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Originally Posted by Unregistered
I'm more than a little confused. Can someone help me out a bit here. What is the difference between an Independent, an Evangelical, a Protestant, and a Pentecostal Christian? I've just realized that I've always taken them all to be the same group of people.
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I can see the confusion. But I don't think the idea was to say that these are separate groups, but rather ways of dividing up the whole of Christianity.
At the highest level you have the EO, RCC and Protestants.
There are actually Catholics other than the RCC, though a very small part.
"Protestant" is a collection of many groups that can be singled out or even grouped within the larger protestant grouping. Independents is a vague collection of non-denominations, free groups, home churches, etc. It is likely that the Bible Church movement is in that since it is not a denomination and no assembly answers to anyone outside of itself (other than God). But it is also part of the Evangelicals. And another subset called Fundamentalist. Pentecostal/Charismatic groups are generally overlapping with evangelicals, but not always or not entirely in some cases.
The Anglicans are a funny bunch because to some degree they are simply separated Catholics, not really fitting in with Protestantism. But that is not a universal statement. There are very Evangelical Anglican churches.
So it is like drawing a variety of circles over a large population of Christians and finding that this circle is Evangelical. The next circle, which overlaps with the Evangelical circle at least somewhat are the Pentecostals/Charismatics. And so on.
Some groups are quite doctrinally different from others. Yet others are only marginally different, or mainly different in practice or in connection to "roots," etc.