>>>>>>Would Protestantism proliferate 30,000 different denominations if we returned to the sources and, as a Christian people, read what the earliest Christians had to say?<<<<<<<<
The author needs to get a new lie.. this one has been debunked .. if the rest of his article is researched like this statement.. I would never trust him
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/756707/posts
While you and I rarely agree on theological topics, the 30k number is a stretch, but the info below demonstrates where that number comes from.
Some of the research I did come from the Hartford Seminary (non-Catholic, non-denominational): Q: How many denominational groups are there in the United States?
A: This is a very tough question, because it depends on how a denomination is defined. There were 217 denominations listed in the 2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. But there may well be other groups that function as a denomination but do not regard themselves as such. The single largest religious group in the United States is the Roman Catholic Church, which had 67 million members in 2005. The Southern Baptist Convention, with 16 million members, was the largest of the Protestant denominations. The United Methodist Church was the second-largest Protestant denomination with 8 million members. In third and fourth spots were the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known as the Mormon church, with 6 million member, and the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly black Pentecostal denomination, with 5.5 million members.
However, since the RCMS 2010 study we now know that the grouping of nondenominational churches, if taken together, would be the second largest Protestant group in the country with over 35,000 independent or nondenominational churches representing more than 12,200,000 adherents. These nondenominational churches are present in every state and in 2,663 out of the total of 3,033 counties in the country, or 88% of the total.”
In the simplest terms, Luther and his contemporaries defected from the Catholic Church, they then defected from each other. The Catholic Church has remained the same, dogmatically (with two new dogmas since 1573), while those who left continually change and evolve.