Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 17

To be a Christian is to be a follower of Jesus Christ, but not all Christians follow Christ in the same way. Those differences become apparent with a quick survey of the social structure of contemporary Christianity. Christians are institutionally divided into more than 35,000 separate and distinct organizations, ranging in size from the enormous Roman Catholic Church, which has more than a billion members worldwide, to the grandly named Universal Church of Christ, which has only a few hundred members, almost all of them in the Caribbean. Every week, Christians gather at more than five million local churches and parishes to worship God. And that’s just the formal structure. Informally, there are millions of additional Christian groups that meet in homes, schools, and places of work for Bible study, prayer, and mutual support.

The diversity that now exists within Christianity is so broad and multifaceted that some scholars have begun to use the term “Christianities” (instead of “Christianity” in the singular) to describe the movement. There is a logic to this plural terminology. World Christianity has become so divergent that it can sometimes be very hard to see what binds together all these groups and individuals. But, despite an enormous variety of beliefs and practices, some important commonalities still define the movement, and these distinctive ideas, practices, and understandings of human life are shared by all or almost all Christians.