Logical Church-hopping Guide

It's one of the modern leisure activities, is church-hopping.

It was a great sign of the Early Church, of course. If the experts are to be believed, that is. A member of a church that read only Mark's Gospel might decide they needed to know what happened in the end. So they'd up sticks and join the "Emmaus" fellowship up the road, where they read Luke. Still a member of a Jewish group, but smarting after reading Galatians? You might decide that it was time to try out a Matthean group, to remind yourself that Jesus came out of that tradition. If life were getting too Gnostic for you, maybe nip down to the local Johannines to think about "truth" and "light" in a more solidly monotheistic environment.

Then in the Middle Ages, this all dropped off. Up to Luther, church-hopping was a bit pointless. I suppose if you lived in a big town you could nip up the road to where you got a better Mass. But out in the sticks that wasn't much of an option. If you were rich, of course, you could always build your own church. But that's rarely something the rest of us can aspire to.

But now, thanks to Luther and his successors, we are able to worship God in a variety of heterodoxies of our choice. And if we disagree with the current place we worship, we can just go somewhere else. And if we don't like it there, we can just move again.

But you don't want to go in for illogical church-hopping. I mean, just going straight from Eastern Orthodox to Oneness Pentecostal could cause some real culture-shock. Like a chess game, you should always proceed in  a series of sensible moves. And that's where our Logical Church-hopping Guide comes in. As long as you progress logically from one square to another, connected square, you will move calmly around the ecclesiastical ecosystem without disturbing your internal equilibrium.