Something is happening that would have surprised us ten years ago. Young adults, many raised with no faith at all, are walking into Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches and asking to be received. France saw a record number of adult baptisms at Easter 2025, most of them young people. Here in Canada, the Archdiocese of Montreal reports that adult baptisms in Quebec have risen markedly in recent years, and church leaders report young men in particular being drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy, often through voices they first heard online.
We should not sneer at this. Behind it is a real hunger. Young people want roots in a rootless age, reverence in a casual world, and certainty in a time of confusion. Those are good desires, and God put them there.
But a good desire can be pointed at the wrong answer. The question is not whether the Catholic or Orthodox Church feels ancient, beautiful and certain. The question is whether it is true. The Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). Let us do the same with the main reasons people give, first for the Catholic Church and then for the Eastern Orthodox Church.
1. “It is the one true church, built on Peter”
The Catholic case rests on Matthew 16:18: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”
But let Peter speak for himself. He calls Christ the “chief corner stone” (1 Peter 2:6), and Paul leaves no doubt about it: “Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11).
Peter never acted like a pope:
- He called himself a fellow elder: “The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder” (1 Peter 5:1).
- At the council in Jerusalem, it was James who gave the decision (Acts 15:13–19).
- When Peter went wrong at Antioch, Paul “withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11).
History agrees. Around 595 AD, Pope Gregory the Great rebuked the bishop of Constantinople for calling himself “universal bishop.” He called the title proud and said it belonged to the forerunner of Antichrist. Within a few centuries, Rome claimed that very authority for itself.
The conclusion: The church is not built on Peter, or on any man who has sat in Rome since. It is built on Christ. Peter’s own letters point away from himself to the true Rock, and a church that builds on Christ alone is standing exactly where Peter stood.
2. “The Pope’s authority goes back to the beginning”
Look at what actually built papal power over the centuries:
- The Donation of Constantine claimed the emperor gave the Pope rule over the West. It was a forgery from the 700s, exposed in 1440.
- The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were letters falsely attributed to the earliest bishops of Rome. They were forged around 850 and used in church law for about 700 years.
- 1 Clement, a letter written from the church at Rome around 96 AD, shows that church led by a group of elders, with no single ruling bishop.
- Around 190 AD, Bishop Victor of Rome tried to cut off the churches of Asia. The other bishops refused, and Irenaeus rebuked him.
The conclusion: The papacy was not handed down by the apostles. It grew over centuries, and it was propped up by forged documents along the way. The church at Rome in 96 AD had no pope, and no believer today needs one to stand between him and Christ.
3. “Scripture and Tradition together”
Rome teaches that Scripture and Sacred Tradition together are the Word of God. Jesus warned the religious leaders of His day about exactly this: “Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition” (Mark 7:13).
Scripture claims to be enough: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God… That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy 3:16–17).
The early church agreed:
- Cyril of Jerusalem, around 350, told his hearers not to believe even him unless he proved it from the Holy Scriptures.
- Athanasius wrote that the inspired Scriptures are sufficient in themselves to declare the truth.
The conclusion: When tradition and Scripture disagree, one of them has to give way, and Jesus has already told us which. A tradition is only trustworthy when it agrees with the written Word, and when it does, it is the Word that carries the authority, not the tradition.
4. “The church has never changed”
Look at when these Catholic teachings became official:
| Teaching | Made official |
|---|---|
| Purgatory defined | 1439 |
| The Apocrypha declared Scripture | 1546 |
| Mary’s Immaculate Conception | 1854 |
| Papal infallibility | 1870 |
| Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven | 1950 |
The Assumption traces back to a book called The Passing of Mary. Around 500 AD, the Gelasian Decree listed it among the writings the church does not receive. Yet it became required belief in 1950.
Meanwhile, Scripture is plain:
- Mary called God “my Saviour” (Luke 1:47). Only sinners need a Saviour.
- Joseph “knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son” (Matthew 1:25).
- Jesus had brothers and sisters, named in Matthew 13:55–56.
The conclusion: A church that adds new required beliefs more than 1,800 years after Christ cannot claim to be the unchanged faith of the apostles. The one thing that truly has not changed is the Bible itself. Mary was a godly woman who needed a Saviour, the same as every one of us.
5. “The Mass is the sacrifice of Christ”
Rome teaches that each Mass makes present the sacrifice of Christ. Hebrews answers it:
“But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God… For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified… Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin.” Hebrews 10:12, 14, 18
On the cross, Jesus said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). The Lord’s Supper is precious, but it is a remembrance: “this do in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24). It is not a sacrifice offered again.
The conclusion: Christ is not sacrificed again, and nothing needs to be added to the cross. He sat down because the work was done. A believer comes to the Lord’s Table to remember a finished work, not to receive a repeated one.
6. “You need a priest”
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).
The New Testament never calls a church leader a sacrificing priest. It calls every believer a priest: “Ye are… a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9). Every believer can “come boldly unto the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16) without anyone in between.
The conclusion: No one needs a human priest to reach God. Through Christ, every believer can pray to God directly, confess sin to Him directly and be forgiven by Him directly: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9).
7. Salvation: the heart of it all
This is the most important difference of all. The Council of Trent (1547) declared:
“If anyone says that by faith alone the impious is justified… let him be anathema.” Session 6, Canon 9
The Bible says:
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” Ephesians 2:8–9
“Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” Romans 3:28
Even the early church said it. Clement of Rome, around 96 AD, wrote that we are “not justified by ourselves… but by that faith” through which God has justified all His people.
That is why a believer can have assurance: “that ye may know that ye have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). Rome teaches that no one can know for certain that they are saved, apart from a special revelation. The gospel says you can know.
The conclusion: This is the dividing line. If salvation depends on our works, our sacraments or our faithfulness, no one can ever be sure. If it rests on Christ’s finished work, received by faith, a sinner can be saved today and know it. That is the gospel, and it is worth more than every tradition in the world.
8. “The Catholic Bible is the complete Bible”
The extra books, such as Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees and Wisdom, were declared Scripture by Rome only at the Council of Trent in 1546.
- The New Testament quotes the Old Testament hundreds of times, but never once says “it is written” of any of these books.
- Jesus marked the limits of Scripture “from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias” (Luke 11:51). That runs from Genesis to Chronicles, the first and last books of the Hebrew Bible.
- Jerome, who translated Rome’s own Latin Bible, said these books were not to be used to establish doctrine.
The conclusion: The Bible Jesus and the apostles used had the same Old Testament we hold today. Adding books adds doctrines: prayers for the dead and purgatory are drawn from 2 Maccabees 12, not from Scripture. The 66 books from Genesis to Revelation are the complete Word of God.
What about the Eastern Orthodox Church?
Not everyone who leaves an evangelical church goes to Rome. A growing number, especially young men, are joining the Eastern Orthodox Church: the Greek, Russian, Antiochian and other Orthodox churches.
The Orthodox rightly reject several of Rome’s claims. They have no pope, they reject purgatory, and they do not accept the Immaculate Conception or papal infallibility. But many of the answers above apply to them just as much: the priesthood, the Divine Liturgy offered as a sacrifice, Tradition placed beside Scripture, the extra Old Testament books, and salvation as a lifelong process rather than a gift received by faith. Here are the reasons that draw people to Orthodoxy in particular.
9. “We are the original, unbroken church”
This is the heart of the Orthodox claim, and it is the argument of the popular book Becoming Orthodox, in which a group of evangelical leaders went looking for “the New Testament church” in church history and ended up Orthodox.
But the same claim of an unbroken line of bishops is made by Rome, by the Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopian churches that split from the Orthodox in 451, and by others. They cannot all be the one true church, so succession by itself cannot settle the question.
Scripture shows that an unbroken line is no guarantee of truth. Israel’s priesthood ran unbroken from Aaron, and the high priest Caiaphas, standing in that line, condemned the Son of God (Matthew 26:57–66). The church at Ephesus was founded by Paul and taught by John, yet the Lord warned it: “repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place” (Revelation 2:5).
The conclusion: God has never measured a church by the length of its line, but by its faithfulness to His Word. Christ promised that His church would never die out (Matthew 16:18), not that any one organization would never go astray. The true line runs through those who hold “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).
10. “The church fathers look Orthodox”
Many converts say, “I read the early church fathers, and they sounded Orthodox.” The fathers are worth reading, but read all of them and a different picture appears:
- Ignatius (around 110 AD) speaks of a bishop in each church, but each was the pastor of one congregation in one city. His letter to the church at Rome is the only one of his seven letters that mentions no bishop at all. He even calls faith and love “the flesh of the Lord” and “the blood of Jesus Christ”, and he wrote, “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles.”
- Papias, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, among the earliest Christian writers, taught a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on the earth. The Orthodox Church rejects that teaching.
- Cyril of Jerusalem and Athanasius taught that the Scriptures are sufficient, and that even a bishop must be believed only if he proves his teaching from them.
The conclusion: The early church was not uniformly Orthodox, or uniformly anything. That is exactly why the fathers themselves pointed to the Scriptures as the final judge. When Gillquist’s group went looking for the New Testament church, the place to find it was the New Testament.
11. “Icons belong to the ancient faith”
Icons are at the centre of Orthodox worship. Believers kiss them, bow before them and light candles to them. Yet the early church did not agree:
- The Council of Elvira in Spain, around 305 AD, ruled that pictures should not be in churches, “lest what is worshipped and adored be painted on walls.”
- Epiphanius of Salamis, in the late 300s, tore down a church curtain painted with an image, calling it contrary to Scripture.
- Eusebius, the first historian of the church, refused the emperor’s sister when she asked him for a picture of Christ.
- The veneration of icons was made official only in 787 AD, at the Second Council of Nicaea, after a century of bitter fighting.
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” Exodus 20:4–5
The conclusion: Bowing to images was not the practice of the apostles or of the earliest churches. It was added centuries later, against the plain words of the second commandment. God seeks worshippers who worship Him “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24), and the apostle’s last word in his first letter still stands: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).
12. “We have the Greek Bible and Holy Tradition”
The Orthodox often point out that they still read the New Testament in its original Koine Greek. But the King James New Testament is translated from that very Greek text, the Textus Receptus, which closely follows the text the Greek-speaking churches copied and read for a thousand years. A Baptist reading the King James Bible and an Orthodox believer reading the Greek are reading essentially the same New Testament. The difference is which one rules: the text, or the tradition that interprets it.
The Orthodox Old Testament is the Greek Septuagint, which includes extra books. As we saw above, Jesus marked the limits of Scripture from Abel to Zacharias (Luke 11:51), and the New Testament never quotes those extra books as Scripture.
And Orthodox Tradition has not stood still either. Gregory Palamas’s teaching on God’s “essence and energies”, now central to Orthodox spirituality, was made official only at councils in the 1340s and 1350s. The Philokalia, the best-known Orthodox prayer book, was compiled in 1782.
The conclusion: Having the Greek text is not the same as submitting to it. In that very Greek, elders and bishops are the same office (Titus 1:5–7; Acts 20:17, 28), every believer is a priest (1 Peter 2:9), and the word translated “mystery” means truth God has revealed, not a ritual that imparts grace. We are happy to open the Greek with anyone, word by word.
13. “A deeper, harder, more mystical faith”
Many young men are drawn by Orthodoxy’s demands: long services, strict fasting for much of the year, prostrations and confession to a spiritual father. Others are drawn by its mysticism and its teaching of theosis, being made one with God.
Discipline is biblical. Jesus said, “when ye fast”, not “if ye fast” (Matthew 6:16). But in Scripture, discipline is the fruit of salvation, not the road to it. And the believer already has the deepest union with God there is: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). We become “partakers of the divine nature” through God’s “exceeding great and precious promises” (2 Peter 1:4), received by faith.
Orthodoxy teaches that salvation is a lifelong process of cooperating with God’s grace, so no one can be sure of the end. Jesus offers something better:
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest… For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28, 30
The conclusion: A hard religion cannot save anyone, however sincere. A man is justified “not… by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). Once he is saved, then let him pray, fast, study and serve with everything he has, not to earn his place with God, but because he already has it.
The hunger is real, and so is the answer
Young people are right to want something ancient. God Himself says:
“Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16
The oldest path is not the 1500s, or the 300s. It’s the faith “once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3), written down by the apostles themselves.
They are right to want reverence. God asks us to serve Him “with reverence and godly fear” (Hebrews 12:28). They are right to want certainty. “Thy word is truth” (John 17:17).
Everything they are looking for is found in Christ, in His finished work, and in His Word. You don’t need a ladder of rituals to reach God. Christ came all the way down to you.
What we do at Kitchener Baptist Church, and why
It is not enough to say what we disagree with. Here is what we practise at Kitchener Baptist Church, and the reason for each. Every one comes back to the same principle: if the Bible teaches it, we do it, and if the Bible does not teach it, we will not bind it on anyone’s conscience.
We take the Bible as our final authority
The Bible, literally interpreted, governs what we believe and how we live, as individuals and as a church. We do not set a pope, a council or a tradition beside it.
“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” Isaiah 8:20
Why: only Scripture is breathed out by God (2 Timothy 3:16). Every other voice, including ours, must be tested by it.
We use the King James Bible
We believe God not only inspired every word of Scripture, but has preserved it. We use the King James Version, translated from the Hebrew Masoretic Text of the Old Testament and the Greek Textus Receptus of the New Testament, the text the churches copied and read for centuries.
“The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.” Psalm 12:6–7
Why: Jesus promised, “my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). We want the words God preserved, not a text reconstructed from a few older manuscripts.
We preach the Bible
“So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” Nehemiah 8:8
Why: “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). Paul’s charge to every pastor is “Preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2), not opinions, programs or entertainment.
We preach salvation by grace through faith, and that you can know you are saved
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.” John 5:24
Why: Christ paid the full price for sin on the cross. Salvation is a gift received by faith, not wages earned by works (Romans 6:23; Ephesians 2:8–9), so a believer can rest in it with confidence.
We baptize believers by immersion
We baptize people after they have trusted Christ, and we baptize by going down into the water, just as the New Testament church did. Baptism does not save anyone. It is a public picture of what Christ has already done for the believer.
“See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest… and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him.” Acts 8:36–38
Why: every baptism in the New Testament follows faith, and immersion pictures the gospel itself: “we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead… even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
We keep the Lord’s Table as a remembrance
“For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.” 1 Corinthians 11:26
Why: the bread and the cup point back to the cross and forward to His return. They are not a new sacrifice, because Christ’s one sacrifice was enough.
We are an unaffiliated, local New Testament church
Kitchener Baptist Church is not part of any convention or national organization. We believe the local church is God’s institution for His work today, made up of people who have been saved and baptized, joined together to worship, serve and reach others.
Why: in the New Testament, each church answered directly to Christ, its only Head (Colossians 1:18), under the oversight of its pastors: “Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof” (1 Peter 5:2). Deacons served the church alongside them (Philippians 1:1). No church office above the local church appears anywhere in Scripture.
Every believer comes to God directly
Our people pray to God themselves, confess their sins to God themselves and read their Bibles for themselves.
Why: every believer is a priest before God (1 Peter 2:9), and Christ is the one Mediator (1 Timothy 2:5). We encourage every member to “study to shew thyself approved unto God” (2 Timothy 2:15).
We gather faithfully to worship
We meet on Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday evening to sing, pray, give and hear the Word of God.
“Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” Hebrews 10:25
Why: worship is not a performance for an audience. It is God’s people meeting with Him, “teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Colossians 3:16), with reverence and joy.
We take the gospel to our city
“Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Mark 16:15
Why: the same gospel that saved us is the only hope for our neighbours. That is why we knock on doors across Kitchener-Waterloo, preach on the radio, and support missionaries around the world.
We are looking for Christ’s return
We believe the Lord Jesus will come for His church, and then return to the earth to reign for a thousand years, exactly as the earliest Christians believed.
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.” Titus 2:13
Why: His return is a promise, and it is our motivation to live holy lives and to reach others while there is time.
Why we follow Scripture in faith and practice
Everything above comes down to one question: who has the final word?
Traditions change. Councils disagree. Even godly men in church history were sometimes wrong, and some of the documents that shaped church history turned out to be forgeries. But God’s Word does not change:
“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” Isaiah 40:8
That is why we hold to the Bible in what we believe and in what we do. Not because we have no respect for history, but because history itself shows that every church that drifted from the Bible drifted from the truth. The safest place to stand, in any century, is on the written Word of God.
If you’re searching, or you have friends who are, we would love to open the Bible with you. Read what we believe, or plan a visit. We meet Sunday at 10:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., and Wednesday at 7:00 p.m., at Kitchener Baptist Church. I would love to meet you.
