Recently I was asked by a friend if I would like to visit the Sunday service
of a church in Norwich. He felt that this church needed some investigation. So,
one Sunday he and another friend found ourselves at the morning service of
“Servant’s Church”. The report of this visit (which I sent to both friends) can
be found here.
Servant’s Church is part of the Calvary Chapel
network of churches. This network has its origins in the Jesus Movement of the
1960s and the vision of charismatic leader Chuck Smith. It follows a pattern
found among some other fellowships in Norwich: Viz; a single founding patriarch
and a mentoring organisation with its centre of gravity in America. A similar
pattern can be seen in the Potters House church, The Living Stream Ministry fellowships,
Bethel Church, Vineyard, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. All these
brand-named versions of Christianity have at least one affiliated fellowship in
Norwich. To these churches we can add a miscellany of sectarian fellowships with
origins closer to home such as the Plymouth Brethren, Closed Brethren, Strict &
Particular Baptists, the Jesus Army, Reformed churches and reformo-charismatic.
All these groups tend to view themselves as distinct from and superior to the
more traditional protestant groupings (e.g. the Church of England, Methodists,
Baptist Union, Salvation Army, United Reformed, Assemblies of God, Elim,
the FIEC, and the Open brethren) and also
superior to the newer mainstream charismatic churches (e.g. New Frontiers, Hillsong
and Alive church). However, traces of sectarianism and fundamentalism, to a
greater or lesser extent, can even be found among mainstream churches.
I don’t think Norwich is unusual in having such a bewildering array of
protestant factions on top of its more mainstream groupings. Moreover, their
number has been increased by the relatively recent appearance of several black (immigrant)
churches. I have never attempted to formally catalogue all these
fellowships/churches/groups/affiliations/congregations/assemblies. I have only
succeeded in listing some of them simply because they have, for one reason or another,
come to my attention; I haven't gone out looking for them, they have simply drifted into my line of sight. For example, I didn’t know about Servant’s church until
my friend brought them to my attention. I have a feeling that I don’t know the
half of it: Consider, for example, what I referred to as the “Car park” sect; they popped up out of the blue when they
placed tracts on all the cars in the Norwich Central Baptist Church car park.
Up until that moment they were completely unknown to me*1.
Cataloguing churches is like cataloguing beetles: Creating an exhaustive catalogue
of these congregations along with pithy descriptions summing up what they are about
would require more time than I am able to give. Many of them, needless to say,
consider themselves as the one and only exclusive model to follow if you want
to know how to do church properly!
During the service at Servants I spotted someone I had become acquainted
to in another connection and this gave me the opportunity to catch up with him
and find out what he thought of his chosen fellowship. To disguise his identity in my report I have called him “Charlie Neblus”.
Footnote
*1 I must be cautious though. New sects tend to disguise their sectarian
agenda and shun any badging brand names, names which readily identify who they
are and their origins (see my report for suggested reasons why).
Therefore sometimes it is possible to think one has stumbled on a new sect when
in fact it is a sect one is already familiar with.
