One Tree, Many Branches

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[0:00] talking about denominations, and I realize that not everybody realizes that there are different kinds of Christians. I think some people are like, oh, Christians are Christians, and one church, the difference between the churches is just that one is closer to my house or is on a different street and might have a slightly different name. But actually, there are very many different kinds of churches. There's actually three or four major branches of Christianity. I'll say four, we'll see why. And within the most recent branch, major branch of Christianity, which is the Protestant branch, there are literally thousands of groups, but among them, I would say about 20 major subgroups, give or take. And this handout you're getting now in somewhat haphazard fashion, but that's okay, and you might need to share, families might need to share, I'm not sure, I only made 30 of them. You know, I'm really glad, that John and George are here today, because we're going to be talking about the Eastern or the Greek Orthodox Church, and then we're going to get your input on that, because we're going to talk about the differences. But on the back of this sheet is the family tree, which I think is really great. It kind of just puts it all together for us. Thank you, George, you're doing such a

[1:11] great job. How many do you have left, though? Okay, maybe give the Petches just two, and then give Wendy one, and then give them two. Okay, so that family tree is really good. This was developed by a covenant tree. Most Christian family trees would not have the covenant church on it, because the covenant church is a small denomination, although worldwide we're actually getting, we're kind of growing all the time. All right, they're all passed out. Oh, but I need one. I need one. Perfect. Okay, George, maybe sit by somebody you can share with, okay? How would that be? You want to sit by Adele?

[1:48] Okay, so we have denominations. They believe different things, and we're going to go into the slight difference. So, we have denominations, they believe different things, and we're going to go into the slight differences. And this is more so you know, but also there's a bigger question around that, and I want you to be thinking about this question. Is it okay, okay, is it okay that there are different denominations and expressions of Christianity? Or would it be better for there just to be one expression of Christianity, one root? Be thinking about that all the way through, because at the end we're going to come back to that question, all right? And as we'll see, there are some definite downsides. And there have been historically that there's a definite downside to the splitting of the church into all these branches of the tree. But we'll be looking for some upsides too, okay? So, let's go to our reading, and this one is more about unity in the church. So, Ephesians 2, 11 through 22.

[2:43] Verse 11. Don't forget that you Gentiles used to be outsiders. You were called uncircumcised heathens by the Jews who were proud of their circumcision, even though it affected only their bodies and not their hearts. In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope, but now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ. For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people. When in his own body on the cross he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. He did this by ending the system of law with its commandments and regulations. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups. Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups. Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross.

[3:56] He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people and our hostility toward each other was put to death. He brought this good news of peace to you Gentiles who were far away from him and peace to the Jews who were near. Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us. So now, you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God's holy people. You are members of God's family. Together we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, and the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord. Through him you Gentiles are also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by his Spirit. Let's pray. Oh Heavenly Father, thank you for this good word from Ephesians and thank you for this day in which we can worship you and praise you. In Jesus' name, Amen.

[5:02] Well, we're just going to work through this table here. So go ahead and take that out. And just like last week when we were talking about the cults, we start with the Nicene Creed. We're not going to take the time to read it, but it's pretty long. And you could say that the Nicene Creed was definitely an attempt by the early church to flesh out these really difficult questions like, what is the nature of God? And they understood that God was a God who was a God who was one God in three persons, with three persons. And that sounds like a contradiction, but it's actually just a paradox. And there's a difference between a paradox and a contradiction. If they said, God is one God in three persons, and then he said, but God is one person in three persons, that would be a contradiction. But it's a paradox because it's one God in three persons. You get what I'm saying? It's not a direct contradiction. A paradox is asking you to kind of hold something in a little bit of tension and a little bit of mystery. The other thing that the council did, and several other councils did, was to try to really define the exact nature of who Jesus is and what he does. And so they came to this understanding of what we call the incarnation,

[6:12] which is always central to everything that we talk about here in the church. We talk about the nature of Jesus. So we could say that Jesus is one person of the Trinity or the Triune God, as it's sometimes called now. And then we have the Trinity, which is the Trinity of God, and then we have the Trinity of God. And I think we say Trinity a lot, but Triune God is probably now the more preferred way of saying that we're talking about who God is, the Triune God. So God, Jesus is one person of the Triune God or the Trinity, but he's one person with two natures. And one nature is divine and one nature is human. And this is the really important distinction, is that he's not half human and half divine. He's all human. He's all human and all divine, which is yet another paradox, but not a contradiction. So I want you to think of plywood. Does anyone love plywood? It's a very good building material. It does all sorts of great things. Blake has made a bunch of things out of plywood, right? And plywood is just two or more sheets of thin wood that have been glued together. So imagine you have a piece of plywood and one sheet is oak and the other sheet is pine, and you would never do this in a million years. I don't

[7:19] know anyone who would do that. I guess maybe some people might do it, but you would never really do that. But just imagine that. Then you have a sheet that's half oak and half pine, right? It just is. It's half and half, although it looks like one piece of wood. And if you flip it over, on one side it looks like oak and the other side it looks like pine. Some people have that view of the incarnation, but what we would say is that the whole thing is oak and the whole thing is pine. Does that make sense? No, it doesn't. Don't nod your head like that makes sense, because it doesn't. It's a paradox. But this is the incarnation. . . . half of what humans experience. Jesus experiences everything that humans experience. Pain, sadness, laughter, anger, temptation, you name it. He has the entire human experience. But at the same time, he has all the fullness of the divine dwelling bodily. That's a quote from scripture right there. So you have in Jesus all God, all human, all the time. Okay, I just made that up. It sounds really good. No, I didn't just make that up. So that's the nature of Christ. Now, so and also just keep a finger on where it says, did you notice one part of the Nicene Creed says, and the sun and is bold

[8:42] and underlying? Because I really wanted to draw your attention to it because that's going to come up a little bit, actually quite soon. So if you take a look at our family tree, and one thing I really, really want you to see is the very roots of the family tree. And I want you to see the very roots of the family tree. And I want you to see the very roots of our Christian family tree is what? Judaism. There is no escaping this.

[9:07] Christianity is descended from Judaism. Absolutely. In all sorts of ways, partly because, or mostly because Jesus was Jewish. Now there is an old joke among some Catholic priests, because they have such a high veneration of Mary, that they would say, well, we know Jesus was Jewish. But we don't know why he was Jewish. And we don't know why he was Jewish. And we don't know why he was Jewish. And we don't know why he was Jewish. And we don't know why he was Jewish. But Mary, I don't think so. She couldn't have been Jewish. But that is a contradiction, because obviously Mary was Jewish too. Mary was Jewish. Joseph was Jewish. Jesus was Jewish. All right? And so Judaism is the root of it. But then also Jesus comes out of Judaism, and Jesus is also the root. And so the next level up is the one holy Catholic, which means universal, not Roman Catholic. One holy Catholic and apostolic church. If you notice, one of the things that I want you to see is that one of the biggest branches early on is Roman Catholicism. So there's a difference between Catholic, meaning universal, and Roman Catholic, which is what we often call the Catholic church, like the Catholic church down the street, like St. Joseph's or something like that. Okay.

[10:12] So we look at our chart, and we find that there's a very fascinating Christian group called the Oriental Orthodox. Oh, I didn't finish. I'm going to give you the list of all the churches that are in the Oriental Orthodox. Church. Okay. So those are churches. There's 50 million members of the Oriental Orthodox Church in its various expressions. And we can't go into all of them, but that includes the Coptic Church, the Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. You get the idea, because we could make a long list of these. We're not going to do that. Now, in this table, we see the name of the group and then the differentiated teaching. This is how it's different from our church. So we're going to look at the name of the group, and then the differentiated teaching. Okay. Not how it's different from Roman Catholicism or other, but it's how it's really different from our church, among other ways. And so their differentiated teaching, among other things, but the most, sort of the most significant one, and I spelled this word wrong, monophysitism, which has now been replaced by the word meophysitism, but I spelled that wrong. It's M-I-A, and I apologize for that, meophysitism. And that was the belief that Christ

[11:27] only had one. Not two natures. Remember where I said Christ had two natures, and he's a fully oak and pine piece of plywood? This is kind of a clumsy paradox. But they only believe, really, that Christ has one divine nature. And so there's mono, he has one, mono means one, right?

[11:49] And this break occurred as a result of various church councils that were clarifying the nature of the triune God and the incarnation. And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, there was definitely a time, and this is a theme that's going to come up, there was definitely a time where the, we would call the larger center of the Christian church would look at the Coptic church, or, you know, some of these other churches that were monophysite, meophysite, and say, well, they're not really Christians. They're on, they're outside the tent, you know, so to speak. And that's changed. That's changed. We just say, you know, we have a different view of Jesus. We think how we understand the, incarnation is super important, and it's actually quite central to everything that we teach. But I don't think we want to disqualify somebody just for kind of getting that detail wrong or differently than us, even though it's a very important, it's a super important detail. Like, it is a very important detail. The incarnation, like I said, is central to everything that we talk about, almost. So there's 50 million of these people. We can't ignore them. They're one of the earliest breakaway from the church. Even some Armenians are in this kind of group, some of the

[12:57] Armenian. The Armenian, see, I have this list here. I'm not going to, but Armenians are particularly important. And Armenians were the very first Christian nation, as it turns out. It's quite interesting. Yep. The Syriac Orthodox, no, what is it? Armenian Apostolic Church, but not Armenian Orthodox Church. Okay. So you should know about this, but it's not going to change your life one way or the other. But this group exists. The next group is, the Greek or Eastern Orthodox Church. And I say Greek there because that's probably the largest group of the Orthodox Church, but you have other Orthodox Church. You have Russian Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox. They're not getting along very well. You have a lot of other Slavic Orthodox churches. And here's probably the biggest difference as it developed, is they disavow what was called the Filioque, which was added by the Catholic Church to the Nicene Creed. So the Filioque, which is the Catholic Church, is the one that was added to the Nicene Creed. So the word Filioque, that's a Latin phrase. Fili is the Latin word for son. And you can imagine the Oque part means and the. So the Catholics, the part that says and the son in the Nicene Creed, that didn't used to be there. So there was really a question about what is the nature of the Holy

[14:16] Spirit? Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father only? Or does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son? Filioque is how it was in Latin. And you may, I think it would be okay if you said, gosh, why does that matter? I mean, are you saying that to yourself right now? Does it really matter if the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only or from the Father and the Son? In my mind, it doesn't matter that much if you just put it on paper like that. But it mattered hugely back when this happened. And so in the 7th and 8th century, there was a lot of conflict about this because the Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church added, or the Western Church, added it to the Nicene Creed. Then they insisted that Eastern churches that had kind of had missions inside the Western part of Europe, the reason we're a Western and Eastern church is because the Roman Empire was split into the Western and the Eastern Empire and the churches kind of follows this little bit of history there. So eventually, and so the Eastern Church didn't like that they were being forced by the Western Church in those churches that were in the Western geography to say, and the Son. They didn't like that. They were being told how to worship. And they also disagreed with it

[15:33] theologically. They said, we don't think this Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son. Well, we think it only proceeds from the Father. So like I said, to us, it sounds a bit trivial, but it wasn't. It led to the Great Schism of 1054. It's an important date in church history where the Eastern Church and the Western Church, the popes of each church, mutually excommunicated each other. Can you imagine that? That's a letter. You excommunicate me? No, I excommunicate you. And they excommunicated each other. And thus, there were now, there were two churches that each thought that they were the true church.

[16:11] And can you imagine that they met at the border and just shook hands and said, oh, it's all right. That's not how the world was. Because the church at that time also had a great hand in what countries looked like, in what militaries looked like. And so there were wars. There were wars between East and West. There were wars between the churches. So a lot of bloodshed happened. And that's why I say it's not a trivial thing, because it led to so much bloodshed. In fact, some of the Crusades, they were supposed to go sort of liberate the Holy Land from Muslims. But some of them just stopped in Constantinople and looted the whole city, you know, because the Eastern Church was there. And they didn't even get any further than Constantinople. They just stopped there and took a bunch of stuff and then left. And if you talk to some Greek Orthodox priests, they'll still talk about that. They're like, that happened. We're really mad about that. You know, it happened over almost a thousand years ago. Or while the Crusades were more recent than that, but still say 800 years ago. So that's an important distinction is the Nicene Creed. And then John and Georgia, do you have any other in your mind, like if you were to say, what's the difference between, because I know

[17:23] you go to Greek Orthodox Church from time to time or fairly more often, whatever. It doesn't matter. We're not keeping a tentative church. We're not keeping a tentative church. We're not keeping a church. We're not keeping a church. We're not keeping a church. We're not keeping a church. We're not But tell us what have you noticed, difference-wise, if you're willing to. You don't have to.

[17:37] I mean, you originally talked about, is it a good thing? Right, yeah. Christ keeps that. We go to church there. A little bit more there again. It's in, like, biblical, biblical, the whole mass. Okay, yeah. Nobody understands it. Ah, right. Right. That's a problem. Mm-hmm. So there are, you know, and even in Greece, it's a little bit. Yeah.

[18:07] So there are problems with being too Orthodox. Right. You know, you want to, you're supposed to speak in the light of people, right? So that's. That's a challenge, yeah. So it's kind of different than what you're. Yeah. You sound summarized. Right. So it'd be hard, it might even be hard to actually get what the theology of that church is if it's in a language you can't understand, right? Yeah? Yeah?

[18:30] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . where they basically said the mass needs to no longer be in Latin, which it was, and it needs to be in the language of the people that are in your church. And that's not that recent. I mean, that's fairly recent. That's not that long ago that the Catholics did that. A lot of inertia.

[18:51] Yeah. They're not. They're holding fast on that. And, yeah, and I think that's the. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And they won't change. Are there other Greek Orthodox churches that are in English? Not that you're aware of. Okay. Yeah. And so I think sometimes when there are divisions, it creates this stubbornness to change because you think you might be giving in to the other side. Oh, the Catholics did it. We can't do it. You know what I mean? Like, there's still that. And I think that's really the downside. The overarching question I want us to be asking is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? If you want to put something in the bad column is, the reaction. The reactionary level of this is that we're not going to make any changes that are good for our people because then we'd be admitting that the people we don't like on the other side of this are right.

[19:47] And that's. No, I'm not saying that that's why the Greek Orthodox Church won't go to English, but that could be it. They're pretty mad. The Russian Pope is the top. Our patriarch. Right. The patriarch. The biggest, right? But then Greece is next. Yeah. The Ethiopian is very big. Serbian. Yeah. But they don't talk to each other. Right. And then there's actually Russian churches here that we don't. We actually should be one unified church. Yeah. In a different language and culture. The other big difference. No, it's great.

[20:19] The mass is really based around communion. Yeah. Very, very core. It's the core of it. It's in two-go. You're supposed to get communion every time. And there's been a lot of issues with it during COVID because everyone takes communion off the same spoon. And during COVID they said, don't worry. No one's ever contracted anything in 2,000 years. And so it's kind of hard. Yeah.

[20:43] You know, for those people at home who haven't heard this, I'm so sorry. We should have had the microphone over to them, but that's okay. John and Georgia have been saying that the mass is in Koine Greek, and that's difficult to hear. And the other is that communion practices in their church is a very, it's like a common cup and a common sort of spoon, and they drop the wafer into your mouth with it. And that's in the age of communion. I mean, especially during COVID, that's kind of a concern. But has anyone in the church gotten sick from that? They might be right. Miracles abound. We don't know. They said... Don't put the Lord to the test. I would say don't put the Lord to the test either.

[21:21] Don't bank on miracles that aren't in your control. But yeah. And I think the other thing, I think that's a great point, is that the Catholic Church has maintained a centralized authority in the Pope. And that's not easy. Yeah. Yeah. of splinters within the Catholic Church, but they theoretically all agree that the Pope is the top. But there are many patriarchs in the Eastern Orthodox Church. So each kind of each ethnic group has their own patriarch. So there's not as much unity that you could again ask if that's a good or a bad thing. So that's a good question. So that's the Greek or the Orthodox Church. And as you see on your little chart there, you saw that the Eastern Orthodox broke away. Oh, there it is. It's 1054. Great schism. I didn't know it said that there, but that's great. So it tells you exactly how that happened. So you have the Greek and the Russian Orthodox Church, but you have Serbian Orthodox. You have probably Ethiopian Orthodox. Next, we have the Roman Catholic. I think everybody understands that there's Catholic churches and Protestant churches, or I hope you understand that. And we're in a Protestant church, right? And so what differentiates the Roman Catholics, say, from the Protestant or the Covenant Church? One is that I think to me,

[22:31] this is actually the most important one, is what is authoritative. And so for Protestants generally, authority is in Scripture only. Do you get that? Like the Scripture only. And like last week, we talked about the Mormons, they were adding to Scripture. We don't do that either. So Scripture only as we have it, no extra books getting added to the end. And that's good, I think. I mean, that's a difference. In the Catholic Church, Scripture and church leadership, are authoritative. And the thinking there is that all the popes are in a direct succession from Jesus, not a direct succession genetically or by marriage or anything like that, but the passing of apostleship went from Jesus to Peter to other apostles and other apostles and other apostles. And eventually, the pope of the Roman Catholic Church has received this blessing in an unbroken line from Jesus. And so, you know, I think that's a very important thing. And so, the pope has the authority to give his opinion on things that Scripture isn't totally 100% clear on. You get that? And so, the pope can make what we call canon law by deciding to. And it's authoritative in the church. But we don't believe in human authority. We believe in Scripture only being authority, which has its own challenges, right? Sometimes it might be easier to

[23:57] have sort of a benign dictator telling us how to interpret things, but we don't do that. And especially in the covenant, we don't do that. We don't do that. We don't do that. We don't do that. And so, in the covenant church, we say, well, where is it written? So, we always say, how does the word inform us? And we have five, 10, 20 different Scriptures that may put information into this question that we're asking. We need to sift them all carefully, and we need to look at the context. And so, being a church that says Scripture is authoritative means we also have to be a church that reads Scripture and studies Scripture and understands it the best we can, and that's a bigger challenge. And so, there's a high, there's a higher burden of literacy, and especially, not just, I mean, literacy, like actually being able to read, everybody, but biblical literacy are important in Protestant churches more so. Okay. There's some beliefs that probably came about because of this understanding of human authority and kind of trying to fill in the gaps. So, the Catholics believe in purgatory, which is an intermediate place after you die, before you go to heaven, and in purgatory, it's sort of meh, M-E-H. It's like, it's not terrible, but it's not paradise.

[25:09] You're just there until kind of some of your sins are burned away by prayers made to the saints. They used to sell indulgences. That was a big issue for Martin Luther. That was where you could pay them some money for a piece of paper, and on that piece of paper, it said, you don't, you know, you don't have to do any penance for your sins. Your donation has washed your sins away, and since the budget's... It's a little light this year. I think we're going... No, it's not. It's not. The budget is not light, and we will not be selling indulgences. That's how, if you go to Rome and you see St. Peter's Cathedral, it's astounding, and that's how it was funded, with indulgences. They were like, we need to build this big church. We need money. We're going to start selling forgiveness, and it was a blockbuster. They made a lot of money, and Luther looked at that, and he said, this is absolutely wrong. For two reasons. One is you should not be able to buy grace. It's a free gift of God. The other is that the individual believer who believes this is still condemned, because they haven't actually repented. They've just bought repentance with their money, and it's a license to go sin more, and so he was both concerned about just how corrupt it was, but he was concerned about

[26:24] the souls of the people who thought it would actually help. You get that? It was a double problem. Okay. Catholics don't sell indulgences anymore. However, they have issued some recently, and they've given them away for free, but still the whole idea is kind of not what Protestants agree with. Catholics also believe you can pray to the saints. The saints could answer your prayers or be intercessors between you and Jesus. Protestants believe that you can pray directly to God himself. You don't need somebody in between. You don't need, you don't need, you don't need, you don't need the white filling in your Oreo, you know, if you want to put it that way, right? You go directly to God. The Catholics believe that there are seven sacraments. The two that we hold are baptism and Holy Communion, but to that the parents, the Catholics would add, for example, marriage is a sacrament, which I think is kind of cool, and something called extreme unction, which is a blessing that you have before you die, and there's a few others that, you know, I can't keep track of them because there's seven of them, but there's, there are other sacraments. The other thing in very, very important, and this kind of goes back to the indulgences, the Catholics believe that

[27:37] you're justified and is made righteous in God's eyes by faith, but also by some works, works that the formulation they have is works completed in love, or works made complete by love, and so there is still this, and we talked about this with the Mormons last week, is there's still this sense that you have to do enough on your part, and God has to fill in the rest, and Protestants believe that you can do, you can be like, you can be like Albert Schweitzer or some great missionary and work all your life, and all of that will count zero. Now, it doesn't count zero in terms of the world, it counts a whole lot, but it counts zero in terms of your own salvation. You cannot earn it one bit, zero. God does all of it, and so he will save a very corrupt person. He will save a very corrupt person. He will save a very corrupt person. He will save a very corrupt person. He will save a very corrupt person. He will save a very sinful person who hasn't done a good thing for anyone in their whole lives, and he will also save Albert Schweitzer or anybody else if they come to him in faith and receive his grace, so it depends on faith. It does not depend on works. And the Catholic Church, to various degrees over the years, has believed that the Church

[28:50] has authority in temporal affairs. In certain times in the Middle Ages, it meant that the Catholic Church had a standing army, and they would use this army to enforce their will on other nations. Can you imagine how messed up that is? The Church had an army? Like, who was the general? Did you have to be a priest and a general? I don't really know. The Church was not above sending pointed letters to various kings around Europe, also Henry VIII, because he got in trouble with the Catholics for how many wives he had and having a divorce, but they would send letters to various kings saying, you have displeased us. You need to straighten out. You need to do this, that, or the other. And so this is the idea that the Catholic Church was exerting influence over other countries. And as it turns out, one of the smallest countries in the world is what we call the Holy See, or Vatican City, inside Rome. It's actually a country. It's on the list of countries.

[29:49] So that's the difference. And so if we go to the Protestant teaching column, we say Scripture is the only authority, although some Protestant churches have what we call creedal, legal formulations. And I'll just talk about that real briefly. So the Lutheran Church, these are the creeds of the Lutheran Church. So men or humans are always going to try to augment God's Word. They will definitely say this all flows from Scripture, and it's on a lower level than Scripture as an authority, but it's still an authority, they would say. And so in this book of Concord, you'll have Luther's large and small catechism. My favorite is the Heidelberg Disputation. It's really, really good. I mean, this is good stuff, right? And you have the, well, you have so much. There's just so much in this book. And you can borrow it if you want, but you're not going to borrow it. I know that. And then if you go to the Reformed Tradition, and I'm going to read you that real quick. Well, of course I lost it. So the Reformed Tradition has, it's like the Council of Dort. I'm not going to even list them all. Basically, they're saying, we're going to write them all. So you have to agree to this book. And so, for example, to become a member of a

[31:06] Lutheran church, you have to say, I confess in God the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, all the rest. Also, I subscribe to the Augsburg Confession. It's in here. The Augsburg Confession is probably the most important creedal document of the Lutheran church. If you join a Presbyterian church or other Reformed churches, you might have to say, I agree with all these other books. And one thing that was really fun, about the Covenant Church, is it's a non-creedal and non-confessional church. And so it actually, technically doesn't even believe in the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed as, because those are not scripture. You see what I'm saying? But they say that we revered them, they're important, they guide us, but our authority is solely, solely scripture. And we have no creeds and we have no confessions. And so there's a story about one, I think it was a Lutheran or a Presbyterian asked a Covenant pastor once, he said, where's your book of, where's your version of this book? You know, where's your book of creeds and confessions? And the Covenant pastor was like, here it is right here. You know, and this is the Bible. He said, this is our creed. This is our confession. We always have to go back to the source if we want to understand these things. And we have to be thinking about,

[32:31] so I kind of like that. But again, especially for Covenant people, people in the Covenant church, literacy and biblical literacy are immensely important things. And this, you can think about that. That's also a challenge because how can we be a good church to people who aren't literate? It's a challenge. I'm not saying it's perfect, right? There are some people who just can't read for whatever reason. They're new to a country or they never learned growing up.

[32:57] Well, or they're blind, but we have, we have the Bible is in Braille, but yeah, you're right. Yeah. There's some people have trouble reading, right? So our, our requirement for literacy, I think is a challenge, but anyway. So that's it that a lot of Protestant churches, but not all have creedal formulations or confessional documents. Like I just showed you, Protestants don't believe in purgatory indulgences or prayers to the saints. We can pray directly to God. Almost all Protestant denominations have two sacraments, which are baptism and Holy Communion. Some Protestant denominations don't use the word sacrament for Holy Communion and, and baptism. They call them something else. And that's why they don't even have sacraments at all. We believe in justification by faith alone. And in general, Protestants have a doctrine of two kingdoms, which is that there's the kingdom of the world, which is full of war and politics and intrigue and drama, teen drama, plus the older drama. It's all fun. And then it's not fun at all. And then there's the kingdom of the kingdom of God and they overlap, but the kingdom of God's job is not to tell the kingdom of the world what to do. The kingdom of God's job is to bring the kingdom

[34:12] of God to every person in the kingdom of the world so that by faith, they become citizens of both countries. And someday, maybe the kingdom of the world will resemble the kingdom of God, but I'm not holding my breath. You know, it's not going to happen in my lifetime. That's absolutely sure. Unless there's a major sort of revival in this world.

[34:32] So, and just some names that you may want to know. The Protestant Reformation broke away from the Catholic Church. You can see right here above that, 1517 was Martin Luther, but he wasn't the first. Jan Hus was before him. He was martyred. He didn't have the protections that Luther had. Jan Hus, Martin Luther, Philip MacLankton, John Calvin, Erasmus, and others.

[34:55] Holdreich's Wingly was very important. I didn't put his name on there. These are some really important Protestant reforms. These are reformers that really worked through this stuff and said, well, if the scripture alone is our guide, what does that mean for us? What, how are we going to work that out?

[35:11] Now, as you can imagine, when there was a war between the Eastern and the Western Church from 1054 on, what happened between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church from 1517 on? More wars, you know? So the church is really corrupt. This is the other challenge I think that we have. church, even though it's been blessed by God and instituted by Jesus, is filled with humans. And humans are humans. And humans do human things. And they make mistakes. And they get very territorial. And they get violent. And so to the shame of the church, Catholics, Protestants, and what we would call some of the radical reformers, the sort of another branch of the church, the Amish, the Brethren, the Hutterite, and the Mennonite, some of those groups were actually fighting too.

[36:00] So that's the end of the table. I'm going to look at this tree real quick. But before we go there, A, was this interesting? And you can say no. And B, are there any questions? A, was this interesting? Kind of. Yeah. Okay. B, are there any questions? I can definitely try to answer some. I'm not an expert. And this table is not exhaustive. This is like the highlights. Any questions?

[36:23] Take a look at the tree there. I think this is really useful because it helps us find our place. And it's a really good place to start. And it's a really good place to start. And it's a good place to start. And it's a really good place to start. And it's a really good place to start. So we start at the bottom, Judaism, Jesus, and I said the core church before a lot of the councils happened, it was just the church. But then what we call the Oriental Orthodox Church, the Coptic and Armenian, broke off. In 1054, the Eastern and the Western Church broke off. That's the Great Schism. Then in 1517, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Church diverged. So everything you have on the left side of the table is the church. And then you have the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. And then you have the Catholic and the Protestant churches. And then you have I'm sorry for people at home. I did not send this home, and I apologize for that. You just have to imagine it. Everything on this, the reason this tree looks like this is it was for the Covenant Church. In actuality, if you went by the number of people that are in the church, the Catholic church and the Orthodox churches, their branches would be much larger. Okay?

[37:26] So Anglicanism broke off from Catholicism, not for any other theological purpose except that King Henry VIII wanted to either divorce or kill all his wives until he could have a male heir. So even the churches are messed up. So the Anglican Church broke off because of that. And from the Anglican Church, you get in the Episcopal Church for some reason. In America, the Anglican Church is called the Episcopal Church. It just is. But after, off of Anglicanism, you'll see some really famous names here. Methodism broke off from that, from that Pentecostal, Assemblies of God, Holiness movements, African Methodist Episcopal, AME Zion, AME CME Nazarene, you get the idea. So that's that Anglican branch. It's pretty big, and there's a lot of, you'll see, Pentecostal churches. By the way, there's also a bunch of churches out there that, in their mind, and they're kind of right, believe that they're not part of this tree. They believe that they have no, their roots are nowhere in this. They're just Bible churches, they're independent churches, non-denominational churches. In all reality, they can probably trace their roots to one of these branches. Okay, so before we get to Lutheran, let's look at Reformed real quick. This would be sort of the theological descendants of John

[38:46] Calvin and Holdreich Zwingli. And so here's some names that you really know. The Reformed church includes the Baptists, you've heard of them. The Presbyterian, Christian Reformed, if you've been, if you've been to Iowa, you know there's a lot of Christian Reformed people there. Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Unitarian and Universalist ended up from that branch, and it's hard to say that they're even, some of them are, it's hard to say that they're Christians, but they're in the tree. Okay, then we go to Lutheran, and this is descendants from Luther. So you have churches that actually call themselves Lutheran. Like the ELCA is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. It's the largest Lutheran church in America. The second largest is the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. And even names like that, you're like, you realize just how factional these churches are when the name of the church, which is for all of the United States, is called the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. They have not even changed their name to something else. And there are many of them. There's actually one on Miramonte. There's a church there.

[39:48] It's called St. Paul Lutheran Church. It's a Missouri Synod church. It's near, it's near, well, I don't think it's on Miramonte. Anyways, they're all over the place. They're all over the place. But if you see a Lutheran church, the chances are it's either Missouri Synod or Lutheran. Then you get to the Pietist movement, and these are our forefathers. So you have another group of reformers that reformed Lutheranism. And yet with the Evangelical Free Church, Moravian Church, I don't know what converges, but then we have the Covenant Church. Also at the time of Lutheren you had these radical reformers, and some of them were quite interesting, but you ended up like with some of these really interesting groups . Amish brethren, Hutterite, Mennonite. Anyway, so that's our tree. And so that just helps kind of locate us where we are. Our branch goes from covenant to pietist to Lutheran to Catholic to the church before all the councils, okay? And then to Jesus, to Judaism. So there's a lot of steps along the way. And here's the thing. Do we think we're right? Yeah. Otherwise, we wouldn't do this. But do we think everybody else is wrong? Kind of, but not in a way that really we would not exclude them. We wouldn't even necessarily exclude the Oriental Orthodox

[41:07] Church that has a monophysite or a meophysite view of the nature of Christ. We wouldn't necessarily exclude them. Do we think Catholics aren't Christians? Absolutely not. We think they're Christians, right? Do we think Baptists aren't Christians? Absolutely not. We think Baptists are Christians. So we're pretty easy. When I was a pastor in Iowa, the covenant church ended up being this landing place for a Catholic girl would marry a Dutch Reformed guy, and they couldn't go to each other's churches, and they wanted to raise their kids in some place. They'd end up in the covenant church because they're like, well, you know, it doesn't exclude anybody, which is kind of nice. All right. Oh, it's 1145. Okay. So I'm going to go through this. Some other day, I'll talk about what the covenant church believes, and I won't be able to preach again for three weeks because next week we have Unite and the week after the Langsdorfer here. But in three weeks, I'll teach what is specifically unique about the covenant church. This is a document called Covenant Affirmations. I can print out more of these. You can have this if you want it. This is what got me into the covenant church. I switched from Lutheran to covenant because of this document. And I'm just going to tell you what. Now, these aren't creeds

[42:15] and these aren't confessions, but the covenant did have to kind of write down, somewhere, what they believe. But they would say even this document is subservient to scripture. So there are common affirmations of the covenant church. One is that we're an apostolic church, which means we actually believe that we do have a place in this family tree. We are descended from the apostles and all the other churches. And so thus, we do have the apostles' creed, the Nicene Creed are informative to us. All right. Let's see. Here are the covenant affirmations. The number one is the reason for reason is reason is reason is reason is reason is reason is reason is this is the idea that the church shouldn't just be like a little steeple on a hillside just existing for itself. The church needs to be engaged in the world in a two kingdoms kind of way. So the church needs to have a hospital. The church needs to feed the poor. The church needs to reach out into the world with the good news, not just to convert people, but to bless people. So we are, the whole mission of the church is to bless the whole world, not just to convert people, or not just to read the Bible together in a closed room. The church is a fellowship of

[43:47] believers. You have to believe to be a member of the church. You can't like inherit your membership from your parents. You can't just go, I think I'm a covenant. No, you have to actually positively affirm that you're joining the church. And then I think fifth, I don't know what number I'm on, but a conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit. And so you have the, maybe the Pentecostal churches that over, maybe overemphasize the work of the spirit, but you have other churches that barely talk about it. And so you have the, maybe the Pentecostal churches that over, maybe over emphasize partly as a reaction to the Pentecostal churches. The covenant church says, we don't need to be in that sort of that continuum at all. We don't need to stay in that. We just say that the Holy Spirit is living and active, and we have to pay attention to what it may be doing and telling us to do. And then finally is the reality of freedom in Christ. I'll go over more of these in three weeks, but the reality of the freedom of Christ is that there is freedom for us to disagree on a lot of these things, on the non-freedom of Christ. And so I think that's a non-core thing. Now, what are the core things and what aren't the core things? That's a great

[44:47] question. Okay. But we have this freedom to be informed by scripture and we have the freedom to come to each other and say, where is that written? Where is it written? Tell me. And we can talk together. So there's not this sort of, the freedom in Christ means we don't have books like this that kind of are like, can act like a straitjacket and tell us what we can and can't believe. But the freedom is we can wrestle with scripture as a body together. We can do that. So isn't that exciting? In three weeks, I'll preach on this document, which changed my life. Now, the final question.

[45:19] Oh, by the way, I think what's really good is that churches aren't killing each other anymore, like literally killing each other more. Praise God. We'll see that may happen, you know. And I think it's not our job to say that some churches are in and some churches are out. Now, last week was different. I talked about the cults. They are out. And I have to say that clearly. It's partly my job to say that. Because their belief system is so vastly different and also abusive in some important ways that we cannot say that we have common cause with Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-day Saints, or Scientologists. There's no place from this pulpit where I could say, there are our brothers and sisters in Christ. It just doesn't work. For example, like the Mormons or the LDS, they're polytheists. They believe in God. They believe in God. They believe in God. They believe that they can become a God themselves someday. That is so different. That's so fundamentally different from what we believe that we cannot say that we're brothers and sisters. We can't. But all these other churches that I've talked about, this is one large worldwide family of Christians, okay? And I love and bless all of them. Now, let's get back to that very first

[46:33] question, right? Is it okay that we have a family tree with this many branches or is it a bad thing, right? The bad side we saw. Fighting, violence, disagreements, siloing, reacting to each other and not actually doing what's best for the people in the church. Any thoughts on that? I mean, I'm willing to, we have one, like a few more seconds, but any feelings that it's good or bad that we have such a big family tree? I'll end with why I think it's good. You think it's good? Yeah, tell us why.

[47:08] Because I think that God needs each of us. Yeah. Yeah. Mission field, maybe. Yeah. Adele, you took the words out of my mouth. That was my, no, that was my final point. Anybody else? I thought Callie was raising a hand, but you're knitting. That's okay. Yes. Yes, John.

[47:49] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're having different experiences at different churches. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone else? Good or bad? Just is. Okay said, you're not a Buddhist. It's like actually turning someone, I can just tell you're not a Buddhist. You're a Catholic. You just are. I can tell. And he became a Catholic priest. You know, it's like, and it's that discernment, like his DNA was, I'm a Catholic, like, and I don't know if everybody's this way, but it's true. So we have a mission field. The Catholics have a mission field. The Lutherans have a mission field. If they follow the Lord, it'll work out. If they don't, now a lot of these denominations are kind of drifting away, and that's a topic for another time. Some of them are in deep, steep decline, and that's sad, but that's a topic for another time. But if they will do it well, all these different groups have a unique mission field, do one thing or two things really well, and will appeal to somebody who needs to join that church. And so that I would call a net good. But it is somewhat of a liability, because you don't have to be a Christian to be a Christian. You don't have to be a Christian to be a Christian. You say, I'm a Christian, and it could be one of a hundred or a thousand different

[49:48] groups that you might actually be. And the actions of one group of Christians reflects, unfortunately, on all the Christians, and that's another challenge. So anyways, you guys are really good. You could all, you know, this is like 50 minutes. I appreciate you listening to all this little download of information. I hope you keep the chart. Well, let's pray. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word to us. Thank you for your desire for unity. And Father, I pray we could become one in the future with other churches. But I also pray that we keep working the field that you have put us in. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.