08/21/2026
A couple of thoughts on the Church:
1. There's only ONE . There are many congregations and even collections of congregations, but the Church is the whole Body of Christ, and so there's only one.
2. The word "catholic" is the English pronunciation of two Greek words, "kata", according to" and "holu", meaning "whole". Ignatius of Antioch used the phrase "the catholic church" in 110 AD or so to describe the entire universal church of Christ. Early Christians adopted it to mean "the whole Church, since the beginning".
3. The day-to-day and week-to-week and year-to-year operation of individual congregations within the Church is done by Bishops (Greek episcopos), Elders (Greek presbuteros) and Deacons (Greek diakonos). These offices were in use during the First Century and were used by the Apostles, notably Paul. Popes (technically "Patriarchs") were first named by Roman Emperor Constantine the Great at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. to assist HIM in supervising what he thought of as HIS Church. Over the years, the Patriarchs of Rome began to claim universal authority over the other Patriarchates. Pope Damasus claimed universal authority in the 4th Century, Pope Innocent claimed the right to adjudicate ecclesiastical disputes in the fifth, Pope Leo I came up with a Theological doctrine justifying such claims later in the fifth, and Pope Gregory VIII locked it all down with a sweeping codification of the idea sometime after 1080. The Popes of Constantinople and Alexandria still exist, in Greece and Egypt, while that of Antioch has fragmented into five different competing bodies of Christians.
4. The term "Protestant" originally had very little to do with the Church or any particular Christians. At the Diet of Speyer in 1529, Several German Princes and representatives of some free cities signed a protest of the Diet's adoption of an act revoking an earlier grant of religious tolerance to Lutherans. Thus they, and later virtually all non Roman Christians became known as "protestants." The proper term for those Christians who left the Church of Rome in the 15 and 16 hundreds has always been "Reformed".
5. This was especially true of the English branch of the Reformation movement in that the King of England, Henry VIII specifically instructed his religious advisors and church leaders that the Church in England was to remain "catholic" in almost every way except that it would not be subservient to the Bishop of Rome and the Bible would be printed in English and made available in every Church in England for worshippers to read.
6. The Anglican Church (including both the Church of England and other national Churches outside of England) is thus both Catholic and Reformed.
7. Anglican worship is available in Marshall County on Sunday morning and Wednesday evening in very much the same format instituted by Henry VIII in England in the 1500s at Christ Chapel, in Fairdealing. Interested? Come viist. 8:30 and 10:30 on Sundays; 7:00 p.m. on Wednesdays. We'd love to have you.
