Where Does Your Church Land?

What is this page about?

Every church in the world believed three things for a very long time.

1. The babies of Christian families are baptized.
2. Baptism is for the forgiveness of sins.
3. The bread and the cup of the Lord’s Supper are the body and blood of Christ.

In the 1520s, some churches began to hold fewer of these. Some kept all three. Some kept two. Very many kept none.

Nobody prints the list. That is strange, because these are not small questions. They come up every time a baby is born and every time a church holds the Lord’s Supper.

So this page prints the list. There is one line for each church and three answers. Each answer comes from that church’s own book of rules or statement of belief. It is what the churches say about themselves. It is not what other people say about them.

The short answer

1. The churches are not spread out evenly. There are eighty possible ways to answer the three questions. The fifty-two churches use only fifteen of them. They stand close together in a few groups.
2. The biggest group has eighteen churches. They all say no to all three. In this group are the Amish and the Southern Baptists, Mennonites and Pentecostals, Seventh-day Adventists and the newest independent church in town. These people would argue with each other about almost everything else.
3. The three questions do not go together. Four churches do not baptize babies, but they teach that baptism forgives sins. Three do not baptize babies, but they teach that Christ is truly received in the Lord’s Supper. If you know one answer, you cannot guess the other two.
4. The name of a church does not tell you much. A Baptist church on one corner may have a higher teaching about the Lord’s Supper than the church with a tower on the other corner. The Methodist rules say that babies should be baptized, but many Methodist churches do not do it.
5. The churches that kept all three are the churches that separated first. The church of Rome, the Greek churches of the East, the churches that left in the year 451, and the church that left in 431 have spoken against each other for 1,500 years. And they give the same three answers. So these three teachings are older than those fights.
6. There is a hole in the middle. Churches are at the top, a little below the top, low down, or at zero. Almost nothing is in between. A slow change would not look like this.

Four churches that people think they know

Most people guess wrongly about these four churches. Many members of these churches guess wrongly too. But each answer is written in a text that anyone can read.

1. A Baptist church that follows the old Baptist statement of 1689. Everyone knows that they baptize adults and not babies. But what does their statement say about the Lord’s Supper? It says that people who eat truly receive Christ, in a spiritual way. This is almost word for word what the Presbyterians wrote in 1646. But be careful: many churches that use this name today do not hold this.

2. The United Methodist Church. What does its book of rules say about babies? It says that the baptism of young children must be kept in the church. John Wesley himself put this sentence into the book in 1784. But many local churches do not do it. This is the widest difference on this page between what a church says and what it does.

3. The Churches of Christ. They have no central office and no creed, and they do not baptize babies. What do they teach about baptism? They teach that it is for the forgiveness of sins. So a church can say no to the baptism of babies and still say that baptism forgives sins.

4. The Church of God in Christ. It is the largest Pentecostal church in America. What does its statement say about a person who takes the Lord’s Supper? It says that by faith his soul enters a special union with the risen Christ. This is a higher teaching than in any other Pentecostal church on this page.

What the last column means

How is the number made? Each of the three answers gets a mark from 0 to 3.

• 3: the church holds what the early church held.
• 2: it holds nearly the same thing in other words, or it allows the practice but does not expect it.
• 1: it half holds it. It says one thing in one place and something different in another place.
• 0: it holds the opposite, or it does not do it at all.

The three marks are added and changed into a number out of ten.

The table of fifty-two churches

The churches are in order from the highest number to the lowest. All churches with the same group letter gave the same three answers.

Who is in a group with whom?

A group is all the churches that gave the same three answers. Nobody planned these groups. They appear when we sort fifty-two churches by three answers.

Look at Group A. It has eighteen churches. Then think how little these churches share in other things.

Where is your church?

Answer three questions about the church where you worship. Answer from what is really taught and done there.

1. When a baby is born to a family in your church, what usually happens? Is the baby baptized? Or is the baby dedicated, with baptism later?
2. What does your church teach that baptism does? Does it forgive sins? Does God work through it? Is it a sign and seal? Or is it only a picture of something that has already happened?
3. What does your church teach about the bread and the cup? Are they Christ’s body and blood? Is Christ truly received? Or are they bread and wine to remember him?

Now find your three answers in the table. You will see your group, and the other churches in it.

The easiest way to check

Ask. Do not ask it as a test. Ask it as a normal question to the person who teaches in your church.

Maybe the answer is what you expected. Then you know your church well. Maybe the answer is different. Then you have learned something useful in one minute. And maybe the honest answer is, “We have never really asked that question.” That is an answer too. It is the most common answer in the largest group on this page.

One more thing takes ten minutes and costs nothing. Read your own church’s statement of faith from start to end, with these three questions in your hand. See which of them it answers. Many statements of faith do not answer any of them.

The full page gives the exact words of each church’s own text, with the place where you can find them. It also gives a paragraph about each of the fifty-two churches and explains its number.