Faith Time: Are there too many churches?

MOBILE, Ala. (WKRG) — Faith Time is our weekly conversation on matters of faith. And joining us this morning is Wayne Miller with Grace Lutheran Church in Mobile. We want to talk about kind of a controversial topic: Are there too many churches?

Guest: No. Just like if you go into any small town or a large city, how many golden arches do you see? How many hotels do you see? How many car washes and storage facilities do you see in certain areas of living churches? It’s no different. Here we have our big box churches. I would call churches that sometimes they can get lost in the shuffle.

They have their purpose, but certainly our churches have been known also as parishes. They serve a certain section of the city or a certain area of town. And those parishes do provide people a means to come and to learn about God. And all of them are different.

Anchor: What does the proliferation of denominations say to you about the reach of Christianity and those differences within it?

Guest: As a Lutheran, our own Martin Luther would step into this world in the 21st century and perhaps look around and say, there are too many denominations, there are too many differences. Let’s unify guys. And perhaps that is true in a lot of respects.

It’s sad how many divisions are. But the churches, visible and invisible, as we confess in our creed, in the Nicene Creed, in the Apostles Creed, which by the way, 95% of Christians around the world are unified by the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed, that’s the center teaching of the faith. But we’re also a visible church, which means you have us sinners in the church.

And when there’s sinners and the church like myself and like all people, you do have divisions and disagreements, unfortunately. But we are unified by Jesus’s perfection, by Jesus’s righteousness, and we strive to look for that unity and that doctrinal oneness that the churches exist for.

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