The Eastern Orthodox Church is the second largest Christian church and one of the oldest religious institutions in the world. The church believes that it understands the original Christian faith passed down from the apostles, and it is a communion of autocephalous (independent) churches, with each one governed by a Holy Synod (a group of bishops). Therefore, the church is not led by any specific religious head, but it instead decentralized into smaller sects such as the Russian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church. Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the man in charge of external church relations, believed that there should be more cooperation between the church and Evangelical Protestants due to their shared views on abortion, the family, and marriage, and that Islam and Orthodoxy could coexist due to the fact that there were no religious wars between the two faiths in Russia.