Eastern Protestant Christianity
This is due to the diverse polities, practices, liturgies, and orientations of the denominations which fall under this category, as can be seen in Western Protestantism.
[8] The church employs a reformed variant of the Liturgy of Saint James, with many parts in the local vernacular.
[11] It is unique in that it is based on the Eastern Christian rite used by the Eastern Orthodox Church, while incorporating theology from the Divine Service contained in the Formula Missae, the base texts for Lutheran liturgies in the West.
[19][20][21] The reformers were influenced by the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who arrived in Turkey in the early nineteenth century, and published translated bibles for the Turkish-speaking Armenians.
[22][23] They began to raise questions about what they saw as conflicts between biblical truths and the traditional practices of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Henceforth this denomination adopted several elements of Eastern Christian worship and practices like the use of holy oils for anointing, while keeping the principle of sola scriptura.
[35] Its name was officially changed to Believers Eastern Church in 2017, so as to "better express its roots in the ancient and orthodox faith".
[37][38] The church originated between 1920 and 1924, through the work of the young Romanian Orthodox theologians Dumitru Cornilescu and Tudor Popescu.
[39] Deacon Cornilescu was motivated to translate the Bible into modern Romanian, by Princess Calimachi of Moldavia.
Gradually, they gained a significant following, including priests from the Romanian Orthodox Church.
It started off in 1973 as a network of house churches established by Campus Crusade for Christ missionaries in the United States.
The founders Peter E. Gillquist, Jack Sparks, Jon Braun, and J.R. Ballew wanted to restore Christianity to its primitive form based on the writings of the early Church Fathers.
So they stood in a circle and self-ordained each other, creating an entity called the New Covenant Apostolic Order (NCAO).
Their own interpretations of Church history led to the adoption of a somewhat liturgical form of worship and induced a need for apostolic succession.
The EOC pursued various avenues to obtain episcopacy, including a visit to the Patriarch of Constantinople, but to no avail.
At last they met Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch, during his historic visit to Los Angeles, which proved successful.
John Bartke, who later served as the primary intermediary between the EOC and the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese, and also hosted the initial set of chrismations and ordinations for the EOC at St. Michael's Church in Van Nuys, California.
Unable to completely reconcile Evangelicalism and Orthodoxy, many EOC members formally joined the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America in 1987.
[43][44][45][46] P'ent'ay is an Amharic and Tigrinya language term for evangelical Christians in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
[49] The P'ent'ay denominations may constitute as much as 19% of the population of Ethiopia,[50] while being a small minority in Eritrea.
