Have you come across “Ready to Harvest” on youtube? I really appreciate Joshua’s commitmement to expressing a neutral point of view and I find his overviews of various denominations and groups are tremendously helpful.
In asking that question it might be useful to define denomination, e.g. you might find a church with “Baptist” in it’s name but it may be an independent church. In that case does it belong to a denomination with other churches or is it a denomination unto itself? If you refer to every independent church as a separate denomination, it’s easy to see how the number of denominations would skyrocket.
Yes, I agree. Counting denominations is hard for that very reason. I don’t think the 45000 number is reached by counting all independent churches though… the number would surely be much higher. In the video I linked, it’s pointed out that the same study that gives the 45000 number also says that there are only 300 “major ecclesiastical traditions”, which is much more believable. But even this number obscures the significant agreements in doctrine and practice across many groups.