What this is about
Three things were held by every church in the world for a very long time. That the babies of Christian families are baptised. That baptism is for the forgiveness of sins. That the bread and the cup at communion are the body and blood of Christ.
Then, beginning in the 1520s and accelerating ever since, churches started holding fewer of them. Some kept all three. Some kept two. A great many kept none. Nobody publishes the list, which is odd, because these are not obscure questions. They come up every time a baby is born and every time communion is served.
So this page publishes it. One row per church, three columns, and behind every square is a sentence from that church’s own rule book — its catechism, confession, articles of religion or statement of faith. Not what someone says about them. What they say about themselves.
What this page is not doing
It does not argue that any of the three is right or wrong. If you want that argument, the full dossier points you to the pages on this site that make it. It does not discuss how much water is used — dunking, pouring or sprinkling — which is a different question. It does not decide who counts as a real Christian: churches that say they are Christian are listed, what they hold is recorded, and nothing further is concluded. It records what the rule books say, which is sometimes not what a particular congregation does — and where that gap is known, the page says so. No living person is named anywhere on this page.
The short answer
- The churches do not spread out evenly. There are eighty possible ways to answer the three questions. Fifty-two churches use only fifteen of them. Everybody is bunched.
- The biggest group has eighteen churches in it, and they all say no to all three. That group contains the Amish and the Southern Baptists, Mennonites and Pentecostals, Seventh-day Adventists and the newest church in the retail park. These are people who would argue with each other about nearly everything else.
- The three questions do not travel together. Four churches reject infant baptism and still teach that baptism forgives sins. Three reject infant baptism and still teach that Christ is truly received in communion. Knowing one answer does not let you guess the other two.
- Labels have stopped working. A Baptist congregation on one corner may hold a higher view of communion than the church with a steeple on the other. Methodists are supposed to baptise babies and many of their congregations do not. The word over the door predicts less than almost anyone assumes.
- The churches that kept all three are the ones that split up first. Rome, the Greek East, the churches that walked out in 451, and the church that walked out in 431 have been condemning each other for fifteen hundred years — and hold exactly the same three answers. Whatever these three things are, they are older than those quarrels.
- There is a hole in the middle. Churches land at the top, a little below the top, low down, or at nothing at all. Nothing sits in between. That is not what a slow drift would look like.
Four you think you know
Four well-known churches, and one question about each. In every case the answer is written plainly in a document anyone may read, and in every case most people guess wrongly — including a good many members of the church in question. Commit before you look.
Fifty-two churches
Sorted by how many of the three they hold. Tap a column heading to sort it differently, or use the boxes to show only the churches that answer a particular way. The letter in the group column just means “everyone with this letter gave exactly the same three answers”.
What “Closeness” means — read this first
The last column answers one question and one only: on these three points, how close is this church to the church of the first five hundred years?
Low is far, high is close. A church scoring 0 holds none of the three things the early church held. A church scoring 10 holds all three. Anything in between holds some of them.
How the number is arrived at
Each of the three questions is marked out of three, and the three marks are added up and turned into a number out of ten:
It is not a score for anything else. Not for whether a church is faithful, or biblical, or right, or well run. Not for how it is led, or what it believes about anything other than these three questions. And it says nothing at all about the people in it. A church with a low number here may be a very good church — the number is about three doctrines, not about anyone’s standing before God. It is also the one column on this page that is opinion rather than fact: the three answers beside it come straight out of each church’s own rule book and can be checked, while the number depends on how the marking is done. The full dossier publishes the marking rules so you can argue with them.
| Church ↕ | Are babies baptised? ↕ | What does baptism do? ↕ | What is communion? ↕ | Group ↕ | Closeness ↕ |
|---|
No church in the list answers that way. Sixty-five of the eighty possible combinations have nobody in them at all.
On a phone the table slides sideways and the name stays put. The full dossier gives the exact wording, document and article number behind every square.
Who ends up with whom
A group here is simply everyone who gave the same three answers. Nobody decided these groupings in advance; they are what is left when you sort fifty-two churches by three answers. Look at the first one, and then at how little its members have in common.
Where does your church land?
Three questions about the church you actually go to. Answer from what is taught there, not from what the denomination says somewhere else — if those two differ, that is worth finding out. At the end you are told which group you are in and which other churches are in it with you. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere.
The easiest way to check any of this
Ask. Not as a test, and not to catch anyone out — as an ordinary question, of whoever teaches where you worship:
If the answer matches what you chose in the exercise above, you know your church well, and you now also know which fifteen other churches around the world hold exactly the same thing. If the answer is different from what you expected, you have learned something useful in about a minute. And if the honest answer is that the question has never really come up, that is an answer too — and it is the most common one in the largest group on this page.
The other thing worth doing takes ten minutes and costs nothing: read your own church’s statement of faith all the way through, with these three questions in your hand, and see which of them it answers. A surprising number of statements of faith do not answer any of them at all.
If you want the evidence
Everything on this page is stated without its sources, which is what makes it quick. The full dossier gives the exact wording of every document, the article number, and a paragraph on every one of the fifty-two churches explaining why it scores as it does — along with the places where the page thinks it is most likely to be wrong, and the prompt that produced the whole thing so that you can run it yourself and see whether you get the same table.
The full dossier
Every square with its quotation, document and article. The first-five-centuries evidence set out and dated, including the awkward parts. The scoring rules published in full. A ten-question quiz that comes back at the end, and a tool for exploring the groups.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →Churches and organisations are named on this page only where the full dossier quotes them verbatim from their own published doctrinal documents. No living person is named. Where a body publishes no binding rule book, representative published statements are quoted in the full dossier without naming the congregation. This page contains no defence and no refutation of any of the three positions, takes no view on how baptism should be administered, and takes no view on whether any church listed is Christian. The closeness score in the last column is opinion; the rest of the table is checkable fact. Nothing here is a claim about anybody’s sincerity, salvation or standing before God.