Every now and then someone will come to my door and invite me to come visit “their” church. Well what is “your” church, I always wonder.

There are a lot of “churches” out there and they all teach sometimes drastically different doctrines. So I wonder, is “my” church “your” church?

Is your church the Catholic church? It began officially around the 600s, when Boniface, the Bishop of Rome, declared himself the universal (or “catholic” the word means) bishop over all the congregations of the world. But that’s an incomplete explanation, because it doesn’t explain how a congregation in Rome came to have only one man as bishop. The Bible only speaks of congregations having a plurality of bishops, but over the years after the death of the Apostles, churches started to gradually move away from the simple pattern of New Testament worship. Things like having one bishop lead a congregation crept into the Christian world until, by the time of Boniface, it was the norm. In the years that followed the Catholic Church would continue to deviate from the Bible, creating the office of Priest as a seperate institution from “regular” Christians. These Priests would hear the confessions of the sins of the people and bring them before God. They would encourage their Catholic underlings to pray to various dead Christians (called “saints” in a gross deviation from the Bible’s meaning of the word) and, most famously, to the mother of Jesus, the so-called “blessed Mary.”

Is that “your” church? It may be; The Catholic church commands the largest body of members in the world among those who claim Christ.

But it’s not “my” church.

I belong to a church that is guided by the simple, pure, Apostle-approved New Testament. The man who calls himself Pope claims to belong to a lineage of the Apostles, but there is no such lineage. He’s just a man, pretending to have authority that God never gave him. Roman Catholics say that communion with God is not possible unless you go through a man (a priest). But those men have no business hearing about your sins. They say you can bring your petitions to God through a woman (Mary). But that woman has no ability to hear them. I belong to a church that is the body of Christ, with Jesus as head. I take my sins to Him and He forgives them. I bring my needs to Him and He meets them. I don’t need any third party or intermediary. I take my problems straight to the Man.

That’s “my” church (though technically it belongs to Christ–Matthew 16:18).

Is it “your” church?