N
NPS
Guest
I had an interesting conversation recently with a guy I met who attends a popular local non-denominational church. The church is one of the new breed of churches: Heavy on pop Christian music. Good talk from the pastor about living the Christian life etc.
He enjoys the church quite a bit. But one thing he said at the end of that part of our conversation caught my attention. He basically said that he wishes the church and the pastor would stop focusing on other denominations. Apparently they spend A LOT of time on how to debate other groups, i.e. Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses etc. and he wishes they would just worry about themselves and their lives as Christians instead of trying to prove everyone else wrong. [His statements were completely unbidden as I was mostly just listening to him talk about Christianity and his church] The reason I bring this up is because it’s obvious from any interaction on religious message boards that many churches spend time informing their members of the “bad” things about the RCC, but whenever asked the answer is always “We never even think of the Catholic Church” or “The subject of the Catholic Church never comes up” yet one can hear the same mistruths over and over.
So the questions I put to you are:
*Do non-denominational churches—churches with no real history or background—produce a sort of “Denomination Envy” where they overly focus on others?
*Or is all of that simply an offshoot from regular Protestant misunderstandings of the Church?
He enjoys the church quite a bit. But one thing he said at the end of that part of our conversation caught my attention. He basically said that he wishes the church and the pastor would stop focusing on other denominations. Apparently they spend A LOT of time on how to debate other groups, i.e. Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses etc. and he wishes they would just worry about themselves and their lives as Christians instead of trying to prove everyone else wrong. [His statements were completely unbidden as I was mostly just listening to him talk about Christianity and his church] The reason I bring this up is because it’s obvious from any interaction on religious message boards that many churches spend time informing their members of the “bad” things about the RCC, but whenever asked the answer is always “We never even think of the Catholic Church” or “The subject of the Catholic Church never comes up” yet one can hear the same mistruths over and over.
So the questions I put to you are:
*Do non-denominational churches—churches with no real history or background—produce a sort of “Denomination Envy” where they overly focus on others?
*Or is all of that simply an offshoot from regular Protestant misunderstandings of the Church?
