Friday, November 11, 2011

HOW OLD IS YOUR CHURCH AND WHO STARTED IT?

HOW OLD IS YOUR CHURCH AND WHO STARTED IT?

By Rev. Dr. Miltiades Efthimiou

If you are a Lutheran, your religion was founded by Martin Luther, an ex-monk of  the Roman Catholic Church, in the year 1517.

If you belong to the Church of England, your religion was founded by King Henry VIII in the year 1534 because the Pope would not grant him a divorce with the right to re-marry.

If you are a Presbyterian, your religion was founded by John Knox in Scotland in the year 1560. If you are a Congregationalist, your religion was originated by Robert Brown in Holland in 1582.

If you are Protestant Episcopalian, your religion was an offshoot of the Church of England, founded by Samuel Seabury in the American colonies in the 17th century. If you are a Baptist, you owe the tenets of your religion to John Smyth, who launched it in Amsterdam in 1606.

If you are of the Dutch Reformed Church, you recognize Michelis Jones as founder because he originated your religion in New York in 1628. If you are Methodist, your religion was founded by John and Charles Wesley in England in 1744.

If you worship with the Salvation Army, your sect began with William Booth in London in 1865. If you are Christian Scientist, you look to 1879 as the year in which your religion was born and to Mary Baker Eddy as its founder.

If you belong to one of the religious organizations known as Church of the Nazarene, Pentecostal Gospel, Holiness Church or Jehovah's Witnesses, your religion is one of the hundreds of new sects founded by men within the past hundred years.

If you are a Roman Catholic, your church shared the same rich apostolic and doctrinal heritage as the Orthodox Church for the first thousand years of its history, since during the first millennium they were one and the same Church. Lamentably, in 1054, the Pope of Rome broke away from the other four Apostolic Patriarchates (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem), by tampering with the Original Creed of the Church, and considering himself to be infallible. Thus your church is 1,000 years old.

If you are an Orthodox Christian, your religion was founded in the year 33 by Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It has not changed since that time. Our Church is now almost 2,000 years old. And it is for this reason, that Orthodoxy, the Church of the Apostles and the. Fathers, is considered the true "one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church."

IN SEARCH OF TRUTH

IN SEARCH OF TRUTH

If you came to American and knew nothing about our country but wanted to learn all about it so you could maybe become a citizen what would be the best course of action. You could go to a bookstore and buy all kinds of books written about America. Then you could read all those books and think about all that you have read. You might imagine that you now understand America and are ready for citizenship. But out of all those books you read some of the authors didn’t know their subject very well. Some of the books, for whatever reason, included false or misleading information. Some of the books were written by people who understand our history and some by people who don’t. Some of the authors love America and some dislike it. Some are written to give a clear picture of America, some to express the author’s bias or personal agenda. So you could read all those books and still not know what you should know or need to know. And even if you then think you understand America, you might not understand it at all.

The other option would be to read the books that relate the history of America, clear certain facts that are known by all. You could read the writings of the founding fathers, their very words, ideas and intentions – not some one’s interpretation of their words, two hundred years later. You could read the Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, the Jefferson Papers, the Bill of Rights and other similar documents. Then you would know the truth about America and what it means to be a citizen. This truth would be drawn from objective, established and known truths, not from what you feel or think or from a thousand different modern voices.

Then if you wanted to become a citizen you would not, could not start your own America. Your only option would be to embrace the America that has existed for two hundred plus years. You would have to submit yourself to the America that is and abide by its laws. The way you would be able to identify this America is by its Constitution, its unbroken history and it line of succession of the same beliefs, values and government from one generation to another. If you did not want to do all of this you would be rejecting America and saying you do not want to be a citizen.

All of this can be applied to the Church that Christ established. The Church is His Body of which He is the Head. There are not many Churches, just as there are not many Christs or many Americas. There are not many different Christian Faiths. There is only one God, one Christ, one Faith and one Church. The Church is an historical entity and reality. You can trace its history and read its “constitution” and read the writings of its founders and trace its unbroken succession of truth, life and government from the time of Christ to the present. To learn about the Church we must learn about the Church as it has been from the beginning. To enter the Church we have to embrace what is and not try to create our own or what others have created two thousand years later. We can’t recreate the Church on our own anymore than we can recreate America as though it has no history or historical existence. We can only submit to what is. Christ established His Church with its truth, its life and its way as the means for our salvation. The Church is like a ship sailing across the ocean of time inviting us to enter her safety.

Unfortunately, mankind in his pride tries to create his own “church” according to private interpretations of the Bible and according to personal likes and dislikes. And then, knowing that the Bible clearly teaches there is only one Church, man invents something called the invisible church to allow for all kinds of contradictory beliefs to be included in this “invisible church”. This idea of the invisible church is a new invention of Protestantism that has no history in the historical Church and no basis in the Bible. The only invisible Church is the Church in heaven, i.e., the Church triumphant vs. the Church on earth.