One Faith, Many Rooms — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Independent: How the Christian Families D

Ask three Christians what a Christian is and you may get three answers, and all three will be sincere. There are, by rough count, two and a half billion Christians in the world, in something like forty thousand distinct organisations. To a newcomer this looks like chaos. It is not; it is a house with many rooms, built over twenty centuries, and the rooms have doors between them. This article is a floor plan. It is written by an independent, non-denominational church that lives in none of the rooms it describes, and it is meant to help you tell them apart, not to sell you one.

The first thousand years: one house

For roughly a thousand years there was one Church, with centres at Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. It wrote the two creeds that almost every Christian still says, the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed. It fixed the canon of the New Testament. It held seven great councils that settled who Jesus is: truly God and truly man, one person in two natures. Everything that came later stands on that ground, and a Christian of any room can walk back into those thousand years and find them home.

The first serious break came in 451, when the churches of Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia and the Syriac East, now called the Oriental Orthodox, rejected the wording of the Council of Chalcedon. Modern scholars on both sides agree the quarrel was largely about language; it has nonetheless lasted fifteen centuries. These are the oldest surviving Christian communities on earth, and they have paid for their faith in blood more than any other.

1054: East and West

In 1054 the Pope's legate and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other, and the Church split along a line that still runs through Europe. The Catholic Church, in communion with the Bishop of Rome, is the largest body of Christians on earth: one and a quarter billion people, seven sacraments, the Mass, the honouring of Mary and the saints, a single teaching authority in the Pope and the bishops in union with him, and a tradition that runs from Augustine through Aquinas to the present. The Orthodox Churches, Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian and others, are a family of self-governing churches held together by a common faith rather than a common head. They keep the same seven mysteries, the Divine Liturgy sung entire, icons as windows into heaven, married parish priests, and a deep suspicion of anything the first seven councils did not say.

The two are closer than either usually admits. Both hold the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, an ordained priesthood in succession from the apostles, confession, the anointing of the dying, and the intercession of the saints. Their differences are the authority of the Pope, the phrase and the Son in the creed, and a thousand years of separate history.

1517: the Reformation

In 1517 a German monk named Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the sale of indulgences and set off a century of upheaval. The Lutheran churches that followed him teach that a person is made right with God by faith alone, through grace alone, on the authority of Scripture alone; they keep infant baptism, a high view of Christ's presence in the Supper, and the congregational hymn. The Reformed and Presbyterian churches, following Zwingli and Calvin, stress the sovereignty of God, the sermon, and government by elders; they read the Supper as a spiritual feeding by faith. The Church of England and the worldwide Anglican communion kept bishops and cathedrals, wrote the Book of Common Prayer, and have tried ever since to hold Catholic order and Reformed doctrine in one body.

A second wave followed. Baptists hold that baptism is for believers who choose it, by full immersion, and that each congregation governs itself; they are now the largest Protestant family. Methodists, from the eighteenth-century revival of John Wesley, teach grace offered to all, holiness of life, and a strong social conscience. In the twentieth century the Pentecostal movement, born in a Los Angeles mission in 1906, recovered the gifts of the Spirit, healing and speaking in tongues, and is today the fastest-growing Christianity on earth, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Evangelical is not a denomination but a temperament found across many: personal conversion, the Bible as final authority, the cross at the centre, and a duty to tell others.

Independent and non-denominational churches

The newest room, and the one this church lives in. A non-denominational church belongs to no denomination: no diocese, synod, convention or headquarters above it. It confesses the common faith of the creeds, reads Scripture as the Word of God, prays, and governs itself. Most grew from the Protestant world and share its emphases; some, like this one, take care to explain the Catholic and Orthodox traditions with the same respect as the Protestant ones and to define themselves against no one. The strength of independence is freedom and directness. Its danger is isolation and the reinvention of old errors. The remedy is the one this site tries to practise: learn from every room, claim none, and keep the Bible open on the table.

What all of them hold

It is far more than the arguments suggest. The Bible. The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. One God in three persons. Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, risen bodily on the third day, coming again. Baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Supper, however understood. The forgiveness of sins. The resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Any two Christians from any two rooms can say all of that together, and most Sundays they do, without knowing it.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:4-6)

Which room should I enter?

This church will not tell you, because it is not a member of any of them and does not recruit for its own. It will tell you what each teaches, in its own words, and what Scripture says, and where the honest disagreements lie. Read the Gospels. Pray. Visit a church near you and stay for the coffee afterwards. Ask what they believe and why. The house has many rooms, and the same Lord walks through all of them; the door you go in by matters less than whether you go in.

— IHS Bethlehem Church. An independent, non-denominational Christian church. Explained here; claimed by no one.