Why are there so many denominations?

Question 09016.

The sheer number of Christian denominations is one of the first things an outsider notices about the church, and it rarely lands well. Somebody comes to faith, starts looking for a church, and finds that one small town holds a Baptist chapel, an Anglican parish, a Methodist circuit, a Pentecostal fellowship and two independent congregations meeting in school halls. The question follows almost immediately. If there is one Lord and one gospel, why does the church come in so many varieties?

I want to answer that honestly rather than defensively, because some of the reasons behind Christian denominations are good and some of them are not. Pretending they are all noble would be dishonest. Pretending they are all shameful would leave you unable to make sense of what the New Testament itself expects, and it would leave you with nowhere to worship on Sunday.

Where Christian Denominations Actually Came From

For the first few centuries the church was visibly one, though even then it was never uniform. Read the New Testament letters and you meet congregations with strikingly different characters. Corinth was gifted and chaotic. Philippi was generous and warm. The Jerusalem church wrestled with questions the churches in Asia Minor never had to face. Unity in the apostolic age was real, but it was never sameness.

The first great fracture came in 1054, when the Latin West and the Greek East separated over authority, the filioque clause and a long accumulation of cultural grievance. The second came in the sixteenth century, when the recovery of justification by faith made a break with Rome unavoidable. Most Christian denominations you can name in Britain today trace back to that second fracture and to the questions the Reformers opened but did not finish answering. Baptists emerged from English Separatism in the early 1600s over baptism and the nature of a gathered church. Methodists grew out of Anglicanism through a revival that the parish system could not contain. Pentecostal bodies came later still, out of the holiness movement and the events of the early twentieth century.

The Numbers You Have Probably Heard

Somebody will tell you there are thirty three thousand denominations, or forty five thousand, depending on which article they read. That figure comes from the World Christian Encyclopedia, and it is widely misused. The count treats every national body as a separate entity, so a single denomination operating in a hundred countries is counted a hundred times. It also counts independent congregations that answer to nobody as denominations in their own right.

Strip that away and you are left with something like a dozen major traditions and a few hundred distinct bodies worldwide. That is still division, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the figure sceptics quote is not an honest measurement of Christian denominations, and it is worth saying so when it comes up.

Division the New Testament Anticipates

Scripture is not naive about this. Paul and Barnabas parted company over John Mark in Acts 15:36 to 41, and Luke records the sharp disagreement without moralising about it. Both men went on serving. Romans 14 assumes that believers will reach different conclusions about food and days, and it tells them to stop despising one another rather than to reach agreement. Paul even writes in 1 Corinthians 11:19 that there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine may be recognised.

There is also division that Scripture positively commands. Galatians 1:8 and 9 pronounces a curse on anyone preaching another gospel. 2 John 10 forbids receiving a teacher who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh. Romans 16:17 tells believers to avoid those who cause divisions contrary to the doctrine they have learned. Separation from serious error is not a failure of love; it is one of the ways love protects the flock. Some Christian denominations exist because somebody in the past refused to sign a document they could not sign, and I am grateful for them.

Division That Scripture Will Not Excuse

Then there is the other kind, and the New Testament is scathing about it. In 1 Corinthians 1:10 to 13 the Corinthians had sorted themselves into parties around Paul, Apollos, Cephas and Christ. Paul does not weigh the merits of each faction. He asks whether Christ has been divided, and the question is meant to sting. Personality attachment, tribal loyalty and the pleasure of belonging to the right group are ancient problems dressed in modern clothes.

I have watched churches split over the colour of a carpet, the style of the music and a slight given at a committee meeting fifteen years earlier. Not one of those splits produced a new denomination that mattered, but every one of them wounded people who are still not back in church. When you ask why there are so many Christian denominations, some part of the answer is simply pride, ambition and offences that nobody was willing to forgive.

What Unity Actually Means in the New Testament

Ephesians 4:3 tells us to be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Notice the verb. We do not create that unity or vote it into being. It already exists, because there is one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. The New Testament word for church, ekklesia, means a called out assembly, and every believer belongs to that assembly by the Spirit rather than by paperwork.

That is why I do not think organisational merger is the answer to Christian denominations. When Jesus prayed in John 17:20 to 23 that they may all be one, He was not praying for a single administrative structure. He was praying for the kind of shared life and shared truth that makes the world take notice. You can have a unified structure with no spiritual unity in it whatsoever, and history offers plenty of examples.

Sorting the Primary From the Secondary

The practical key is learning to tell which doctrines carry which weight. Primary doctrines are those on which salvation depends: the Trinity, the full deity and humanity of Jesus, His bodily resurrection, salvation by grace through faith, and the authority of Scripture. On these there is no room to negotiate, and a body that denies them has placed itself outside the faith rather than inside a different denomination.

Secondary doctrines are those where genuine believers differ while remaining orthodox: the mode and subjects of baptism, church government, the framework of prophecy, the continuation of the gifts. I hold my Baptist convictions on these with real conviction and I teach them plainly, and I still recognise brothers and sisters who land elsewhere. Tertiary matters, such as worship style and cultural application, call for charity rather than dogma. Most of the heat generated by Christian denominations comes from treating secondary questions as primary ones. If you want to go further with this, I have written on which doctrines are worth dividing over and on whether unity can exist without doctrinal agreement.

How I Answer the Sceptic

The objection usually runs like this: if Christians cannot agree among themselves, the whole thing must be man made. I understand why that sounds powerful, but it proves less than it seems. Physicists disagree sharply about the interpretation of quantum mechanics without anyone concluding that atoms are a fiction. Disagreement about the implications of a body of evidence is not the same as disagreement about whether the evidence exists.

What actually strikes me is the size of the agreement. Take a Baptist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican evangelical and a Pentecostal, sit them down, and you will find them affirming the same creedal core: one God in three Persons, Jesus truly God and truly man, crucified for sinners, raised bodily, coming again. That common ground across Christian denominations is not what you would expect from an invented religion pulled in different directions for two thousand years. For working out which local church deserves your commitment, the marks of a true church are far more useful than the name over the door. The study notes at NET Bible on 1 Corinthians 1 are worth a look on the Corinthian factions.

So, now what?

If the number of Christian denominations has been troubling you, let me suggest a different way of holding it. Do not defend every division as providential and do not treat every one as a scandal. Ask instead what a particular church actually teaches about Jesus, what it does with the Bible, and whether its people love one another in a way you can see from the back row.

Then commit yourself somewhere. The temptation for anyone unsettled by all this is to stay on the edge, sampling and comparing, belonging nowhere. That helps nobody, least of all you. Find a congregation that preaches the gospel and takes Scripture seriously, join it properly, and hold your secondary convictions with a firm hand and an open heart. When you next meet a believer from another tradition, what would it cost you to start by naming what you share?

I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.

1 Corinthians 1:10 (ESV)