lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I have been watching people throw around ridiculous numbers on the number of protestant denominations for too long, Catholics use it because it has been used by respected Catholic Apologists, and because it is a discussion starter( kind of like breaking the ice with a hand grenade).:bigyikes:
The number is ridiculous number, and Protestants, for all your talk about thinking for yourselves, using your own reasoning and God given brains,-how could you let pass what you knew in your gut was just not right? .
That number,** 33,000 Protestant denominations** comes from a single source…
who either doesn’t understand the concept of Church, Denomination or communion; whose research/ record keeping is more anecdotal, eccentric collector / hobbyist than a scientist; . Whatever his story, he is really annoying the heck out of me.
Source:
He is the
single source of the 33,000 number; you will not find another independent source which duplicates his numbers;
The reason they are so out of whack is because he either never knew, or decided to redefined the word “denomination”,to fit his style of research.
Unfortunately the mainstream media who are ignorant about all things Christian, and wouldn’t know Holy Oil from snake oil, keep using his numbers like they were gospel truth-this includes Encyclopedia Britannica, World Almanac, innumerable journalists, and not a few Catholic Apologists (who really should know better).
HERE’S THE SECRET TO THE 33,000 Protestant denominations.
He redefined the word denomination (I’m being kind, there’s another word for what he’s done, and if it was in field that depended on his research to make life and death decisions, the man would be in prison).
A denomination is defined in this Encyclopedia as an organized aggregate of worship centers or congregations of similar ecclesiastical tradition within a specific country; i.e. as an organized Christian church or tradition or religious group or community of believers, within a specific country, whose component congregations and members are called by the same denominational name in different areas, regarding themselves as one autonomous Christian church distinct from other denominations, churches and traditions. As defined here, world Christianity consists of 6 major ecclesiastico-cultural blocs, divided into 300 major ecclesiastical traditions, composed of over 33,000 distinct denominations in 238 countries, these denominations themselves being composed of over 3,400,000 worship centers, churches or congregations.”
(Barrett et al, volume 1, page 16, Table 1-5.)
So the 7 groups making up the Anglican “ecclesiastico-cultural mega-blocs”(btw, not to shabby for not bad in it’s 500 year history) are not 7 denominations;
Each individual country gets it’s own count; even if the Churches are part of a single body in communion, theologically and organizationally. If there is one in Australia and one in Bolivia, (kind of like there are Catholic Churches in many countries , each is counted separately.
So instead of 7 Anglican-type communions, there are 168.
AND THE ROMAN CATHOLICS GET THE SAME TREATMENT; if you bother to check, you would find out that you are not a the “One Holy Catholic Church” but , according to his way of accounting,
the Roman Catholic Church consists of 236 denominations in the world’s 238 countries. And that number doesn’t even take into account the schismatic/dissenting groups mentioned in previous posts.
Are you beginning to see how this Math is going?
Here’s the long and short of it-
The 33,000 are subdivided into “6 major ecclesiastico-cultural mega-blocs”, and ordering them by denomination size we have the figures for the year 2000:
Code:
* Independents (about 22000)
* Protestants (about 9000)
* "Marginals" (about 1600)
* Orthodox (781)-most of which are in communion with each other
* Roman Catholics (242)
* Anglicans (168)
So the 33,000 number is from the total of these 6 mega-blocs:
22000 + 9000 + 1600 + 781 + 242 + 168 = 33,000+
From a Review by from Richard N. Ostling, Associated Press, 19 May 2001:
… Barrett has doggedly visited most of the lands in person, collecting raw material, including national census figures and United Nations data, and recruiting the 444 specialists who feed him material. Among them: Vatican missions librarian Willi Henkel and editor J. Gordon Melton of the Encyclopedia of American Religions. Barrett’s encyclopedia sought to count each human being in each religion and religious subcategory in each country as of 1900, 1970, 1990, 1995 and 2000, with projections to 2025.
