How old is the Orthodox Church?

How old is your church? Which church is the oldest Christain church? Let's find out.

The Ages of the Churches

• If you are a Lutheran, your denomination was founded by Martin Luther, an ex-monk of the Catholic Church, in the year 1517.
• If you belong to the Church of England, your denomination was founded by King Henry VIII in the year 1534 because the Pope would not grant him a divorce with the right to re-marry.
• If you are a Presbyterian, your denomination was founded by John Knox in Scotland in the year 1560.
• If you are a Congregationalist, your denomination was originated by Robert Brown in Holland in 1582.
• If you are Protestant Episcopalian, your denomination was an offshoot of the Church of England, founded by Samuel Seabury in the American colonies in the 17th century.
• If you are a Baptist, you owe the tenets of your denomination to John Smyth, who launched it in Amsterdam in 1606.
• If you are of the Dutch Reformed Church, you recognise Michelis Jones as founder because he originated your denomination in New York in 1628.
• If you are a Methodist, your denomination was founded by John and Charles Wesley in England in 1774.
• If you are a Mormon (Latter Day Saints), Joseph Smith started your denomination in Palmyra, New York, in 1829.
• If you worship with the Salvation Army, your denomination began with William Booth in London in 1865.
• If you are Christian Scientist, you look to 1879 as the year in which your denomination was born and to Mary Baker Eddy as its founder.
• If you belong to one of the religious organisations known as “Church of the Nazarene, Pentecostal Gospel,” “Holiness Church,” or “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” or your Christian church is not yet listed, your religion is one of the hundreds of new sects founded by men within the past few hundred years.

But...

• If you are Roman Catholic, your church shared the same rich apostolic and doctrinal heritage as the Orthodox Church for the first thousand years of its history, since during the first millennium they were one and the same Church. Lamentably, in 1054, the Pope of Rome broke away from the other four Apostolic Patriarchates (which include Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem), by tampering with the Original Creed of the Church, and considering himself to be infallible. Thus your church is almost 1,000 years old.
• And finally: if you are Orthodox Christian, your Church (which is pre-denominational) was founded in the year 33 by Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It has not changed since that time. Our Church is now almost 2,000 years old.

And it is for this reason, that Orthodoxy, the Church of the Apostles and the Fathers is considered the true “one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

(One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church means: “the one, sacred-for-God, Universal and passed-down-by-the-Apostles Church.” This equates to thousands of years of uninterrupted history, teachings, and traditions being passed down, unchanged through generations of Christians.)

This is the greatest legacy that we can pass on to the young people of the third millennium.

Learn More

Learn more about the history of the Orthodox Church.

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