Volume 2 · Honest HereticsLesson 20About 22 minutes

The Reformation

If there is one Jesus, why are there so many churches?

Honest Heretics edition for skepticsSwitch to Centered (for believers)

The center · John 17:21

²¹that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that you sent me.

Drive through almost any American town and count the churches: Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, nondenominational. Most of them trace their split, directly or not, to the 1500s, when Western Christianity broke apart. Each believes it has the truth. Many have fought, in words or worse, with the others.

You're not imagining it. Christians who claim the same Lord have spent five hundred years condemning each other, and for over a century they burned, drowned and went to war with each other over doctrine. The man they all follow prayed that they would be one, and told the disciples who wanted to call down fire on a village that they did not know what spirit they were of.