[Evangelical]

It is hard to reconcile the state of the Church with Jesus's words about the gates of hell even when considering the state of the early churches. Revelation shows that a genuine church can have its lamp stand taken away.

It is unclear that the early church believed in transubstantiation.There are many early church fathers who mention the bread and wine as symbols. Protestant theologians have carefully studied the early christian writings too. There has been no solid conclusion that the early church believed in transubstantiation as the Catholics (and Orthodox?) believe - otherwise we would all believe that. Logically, transubstantiation makes no sense. Basically to believe in transubstantiation is to believe that Jesus's blood can be bought at a liquor store. During the service the Priest does some hand waving magic hocus pocus and turns it into Jesus's blood, poof, alakazam, puff of smoke, it's now real blood - yeah right.

If the Orthodox church is the genuine church, one thing I do not understand is how can a church of another country be in a different country? For example why there is a Greek Orthodox church in London? According to the pattern of the New Testament churches, we do not find any of the churches named after a different country. For example, the genuine church in London is not Greek it is English. It does not make sense to say that a church which came from Greece and now exists in London is the true church in London. The bible consistently defines a church by its locality, not by its claimed links to history and apostolic succession - many Protestants can claim that, including Lutheran and Anglican. I've done the math in another thread - 100% hit rate for counting the number of times the Bible refers to church and locality in the singular.