One Gospel, Many Rooms

The Number Your Colleague Will Quote

Picture a young man in Lagos on a Monday morning, standing at the water dispenser with a Muslim colleague who has been saving something up since Friday. The young man is an invention. The conversation is not.

“You people can’t even agree among yourselves,” the colleague says, smiling. “I read that there are fifty thousand Christian denominations. How do I take your religion seriously?”

The young man opens his mouth and shuts it again. He was baptised as a baby in the Anglican church his grandfather helped to build in Ibadan. He gave his life to Christ in a fellowship hall at university, where the worship team played until the ceiling rattled. These days he sits in a Baptist church whose pastor quotes Calvin more often than he quotes the Holy Spirit. He has lived in three rooms of the same house, and he couldn’t tell you what separates them.

The colleague’s figure isn’t made up, and it’s out of date. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity, which keeps the most quoted count, put the world’s denominations at 47,000 in its 2024 table and at 50,000 in 2025. Its 2026 table reads 53,000, on a line it labels “Denominations / Rites”. In 1900 the Center’s estimate was 2,000. So if anything the colleague was being modest.

I want the young man to have an answer that doesn’t flinch. My view is that the number measures how fast a living faith spreads far more than it measures how badly it has broken, and that the breaks which do matter are mostly invisible to a headcount.

Why the Objection Deserves Respect

Say it as well as the colleague could. Paul told the Ephesians there was one body, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. Jesus prayed on the night before his death that his followers would be one (John 17:20 to 23). A faith that claims one Spirit leading into the truth ought to produce more agreement than a committee of accountants. Instead, every revival seems to end with a new signboard. You don’t need a statistic in Nigeria. Walk down any commercial street in Ibadan or Enugu and count the church names between the pharmacy and the bank.

He would add that Christians haven’t merely disagreed. They’ve excommunicated each other, and in Europe they went to war with each other for generations. A religion that preaches reconciliation has a poor record at it. And the sharpest form of the question isn’t about Christians at all. It’s about the book: if the Bible is clear, why has it produced all this?

To be fair to the colleague, his own tradition has its schools of thought and its disagreements, and I won’t score that point against him. He didn’t ask for a lecture on his family’s quarrels, and I’d be annoyed if he gave me one on mine. The honest question is what division shows, in any faith.

I concede most of that. Divisions among Christians are a grief, and nobody should defend the pettiness behind some of them. What I’d challenge is the inference, that a big number proves the message is false or the Spirit absent. To test that, we have to know what is being counted.

What the Big Number Actually Counts

The Center’s own commentary says the count rises every year, and it credits Protestant divisions in the twentieth century, the rise of Pentecostalism, and the founding of indigenous churches around the world. That is a mixed bag. A church planted by a Nigerian evangelist in a rented hall is a new entry on the list, and it is also a sign that the gospel reached somewhere it hadn’t been.

Then there is the question of method. A sceptical writer, Jeffery Lowder (2019), looked at an earlier edition of the same research and noted that its authors “count each country in which a denomination has a presence as a separate denomination,” which turns the Catholic Church alone into 242 entries once its rites are broken down. He was working from secondhand sources, and he said so. The Center’s current pages that I could read don’t spell out their counting rules, so I can’t tell you how much of the 53,000 is the same family showing up in many countries. Treat the figure as an order of magnitude and distrust anyone who uses it as precise.

The Pew Research Center gave a better sense of the shape of things in its 2011 report on the world’s Christians, using 2010 data. About half were Catholic, Protestants broadly defined made up 37 percent, and Orthodox Christians 12 percent. The overwhelming majority of Christians live inside three great families, each with its own long internal arguments. The tens of thousands of entries sit on a small number of trunks.

I don’t know how many of those entries are real quarrels. Nobody does. But the count can’t tell you the thing your colleague really wants to know, which is whether the people on it believe different gospels or argue about different things inside one gospel. That question needs a different instrument.

Who Is Inside the House at All

The first job is to settle what makes a room part of the house. For Christians, the answer has been the same since the early centuries, and the story of how it got settled is partly an African one.

Around the year 319, a presbyter in Alexandria named Arius began teaching that the Son of God was made, not eternal, and was a lesser being beneath the Father. His bishop, Alexander, excommunicated him. Alexander’s young deacon, Athanasius, went with him to the great council at Nicaea in 325, and spent most of his long life afterwards defending what it decided. The council confessed that the Son shares the very being of the Father, using a Greek word meaning “of one substance,” and it condemned the claim that there was a time when he was not. Arius and two companions refused to sign and were exiled. The creed we recite on Sundays took its final form at Constantinople in 381. Look at the geography. The crisis began in Egypt, and an African bishop and his deacon carried the answer.

Paul had set down the same confession long before, as the thing he received and passed on.

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”

— 1 Corinthians 15:3 to 4 (ESV)

That is a line about who is in the house. Some groups sit outside it by their own account. Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that the Son is a created being, which is Arius’s position, and the church ruled on it seventeen centuries ago. Latter day Saints would tell you themselves that they aren’t creedal Christians and that they teach the Father and the Son as separate beings. Muslims honour Jesus as a great prophet and don’t confess his death and resurrection as Christians do. None of this is a judgement on anyone’s sincerity or decency. It describes what the word Christian has meant since Nicaea. A boundary that took everybody in would mark nothing.

Sorting Doctrines by Their Weight

Inside the house, not every disagreement weighs the same. The tool I find most useful is what R. Albert Mohler (2005) called theological triage, a term borrowed from emergency medicine that comes from the French for “to sort.” Without it, he wrote, “the scraped knee would receive the same urgency of consideration as a gunshot wound to the chest.” Mohler asks Christians to “determine a scale of theological urgency,” and he proposes three levels, so I’ll use his and add my own gloss.

At the first level sit the doctrines the gospel stands on: the Trinity, the deity and resurrection of Christ, salvation by grace through faith. Here it matters more to be right than to be together. Paul was fierce about it.

“But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.”

— Galatians 1:8 (ESV)

He said it twice, in two consecutive verses, in case anyone missed it.

At the second level are the questions on which faithful readers of the same Bible land differently, and where the difference shapes how a congregation lives: the meaning and mode of baptism, how a church is governed, whether the miraculous gifts continue. Mohler gives baptism as his example, and he is right that a church either will baptise infants or it won’t. Perpetual discomfort in one pew doesn’t produce flourishing discipleship, so separate congregations are a sensible arrangement and need not be a hostile one.

At the third level are the matters Christians can disagree about over the same communion table. Mohler describes them as “doctrines over which Christians may disagree and remain in close fellowship,” and puts most debates about the end times there. Dividing a church over the order of events in Revelation is a little like calling the fire brigade because the toast burned.

Two cautions. The levels don’t hang on the wall of a seminary with every doctrine already labelled, and Christians argue hard over which level a given question belongs on. And the earliest Protestants showed how costly that argument can be. At Marburg in 1529, Luther and Zwingli reached agreement on fourteen points and broke on the fifteenth, about the Lord’s Supper. They parted, and the Reformation went on dividing, wisely sometimes and sometimes not.

This is also how the young man at the water dispenser can answer without raising his voice. He doesn’t need to defend all fifty three thousand entries. He needs to be able to say which of the arguments in his own church’s history sit on which tier, and to say it without embarrassment.

A Walk Through the Older Rooms

With the tiers in hand, the rooms look different.

The Baptists grew out of the English Separatists of the seventeenth century, and their name is their argument: baptism belongs to those who can confess the faith. Each congregation governs itself. That’s either admirable decentralisation or a recipe for chaos, depending on which Baptist church you visited last Sunday.

The Anglicans began, as the story is usually told, with Henry VIII’s marriage problem, and a break with Rome that was more about a crown than a creed. But men who came after Henry, Cranmer and Ridley and Latimer among them, put real Reformation convictions into the structure and were burned for them. The Book of Common Prayer, first issued in 1549, has shaped the prayers of bishops and farmers for nearly five centuries. Bishops oversee the church, and Scripture, tradition and reason are all given a voice.

John Wesley was a priest of the Church of England who never intended to leave it. On 24 May 1738, at a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street in London where someone read Luther’s preface to Romans, he wrote in his journal, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” The movement that grew from that night stressed disciplined holiness, small groups, and the real participation of the believer in salvation. Methodists teach that a believer can grow in holiness until sin loses its grip. Wesley called it Christian perfection, and most later theologians haven’t followed him all the way, but the debate has been productive and nobody ought to split a church over it. Methodists often speak of a Wesleyan quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. The term wasn’t Wesley’s, though. A twentieth century Methodist scholar, Albert Outler, coined it to summarise how Wesley worked.

The Lutherans trace themselves to 31 October 1517, the day Martin Luther dated his Ninety five Theses against the sale of indulgences. The story of him nailing them to a church door is traditional, and some historians doubt it. What’s certain is that he sent them to Archbishop Albert of Mainz that day. His discovery was that a sinner is declared righteous by grace through faith in Christ, which is why he saw selling forgiveness as a theological catastrophe and not merely a financial scandal. Lutherans baptise infants and hold that Christ is truly present in the Lord’s Supper, a position distinct from both Rome and Zwingli.

The Presbyterians, formed by Calvin in Geneva and Knox in Scotland, take their name from the councils of elders who govern a region of churches together. Their keywords are sovereignty and covenant. For them election isn’t a cold mechanism but a pastoral comfort, since a believer’s salvation doesn’t hang on the temperature of their prayers on a Thursday morning.

At the far end of the hall are the two oldest rooms. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches trace their roots to the apostles, and they went their separate ways in 1054. Catholics see in the bishop of Rome the successor of Peter, and they read Jesus’s words in Matthew 16:18 that way, while Protestants take the rock to be Peter’s confession. Orthodox Christians lay their emphasis on the mystery of God, on a liturgy that has changed little in a thousand years, and on salvation as sharing in the divine life. A Protestant who has never stood through an Orthodox service has missed an education in how weighty worship can feel.

Not one of these rooms, in its historic confession, disputes what Paul passed on at the first level. They argue about baptism, bishops, the table, and how God’s choosing and our choosing fit together. That is the family argument.

The Case for One Visible Church

There is a better version of the colleague’s objection, and it comes from inside the family. Catholic and Orthodox Christians have been making it to Protestants for five hundred years. If every believer and every congregation reads the Bible for themselves, they say, you will get exactly the long list we’ve been counting. What holds a church together is a visible teaching authority: a bishop of Rome and the councils for Catholics, the bishops gathered in council for the Orthodox. Without a referee, the game fragments.

I think that’s the strongest argument against my own tradition, and I won’t pretend it has no force. Protestants have no referee, and it shows. The council at Nicaea that gave us the creed was a gathering of bishops, and those who wave away every council and creed since the apostles have thrown away a gift.

But the argument has a limit. Rome and Constantinople separated in 1054, and each still has its own internal quarrels, so a referee has never been enough to guarantee unity. The question of which referee is the right one is itself a dispute at the first tier, and it was argued long before the Reformation. And my own conviction is that when a council or a bishop and the apostles’ teaching in the Bible diverge, the Bible must win. Paul asked the Galatians to test even an angel against the gospel they had received. I would rather live with the mess that follows from that than with a unity that depends on not asking.

The Fastest Growing Room in the House

For most Nigerians reading this, the next room is autobiography.

The Pentecostal movement is usually dated from Azusa Street in Los Angeles, which began in April 1906 under William J. Seymour, a Black preacher (1870 to 1922) who had lost the sight of his left eye to smallpox. Its roots run back through the Holiness movement and Wesley to the upper room in Acts. Its claim is simple and enormous: the power of Pentecost didn’t retire with the apostles. Whether the gifts of the Spirit continue is a second tier question, and it’s one on which Baptists and Pentecostals have long differed. Neither side’s answer makes the other less Christian.

“And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh”

— Acts 2:17 (ESV)

The message crossed the Atlantic and landed in soil that was ready. That isn’t because Africans are credulous, as the occasional condescending observer has implied. Nigerian religious life already assumed that the world isn’t only material. Plenty of Nigerian families have a grandmother who consulted a traditional diviner before their own parents were born, and she wasn’t a fool. She understood that the visible world has an invisible side that has to be reckoned with. The Pentecostal gospel told her she was right about that and told her who rules over both sides. It was a big thing to hear.

Look at where the church now stands. The Center’s 2026 table counts almost 780 million Christians in Africa, and a summary of the same edition reported by Hope Media says nearly 70 percent of the world’s Christians now live in the Global South, up from 17 percent in 1900. A movement that grows by new congregations planting newer ones will always produce a long list of names. Whatever else the number of denominations means, it follows a faith that has put down roots across this continent.

This room has a shadow, and every Nigerian Christian knows it. Wealth treated as proof of God’s favour. Poverty read as hidden sin or a generational curse that needs a prophetic intervention and a generous seed. Prayer sold like a commodity. The Spirit isn’t responsible for what is done in his name, and the existence of a counterfeit is poor evidence that the real thing has stopped. What counterfeit religion shows is the same thing Elijah met on Carmel, a human talent for building machinery around an altar where no fire falls, and dancing anyway.

It’s worth noticing that Pentecostals themselves are arguing about this. In October 2025 the national president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, Bishop Wale Oke, told The Guardian that the fellowship was strengthening accountability and creating a national register to distinguish genuine Pentecostal churches from impostors. I can’t say how that will work, and registers have their own problems. But the instinct is the right one. The movement wants to know who is actually in the room.

Where the Real Fractures Are Running

Here the story I’ve been telling gets harder, and the tidy answer stops working.

A family argument is one thing. Some recent events look like something else. In 2015 the Episcopal Church in the United States changed its definition of marriage, and in 2016 the Communion’s primates restricted its role in doctrinal decisions for three years. Several African provinces, the Church of Nigeria among them, aligned themselves with Episcopalians who left over it. On 3 October 2025 Sarah Mullally was named Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to hold the office. Three days later the Church of Nigeria’s Primate, Henry Ndukuba, called the appointment “devastating.” His statement gave two reasons: the conviction of many Anglicans against women serving as bishops, and Mullally’s support for same sex marriage.

In March 2026 the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans met in Abuja. The meeting drew 347 bishops and 121 other leaders from 27 provinces, according to MinistryWatch. It renamed the body the Global Anglican Communion and elected Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda as its chairman. They called for what they termed “principled disengagement” from Canterbury and its meetings. They also insisted they weren’t a breakaway, and there is a real argument between that claim and the headlines asking whether the Anglican Church would split. History may call March 2026 a schism or a reorganisation. I don’t know, and I distrust anyone who’s sure.

The Methodists went through something similar. In 2022 a new Global Methodist Church began, formed by traditionalists leaving the United Methodist Church. By December 2023 about 7,673 congregations had left the older body. At the General Conference of 2024 in Charlotte, delegates voted 692 to 51 to remove the ban on ordaining people in same sex relationships, and by wide margins removed the penalties against clergy who bless same sex unions. Four former United Methodist conferences in Nigeria joined the Global Methodist Church in July 2024.

Now apply the triage honestly, because it cuts more than one way. The creeds say nothing about same sex marriage, and those who changed their churches’ teaching would tell you that they confess the same Christ and read the same Bible, and that they act out of love for people in their own pews. That is a fair statement of their case, and the creed is untouched. Equally, the Church of Nigeria’s statement bundles together two questions. The ordination of women is one on which careful readers of the Bible, including many who treat Scripture as their final authority, have landed in different places, and I’d put it on the second tier.

The other question I put higher. When a church decides that the settled reading of the Bible on a point of ethics can be overridden by a new consensus, the matter has stopped being about marriage. It has become a question about who holds the authority in the church, Scripture or the consensus of the moment. And the authority of Scripture, on my own reading, is a first level matter. I know thoughtful believers who see it differently, and I’d rather argue with them over a meal than about them from a platform.

The same test applies to the shadow in the Pentecostal room. When a church puts a price on a blessing, it touches grace, and grace is first tier.

So the scandal isn’t the number. The number counts Baptists and Presbyterians arguing over how to baptise their children, and a Nigerian church planted last year in a rented hall. The real fractures run along the seam of the first tier, and they don’t show up in any count. And they tend to widen where the church has been too polite or too nervous to say plainly that a line has been crossed.

What This Asks of an Ordinary Believer

You don’t need to change denominations. You do need to know why yours exists, what it holds at the first level, and whether it is under the authority of Scripture or only pays it ceremonial respect.

You need to be able to tell a second tier disagreement from a first tier departure. The first should make you humble and curious about what your brothers and sisters in the next room have seen that you haven’t. The second should make you sorrowful and firm, and unwilling to pretend nothing has changed.

Go and sit in a room that isn’t yours. If you’ve never attended a Catholic Mass or an Orthodox service, go once, and if you’ve never been to a Pentecostal vigil, go once. You’re not defecting. You’re finding out what your brothers and sisters have seen that you haven’t, and you’ll understand your own room better for it.

And you need to stop treating Baptists and Presbyterians as if they were at war. They’re a family arguing over how to baptise the children. Nigerian Christians already know how to share a room. The Christian Association of Nigeria, founded in 1976, brings together five blocs, from the Catholic Secretariat to the Pentecostal Fellowship. It argues like any family does. In March 2025 the Christian Media Forum was urging two men who each claimed to lead its northern states to end their dispute.

Anyone who has been to a Nigerian burial knows how this works in practice. The family in the front pew may include an Anglican mother, a Catholic uncle, a cousin who worships at a Pentecostal church with a car park the size of a stadium, and a Baptist neighbour who has come to help with the food. They sing different hymns at different speeds. And when the minister starts the Lord’s Prayer, nobody asks to see anyone’s denominational papers.

If you’re in the Pentecostal or charismatic stream, as millions of Nigerians are, hold your experience accountable to the text. The God of Pentecost is also the God of Nicaea. An experience that can’t survive being compared with Scripture was never as solid as it felt.

The Question Beneath All the Rooms

Back at the water dispenser, the young man has an answer, and it isn’t complicated. He can say, “Yes, there are a lot of us, and some of the arguments are petty and some of them hurt. Most of us are arguing about how to baptise and who governs the church, and a few arguments are about whether the Bible still decides anything. But go into any room that belongs to the house on a Sunday and you’ll hear the same thing said out loud, that Christ died for our sins, was buried, rose on the third day, and is coming again.”

That won’t end the conversation with the colleague, and it shouldn’t pretend the disagreements away. It does shift the question. The one Jesus asked his disciples at Caesarea Philippi is still the one that sorts everything.

“He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter replied, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’”

— Matthew 16:15 to 16 (ESV)

If you’ve spent years standing in the corridor, with your head round the door of one room after another and never going in, waiting for somebody to rule on which denomination is right, I’d like to ask something before you walk into any of them. Not which church. What do you say about Jesus of Nazareth? The rest of it, the baptism and the bishops and the end times, can wait until you have an answer. And once you do, there are plenty of rooms where people will be glad to argue it through with you.

References

Biblical References

Ephesians 4:4 to 6 (NIV). The epigraph and the premise: one body, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, set against the objection from denominational division.
John 17:20 to 23 (ESV). Alluded to, not quoted: Jesus’s prayer that his followers would be one, used to state the sceptic’s objection at its strongest.
1 Corinthians 15:3 to 4 (ESV). What is “of first importance”; the anchor for the first tier and for who is inside the house.
Galatians 1:8 to 9 (ESV). Paul’s double warning against a different gospel; the first tier case for firmness.
Matthew 16:15 to 18 (ESV). Peter’s confession quoted at verses 15 and 16 as the closing question; verse 18 mentioned only as the place where Catholic and Protestant readings of “the rock” differ.
Acts 2:17 (ESV). The Pentecostal claim that the outpouring of the Spirit continues.

Other Sources

Africanews. (2026, March 5). Clerics meet in Nigeria, could the Anglican Church split? https://www.africanews.com/amp/2026/03/05/clerics-meet-in-nigeria-could-the-anglican-church-split/. Used for the framing of the Abuja meeting as a possible split.
Christian Post. (2024). Global Methodist Church reacts to UMC votes to allow LGBT clergy, same-sex weddings. https://assets.christianpost.com/news/global-methodist-church-reacts-to-umcs-lgbt-votes.html. Used for the 2024 General Conference votes (692 to 51 on ordination).
Gazette NGR. (2025, March 10). Northern Christians fight over leadership positions, CAN president urged to intervene. https://gazettengr.com/northern-christians-fight-over-leadership-positions-can-president-urged-to-intervene/
Hope Media. (2026). Global Christianity in 2026: Growth, shifts and what it means for believers. Hope 103.2. https://hope1032.com.au/faith/global-christianity-in-2026-growth-shifts-and-what-it-means-for-believers/
Lowder, J. J. (2019, March 22). 41,000 denominations? The Secular Frontier. https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2019/03/41000-denominations/
MinistryWatch. (2026, March 9). Gafcon renames its group, elects leaders. https://ministrywatch.com/gafcon-renames-its-group-elects-leaders/
Mohler, R. A., Jr. (2005, July 12). A call for theological triage and Christian maturity. AlbertMohler.com. https://albertmohler.com/2005/07/12/a-call-for-theological-triage-and-christian-maturity/
Ndukuba, H. C. (2025, October 6). Response of the Church of Nigeria to the election of new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev Sarah Mullally. Anglican Ink. https://anglican.ink/2025/10/06/response-of-the-church-of-nigeria-to-the-election-of-new-arhcbishop-of-canterbury-the-rt-rev-sarah-mullally/
Pew Research Center. (2011, December 19). Global Christianity: A report on the size and distribution of the world’s Christian population (executive summary). https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/
The Guardian (Nigeria). (2025, October 26). PFN demands end to killings, says violence knows no religion. https://guardian.ng/news/pfn-demands-end-to-killings-says-violence-knows-no-religion/
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Athanasius of Alexandria. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_of_Alexandria
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Christian Association of Nigeria. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Association_of_Nigeria
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Episcopal Church (United States). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episcopal_Church_(United_States)
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). First Council of Nicaea. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Global Methodist Church. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Methodist_Church
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). John Wesley. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Marburg Colloquy. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_Colloquy
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ninety-five Theses. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesleyan_Quadrilateral
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). William J. Seymour. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Seymour
Zurlo, G. A. (2024). [Blog post on the 2024 annual statistical table of world Christianity]. Overseas Ministries Study Center. https://omsc.ptsem.edu/the-annual-statistical-table
Zurlo, G. A. (2025). [Blog post on the 2025 annual statistical table of world Christianity]. Overseas Ministries Study Center. https://omsc.ptsem.edu/world-christianity-its-annual-statistical-table-time/
Zurlo, G. A., Johnson, T. M., & Crossing, P. F. (2026). Status of global Christianity, 2026, in the context of 1900 to 2075 [Table]. World Christian Database, Brill. https://worldchristiandatabase.org/static/downloads/Status-of-Global-Christianity-2026.2b54be19fc0c.pdf

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.