Denominations.

I don’t care if you’re Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic, AOG, Anglican, or from any other denomination of Christianity. If you love God, if you believe what the Bible says, then I’m standing along side you in this walk of life. If you ever need anything, I’m more than happy to help out. I don’t want to fight to take people from your denominational Church to mine. I celebrate when you see a soul won, because that soul is being given the gift of eternal life, regardless of what Church it’s at. We’re all children of God, and I’m sure it pains him to see us bickering over little meaningless things. So what if some of us sing hymns in worship and some of us sing rock songs? So what if some lift their hands and dance and clap, and some kneel quietly? So what if we do things differently? We’re worshiping the same God, we’re just doing it in our own way, because each of us is different. God loves us all regardless of the way we do things, because we’re praising him anyway. We need to love each other in the same way, because we are all brothers and sisters.

I love each and every one of you, regardless of what way you do things.

What's Good and What's Not So Good in a Few Christian Traditions

Not an exhaustive list at all, but a few of my thoughts on a number of ways Christianity expresses itself, emphasizing certain aspects of itself.  

Now, this list doesn’t mean I’d favor the foundation of a denomination that takes the good stuff I mention and leaves out the bad.  More denominations are not the answer.  But every denomination could learn something from some of the others.

For sake of full disclosure, I identify myself as a Presbyterian with sympathies toward aspects of conservative Anglicanism, in terms of meeting styles and ecclesiology especially.

Denominations/elements under consideration are theologically conservative unless otherwise noted.

Roman Catholicism

Good: High view of the Church as object of faith, a position she deserves as the Body of Christ (as opposed to Church-as-vehicle-of-faith as most Protestants would put it).  Sturdy Church government structure.  Comprehensive Magisterium.  Emphasis on sacraments.  Willingness to modify when necessary (Vatican II, evolution).  

Bad: Making stuff up (extra sacraments, Mariology, deuterocanon, purgatory, indulgences, transubstantiation, etc).  Salvific grace merited by works, “treasury of merit.”  Papal infallibility.  Ex opere operando - sacraments aren’t magic, they’re sacraments.  Worshipping stuff that’s not God.

Eastern Orthodoxy

Good: High view of Church, sacraments.  Appropriate emphasis on the organizational principle of salvation being union with Christ.  Really cool practices (e.g. hesychasm).  Experiential religion without making things up or dismissing traditions.

Bad: Emphasis on national lines.  Dualism/whole lotta synergism, which leads to the denial of the penal-substitution component of the atonement.  Kind of a weird economic Trinity that leads them to deny the filioque.  Meriting filling with the Holy Spirit by works.

Anglicanism

Good: Liturgy and appropriate collective view of church, sacraments, informed view of mission of the Church/new creation.

Bad: Little to no church discipline, vulnerability to liberalizing forces.  

Lutheranism

Good: Monergism, right canon, sola fide (where true faith is always accompanied by works), still pretty high view of sacraments.

Bad: Single predestination (how does this make any sense?), unlimited atonement, weird kind of view of the (ir?)resistibility of grace that I can’t make sense of.

Anabaptists

Good: Rejection of dogmatic Popery, benefits of a simpler life (Amish, Mennonnites).

Bad: Re-baptizing/denial of infant baptism, thinking sacraments don’t do anything, refusing to modernize in certain ways that aren’t harmful, too much individualism, reducing the mission of the church to teaching/transmission of knowledge.

Presbyterianism

Good: 5 points of Calvinism, infant baptism, appropriately in-the-middle stance on a lot of things (spiritual gifts, kinda the sacraments, new vs old music), government structure that actually does things, covenant theology and rational/systematic efforts at doing theology in general, lots of postmillennialism.

Bad: Unwillingness to tolerate sufficiently collectivist views of the Church (Federal Vision).  Often a not quite high enough view of the sacraments.  Some interpretations of Calvinism deny the reality of apostasy.

Methodism

Good: Emphasis on love.

Bad: Arminianism, weird views of sanctification that tend to perfectionism.

Baptists

Good: Some of them are Reformed.  There is an aspect of salvation that is individual.

Bad: Lots of Arminianism, too much individualism, wrong kind of emphasis on experience, sacraments don’t do anything, waaaaaay too interested in individual/congregational autonomy, deny ecclesial authority.

Church of Christ

Good: Attempt to emulate the good aspects of the early Church, concern for social justice.

Bad: Liberalism (esp. on revelation), weird restrictions like a capella music, no authority.

Charismatic/Pentecostal

Good: Recognizing importance/power of the Holy Spirit, pursuing spiritual gifts, affirmation of the sovereignty of God and the reality of spiritual warfare.

Bad: Disdain for theology, presumptiveness (word-of-faith, etc), disdain for tradition, subsequent propensity to fall into heresies (Oneness), emphasis on individual experience over grounded knowledge and too much consequent individualism, primacy of the conversion experience, tendency to see too many spirits in everything.

Adventism

Good: There is a sense in which God’s Law is important and normative for us.

Bad: It is not the sense in which the Adventists intend it.  Also, not accepting that Miller was wrong, leading to a bunch of weird conclusions about the eternality of God (an eternal God started an investigative judgment in 1844?)  Too much Judaizing.  Teaching that souls aren’t real.