to me, having been thoroughly Anabaptist for well over a decade. Many Protestant groups, such as Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists, practice infant baptism. To me, though, "believers baptism" was one of the marks of the true church, and if Orthodoxy denied it, then its claim was suspect at least on an emotional level. So I investigated believers baptism in the early Church for the first time. Up until recently, I simply assumed that the early Christians baptized only adult believers, because infant baptism was supposedly a corruption that appeared much later. It's enough to say that I learned from history that if the practice of infant baptism had been introduced after apostolic times, it did so without being noticed as controversial and discussed extensively, and had no discernible time or place of origin, yet it was universally accepted from the earliest records of church history. I had to conclude that maybe I had not been handling the Scriptures on baptism right, but that the early Church
had.
The remaining major stumbling block other than infant baptism that had to be cleared up before the idea of becoming Orthodox would even be thinkable was the fundamental Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (Scripture alone). As you may know, that is the teaching that the Bible (especially the New Testament) is the only final source of truth and authority for both Christian faith and practice. Without this doctrine, Protestantism actually could not even exist. The Bible could not have been the
only authority for Christians to go by, because the early Christians didn't even
have a New Testament as such--it wasn't canonized and assembled by the Church until the end of the
fourth century. The Church got along
for over 350 years without even knowing which books
belonged in the New Testament.
If sola scriptura is not true, then Protestantism no longer remains an option, since that doctrine is its entire foundation. That means having to look at the apostolic churches, those not founded by ordinary men but by the inspired apostles. The only churches of significance that fit that description are the Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox Churches. Roman Catholicism divided from Orthodoxy in 1054 and added a number of new teachings to the faith (such as purgatory, indulgences, papal infallibility, and the immaculate conception of Mary), a faith that should not change, and that disqualifies Catholicism for me. The Anglicans absorbed many Protestant doctrines, which means their doctrine conflicts with that of the early Church, plus they have largely fallen into gross liberalism in recent years, so the Anglican Church (i.e., the Episcopal Church here in America) is also out. That leaves Orthodoxy, which I found through studying church history still maintains the same teachings it did before Catholicism left to go its own way. In practical terms, people claim to determine their doctrine from the Bible alone, but
actually rely on their own denomination's tradition to tell them correct beliefs. If someone's going to rely on church tradition to decide right doctrine anyway, why shouldn't they rely on the Tradition of the original Church?
Instead of sola scriptura, I discovered that the method by which the Church's leaders decided what all the faithful should believe was to convene councils after the model of the Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15. At these councils, they sought a consensus and preferably a unanimous opinion from all those present (bishops from the churches in every geographical area throughout the world), they consulted the writings of the early Church fathers, they relied on unwritten apostolic traditions maintained in the Church, and also heavily on the Bible, to which they ascribed very high authority as writings inspired by God. But I know of no one who taught the doctrine of "sola scriptura" for the first roughly 1500 years of Christian history--until the Protestant Reformation.
Many of the Protestant Reformers concluded that God did not or would not use any physical means to have spiritual effects on people, such as the water of baptism, the bread and wine in the Supper, the laying on of hands to transmit the Holy Spirit, or the use of sights, sounds, and smells in worship. Judging by some of their actions, they thought that if something was spiritual, then nothing physical or material was involved in any practical way; at most, material things could be used only as mere symbols of a higher spiritual reality. They took almost anything physical and material that early Christians considered means for God to impart His grace and changed them into mere outward symbols, or dropped them entirely.
As far as I have been able to determine, the Orthodox Faith is practiced and taught in 2005 in no significantly different way than it has been since A.D. 787, the date of the seventh worlwide church council. It hasn't changed its creed, or the doctrines proclaimed by its councils, added any new teachings, or functionally altered any of its distinctive practices.
As part of your search for a new denomination, I recommend two things for you. First, find an Orthodox church near you that you can visit for a worship service. The Saturday afternoon or evening Vespers service is probably the best to attend for a first visit. ("Vespers" means
evening, since this is an evening prayer service.) Second, using inter-library loan if necessary, go to your local library and borrow the book
Becoming Orthodox by Peter Gilquist. It's the story of a group of evangelicals who'd been leaders in Campus Crusade for Christ and their search for the New Testament Church. God bless you in your search!
Regards,
Tauf
God Bless you indeed and I hope all works out by the way I am non-denominational a.k.a bible believer,
