Evangelicals
I have been reading Sir Walter Scott's "Tales of a Grandfather" onto cassettes for my children. It is a history of Scotland from about 1000 AD to Scott's day. I appreciate his perspective on the deeds of the men he tells us of. Any good deed, even if it were done by an Englishman, is reported as praiseworthy and any bad deed done by a Scot (despite the fact that it furthered the Scottish cause) was condemned. Scott looks at the gory and treacherous history of Scotland from God's point of view - one of the aspects of this book which I appreciate most is that he shows that the deeds of individual men are merely a small part of the big picture which is God's plan for history. Yesterday I got to the part of book which tells of the effects of the reformation in Scotland and an outline of the fundamental church differences between the Scottish and English churches. The Scots have always been, it seems to me, a socialistic type of people - they were happy to tick along ignoring the fact that they had a king and answer only to their clan chiefs. (I finally discovered 'who' Mary queen of Scots was and WHY she was such a key figure in history - did you know she was queen of France, married to Francis I? After his death she returned to Scotland.)
When Henry the VIII declared himself head of the church in despite of the pope, he hoped to have Scotland on his side in the Protestant cause. The Scots developed a protestant church system which held that all the ministers were equal to one another - none being appointed bishop over any other.

One fascinating thing to consider is that before this everyone was Roman Catholic (and were used to the hierarchy of that church system). Scott explains how that Christianity which was pure and spread through europe from Rome (with a pope at its head) gradually deteriorated, over the centuries, resulting in a caricature of true Christianity. He tells us that not everyone who was within the church was corrupt but that the church system was corrupt (he mentions the selling of indulgences and such like). I never got this impression in my Evangelical infancy. I used to ask 'so what happened to real followers of Christ between the early church fathers and Martin Luther' - I didn't get a satisfactory answer. The real, although slightly embarrassing truth is that the follower of Christ were in the Catholic church - they were, in fact CATHOLICS!!!
I have a little theory which helps me to understand all this now - if you are an evangelical you convince your minister that you are saved and you get a public baptism at which you tell as many of your non-Christian friends as you managed to invite along, that you got converted. Next you are interviewed for Church membership and maybe offer a private 'testimony' to existing church members. They decide whether they want you in their number (by voting) and then you are 'in'. Now all evangelicals are, I think, Calvinists - that means that they believe 'once saved always saved' - fine as far as it goes but that is assuming that the minister and members are not deceived and that their evaluation of your spiritual condition is in accord with God's (a tall order, I think!). So if THIS is how you gain your 'eternal insurance policy' it leaves no scope for anyone OUTSIDE the Evangelical church to be true believers - or followers of the Way. THAT is why Evangelicals find it hard to accept that their might be a true 'Christian' in the Catholic church (or the Anglican, Methodist,Congregational etc).

Now having developed my little hypothesis I will practice looking at the world in this way in the coming days and test out how credible this is - I might report back!

ps - I already had problems with making over-long sentences (my grammar-checker rebukes me constantly!) and reading Sir Walter Scott looks set to exacerbate the fault in me.....