My Aunt the Missionary.

Aunty Alice. Sister, Aunty, Missionary. 

We gathered for dinner today, my dad's side. The BeeHoon, pork knuckle, honey roast chicken and the ham were the highlights of the dinner. I liked the pork knuckle. Later, we gathered in the living room to chit-chat. The topic soon turned to religion. An interesting discussion ensured; what was the difference between the different Christian churches and denominations? Aunty Alice was good at explaining this. Apparently the was the universal Church 2000 years ago. It split into the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic bodies. The Roman Catholic church begun to lose its affinity with the bible, and thus the other denominations began to splinter from it. Today, Roman Catholics still exist, but so do the other denominations which stemmed from it. What sets them apart, from what I gathered, were the styles of worship and different religious practices. However, what bound them together under the banner of Christianity was that they based their churches on the bible. Individual denominations were but movements by church members who felt that their churches were going off track, veering away from the teachings of the bible. These zealous Christians then begun their movements to revive their churches and to follow the bible more closely. Hence Methodists were founded by a guy who was know to be very methodical in his approaches to things. He was influenced by the holy spirit, and thereby started teaching people about the gospel in a methodical way. In other words, he found a methodical way to teach whatever was in the bible to fellow Christians. Hence the term Methodist! People who study the bible methodically. So what is the difference between Methodists and Anglicans and Presbyterians and Charismatic Christians etc? They were simply different revival movements founded by different people. Now the crucial questions is, regardless of what denomination your church is, how closely does it follow the Bible? That is the difference! 

I can attend a Presbyterian church one day and a Methodist church another, simply because they are just places of worship! What matters most is your personal relationship with Christ! The 2nd most important thing would probably be how much your church keeps to the teachings of the Bible. 

As Joel Ee once said: "I'm willing to travel far for good scripture." Somehow I always remember him saying that to me.