Never has there been such a thorough reference as the two large volumes, running 1,699 pages, of the World Christian Encyclopedia, published by Oxford University Press. Barrett has doggedly visited most of the lands in person, collecting raw material, including national census figures and United Nations data, and recruiting the 444 specialists who feed him material. Among them: Vatican missions librarian Willi Henkel and editor J. Gordon Melton of the Encyclopedia of American Religions. Barrett's encyclopedia sought to count each human being in each religion and religious subcategory in each country as of 1900, 1970, 1990, 1995 and 2000, with projections to 2025.
The 2001 edition, successor to his 1982 first edition, which took a decade to compile, identifies 10,000 distinct religions, of which 150 have 1 million or more followers. Within Christianity, he counts 33,820 denominations.
“Within Christianity, he counts 33,820 denominations.”
Fantastic! This is good news. It prevents the corruption of the Body that comes from central authority and religious dogma.
30,000 of them are Protestant denominations, I read. Amazing, isn't it, the diversity of faiths that God implanted.
From Google:
The Eastern Catholic Churches are autonomous, self-governing particular churches in full communion with the Pope. Together with the Latin Church, they make up the Catholic Church as a whole. They preserve many centuries-old Eastern liturgical, devotional, and theological traditions, shared in most cases with the various other Eastern Christian churches with which they were once associated, such as the Eastern Orthodox Church and Oriental Orthodox Church.
The Eastern Orthodox Church, officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church, and also referred to as the Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy, identifies itself as the present-day continuation of the theology and episcopacy established by Jesus Christ through his Apostles. The Orthodox Church is the second largest Christian church in the world, with an estimated 225–300 million adherents,primarily in Eastern Europe (especially Greece and Southeastern Europe), throughout the Middle East and across Russia.
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I'm starting to get cross eyed. Time to shut down and think of beddy-bye.
It's 8:38 P.M., still light and some poor bird is singing outside, TOTALLY confused, NOT knowing that s/he should be in beddy-bye by now.