Not at all. I see nothing wrong with two or three Baptist faith communities in the same area. Or two or three or more of any faith tradition that professes the same doctrine.
Then you need to rebuke your fellow-Catholics who are making a big deal about the plethora of “non-denominational” churches.
What I find dreary about these churches, in fact, is the regularity with which they agree doctrinally (because the doctrines they agree on are typically the “lowest common denominator” of evangelicalism, without the intellectual depth and spiritual discipline of the major Protestant traditions, let alone Catholicism or Orthodoxy).
Folks seem to be assuming that any two churches that are totally independent will have different doctrines. That just isn’t how it works. Of course they may, but they may not. And they are more likely not to, on the whole.
Sorry, but my own experience right here in my own community belies that statement.
So you can list all the Protestant congregations in your area and name the major doctrinal divisions that divides each of them from all the others? That’s quite a feat. . .
In the tradition my family comes from, the “Wesleyan Holiness movement,” there are all kinds of small denominations with no significant doctrinal disagreements. Wesleyans, Free Methodists, and Nazarenes are the three biggest. There are differences of emphasis and tradition, but members of all three churches regard members of the others as likely to be doctrinally sound. And there are a lot more small denominations. A number of those are genuinely divided from the Big Three because they regard the Big Three as too “worldly.” But they aren’t doctrinally divided from each other for the most part. And then of course there are the United Methodists, whose more conservative members would be doctrinally comfortable in the Big Three Holiness denominations, but many of whom would definitely not.
So there are three major divisions within the Wesleyan tradition on a conservative/liberal spectrum, even though the middle group has several big organizational divisions and a bunch of smaller ones, and the most radical wing has a lot of tiny denominations and independent churches.
I put the Church of God, Anderson in a separate category because of their distinctive eschatology and their restorationist tendencies.
So just this one branch of Protestantism has several divisions, and I admit that I’ve oversimplified things a bit. Protestantism is plenty divided. You just can’t read off doctrinal divisions from organizational ones. And attacking organizational divisions in Protestantism sends the wrong message–it bewilders Protestants as to why you care about something so superficial, it is silly given the parallel organizations within Catholicism, and it reinforces the Protestant stereotype that Catholics mostly care about tight organizational structure.
Yes, and that in itself is a problem.
Agreed–if we are talking about the actual doctrinal divisions and failure to be mutually accountable, and not simply the fact that there are parallel ecclesiastical organizations.
Edwin
). Mathematically, if we only take just 17 doctrinal divisions, the possibilities are over 130,000 different permutations of doctrinal beliefs.