{"id":84026,"date":"2025-07-16T06:00:48","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T10:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=84026"},"modified":"2025-07-10T21:05:44","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T01:05:44","slug":"on-protestant-denominations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2025\/07\/on-protestant-denominations\/","title":{"rendered":"On Protestant Denominations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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Denominations are being attacked from both a Catholic and a Protestant direction.<\/p>\n

Many Catholics say there are thousands of Protestant denominations, with individual Christians all claiming the right to hold whatever beliefs they want and to just start their own churches, as opposed to the one true Church of Rome.\u00a0 Though thoughtful Catholics<\/a> keep saying this is not exactly true.<\/p>\n

But Protestants are also attacking denominations, insisting that each denomination is too much like the Church of Rome. They claim that individual Christians should have the right to hold whatever beliefs they want and should be able to just start their own churches.<\/p>\n

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OK, this isn\u2019t exactly true either. Nondenominational churches do tend to hold to general evangelical beliefs.\u00a0 While individuals can hold a wide range of opinions on certain issues, others are defined by the congregation\u2019s own statement of faith.\u00a0 Nondenominationalism is not so much grounded in different theologies but in a freedom from organizational structures.\u00a0 Each congregation is independent and unconnected formally to any larger ecclesiastical structure or association of churches.\u00a0 In this, nondenominational churches simply have a congregational church polity, which has a long pedigree in Protestant history.<\/p>\n

It is, however, true that a common pattern for nondenominational churches is for a young man to graduate from a nondenominational seminary or Bible college and then just go out and start a church.\u00a0 He is under no ecclesiastical supervision.\u00a0 Freed from \u201cdenominational bureaucracy,\u201d as he will call it, he is on his own.\u00a0 If he is successful in the religious marketplace, he might move from a rented auditorium to build a \u201ccampus\u201d of his own.\u00a0 He is a religious entrepreneur.<\/p>\n

Nondenominational churches are now, paradoxically, the largest<\/a> Protestant denomination.\u00a0 \u00a0That is, according to the probably outdated 2020 Religious Census, there are more members of non-denominational congregations, some 21 million, than any other Protestant church body.\u00a0 (Baptists come in next at 17.6 million; then Methodists at 8 million; then ELCA Lutherans at 3.1 million; then Assemblies of God<\/a> at 3.09 million; then the National Missionary Baptists at 2.4 million; then, coming in seventh, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod at 1.8 million.)<\/p>\n

In this post, I\u2019d like to address both the Catholic contention that there are too many denominations and the Protestant contention that we don\u2019t need denominations at all.<\/p>\n

I came across this brief video (only 3 minutes) with useful subtitles from Jordan Cooper<\/a>:, a pastor and theologian with the American Association of Lutheran Churches<\/a>, which which the LCMS is in fellowship.\u00a0 He points out that there are not all that many different kinds of Protestants:<\/p>\n