How Old is Your Church?

If you are a Lutheran, your religion was founded by Martin Luther, and ex-monk of the Catholic Church, in the year 1517.


If you belong to the Church of England, your religion was founded by King Henry VIII in the year 1534 because the Pope would not garnt him a divorce with the right to remarry.

If you are a Presbyterian, your religion was founded by john Knox in Scotland in the year 1560.

If you are a Protestant Episcopalian, your religion is an offshoot of the Church of England founded by Samuel Seabury in the American colonies in the 17th century.

If you are a Congregationalist, your religion was originated by Robert Brown in Holland in 1582.

If you are a Methodist, your religion was launched by John and Charles Wesley in England in 1744.

If you are a Unitarian, Theophilus Lindley founded your church in London in 1774.

If you are a Mormon (Latter Day Saints), Joseph Smith started your religion in Palmyra, NY in 1829.

If you are a Baptist, you owe the tenets of your religion to John Smyth, who launched it in Amsterdam in 1605.

If you are of the Dutch Reformed church, you recognize Michaelis Jones as founder, because he originated your religion in New York in 1628.

If you worship with the Salvation Army, your sect began with William Booth in London in 1865.

If you are a Christian Scientist, you look to 1879 as the year in which your religion was born and to Mrs. Mary Baker eddy as its founder.

If you belong to one of the religious organizations known as “Church of the Nazarene,” “Pentecostal Gospel,” “Holiness Church,’ “Pilgrim Holiness Church,” “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” your religion is one of the hundreds of new sects founded by men within the past century.

If you are Catholic, you know that your

religion was founded in the year 33

by Jesus Christ the Son of God,

and it is still the same Church.

The first record we have of the Church being called “Catholic” goes back to the nartyr-bishop of Antioch, St. Ignatius, who dies around AD 107. In his epistle to the Smyrnaeans, he says, “Where the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” If it is true that some of the Johanine works of the New testament were not completed until AD 110 or AD 120, we can see that even a decade earlier, the Church was called. “Catholic.”