Christian Denominations Explained

1. How Many Christian Denominations Are There?

Christian denominations number somewhere between a few dozen and roughly 45,000, and the whole difference lies in what is being counted. The large figure comes from the researchers behind the World Christian Encyclopedia, who count each body separately in each country where it operates, so one global church present in 150 nations enters the tally 150 times. Counted by what they actually teach, the families of Christianity are few enough to hold in your head: the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Protestant traditions that descend from the Reformation.

Source: the denomination counts widely quoted online derive from the World Christian Encyclopedia and the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which defines a denomination as an organized body within a country. Population shares below are from the Pew Research Center's 2011 report Global Christianity.

Why the Big Number Misleads

Three counting decisions inflate the figure. First, the country-by-country method described above. Second, the category of "independent" churches, which sweeps in tens of thousands of single-congregation and network churches, many of them small and many sharing the same doctrine as their neighbours. Third, the counting of jurisdictions rather than creeds: several Orthodox churches with identical faith are separate bodies because they are governed by different national synods.

A more useful question is how many distinct answers Christians give to the questions that divide them: who has authority to settle doctrine, what happens in the Eucharist, how a person is justified, and who may be baptized. On those questions the answers cluster into a small number of families, and this page maps them.

2. The Family Tree of Christianity

The Christian family tree has four great forks, each of them a separation between churches that had been in communion. Everything else on the map is a branch growing off one of those four forks. Learning the four in order is the fastest way to make sense of the whole landscape.

The Four Forks in Order

• 431 and 451. The Assyrian Church of the East stands apart after the Council of Ephesus (431), and the Oriental Orthodox churches after the Council of Chalcedon (451). Both disputes concerned how the divine and human natures are united in Christ.
• 1054. Rome and Constantinople exchange excommunications, hardening a long estrangement into the Great Schism. The issues are the authority of the Bishop of Rome and the Filioque clause in the creed.
• 1517 onward. The Reformation divides Western Christianity into the Catholic Church and the Protestant traditions, over justification, the authority of Scripture, and the sacraments.
• 1800s and 1900s. Restorationist bodies claim to recover a church they believe was lost, and Pentecostalism spreads a renewed emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit across every existing tradition.

What Descent Explains

A flat alphabetical list of denominations hides the one fact that explains the landscape, which is descent. Lutherans and Methodists sit far apart on a list and close together on a tree, since Methodism grew out of Anglicanism which grew out of the Western church that Luther also came from. Reading Christianity as a tree explains why some conversations across a division are short (Catholic and Orthodox theologians share almost the whole vocabulary) and others are long.

Christ prayed for the unity of his followers on the night before he died, and every fork in this tree is a place where that prayer waits to be answered. For the theology of what division is and what repairing it would require, see our guide to Christian unity and ecumenism. This page stays with the map itself.

3. The First Divisions: Ephesus 431 and Chalcedon 451

The oldest divisions in Christianity are fifth-century disputes about the person of Christ, and they produced two families that still exist: the Assyrian Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox churches. Both are ancient, apostolic, and often invisible in Western discussions that jump straight from the New Testament to 1054.

The Assyrian Church of the East

The Council of Ephesus (431) condemned the teaching associated with Nestorius, who was understood to divide Christ into two persons and who objected to calling Mary Theotokos, God-bearer. The Church of the East, centred in the Persian Empire beyond Roman jurisdiction, did not receive the council and was long labelled Nestorian by outsiders. Its own theologians say they confess one Christ in two natures and reject the division of his person that the label implies. The church spread east along the trade routes as far as India and China, and survives today as the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East.

In 1994 Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a Common Christological Declaration stating that Catholics and Assyrians confess the same faith in Christ, and that the ancient formulas each side used were largely talking past one another. Fifteen centuries of separation rested substantially on vocabulary.

The Oriental Orthodox Churches

The Council of Chalcedon (451) defined that Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human, without confusion or separation. The churches that declined that formula are the Oriental Orthodox: the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India. Their position is called miaphysitism, following St Cyril of Alexandria's phrase about the one incarnate nature of the Word of God, and they insist it affirms Christ's full humanity and full divinity in a single united nature.

Modern dialogue has reached the same conclusion here. The 1973 common declaration of Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria, and the 1984 common declaration of Pope John Paul II and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, both state that the two sides confess the same faith in the incarnate Word and that the historic disagreement lay largely in the technical language each used. These churches retain valid orders, the seven sacraments, monasticism of great antiquity, and liturgies in Coptic, Ge'ez, Armenian and Syriac.

4. The Great Schism of 1054 and the Orthodox East

The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church separated formally in 1054, when legates of Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael Cerularius exchanged excommunications in Constantinople. The split had been building for centuries through language, politics and distance, and it hardened permanently after Western crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204. Eastern Orthodoxy today is a communion of self-governing churches, including the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Russian, Romanian, Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian churches, in which the Patriarch of Constantinople holds a primacy of honour without universal jurisdiction.

The Two Questions That Divide

Two issues carry the weight. The first is the office of the Bishop of Rome. Orthodoxy holds that the Church is governed conciliarly, that the bishops are equals, and that the Bishop of Rome held a primacy of honour among equals in the first millennium rather than a universal jurisdiction over other churches. The Catholic Church holds that the Petrine office carries a real primacy of jurisdiction, given in Matthew 16:18-19, and defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. Our guide to the papacy and the office of Peter takes up that question directly.

The second is the Filioque. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 confesses the Holy Spirit "who proceeds from the Father." The Latin West added Filioque, "and the Son", a phrase that spread through Spain and Gaul and was adopted at Rome by the eleventh century. Orthodox theologians object on two grounds: the addition was made to a conciliar creed without an ecumenical council, and it risks obscuring the Father as the sole source within the Trinity. Catholic teaching holds that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle, and the Catechism itself acknowledges the legitimacy of the Greek formula, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son (CCC 246-248).

What the Two Churches Hold in Common

The shared ground is very wide. Catholics and Orthodox hold the seven sacraments, apostolic succession through the laying on of hands, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the seven ecumenical councils, the veneration of icons and the saints, prayer for the dead, and the perpetual virginity and divine motherhood of Mary. The Second Vatican Council states plainly that the Eastern churches possess true sacraments, above all the priesthood and the Eucharist, through apostolic succession (Unitatis Redintegratio 15). In 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I lifted the mutual excommunications of 1054 and consigned them to oblivion. Our guide to Eastern Orthodox beliefs and practice covers that tradition on its own terms.

A related family sits inside the Catholic Church: the Eastern Catholic churches, such as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic, Maronite, Melkite and Syro-Malabar churches. They keep Eastern liturgy, married priests in many cases, and Eastern canon law while remaining in full communion with Rome. They are Catholic without being Latin, which is why the phrase "Roman Catholic" describes one rite rather than the whole communion.

5. The Reformation and Its Four Families

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences, and it broke Western Christianity into a Catholic Church and a set of new traditions within a generation. Four families emerged, each with its own founding conviction, and nearly every Protestant denomination alive today descends from one of them. Our guide to the Reformation and its causes covers the history in depth; this section identifies the families it produced.

Lutheran

Lutheranism follows Luther's teaching that a sinner is justified by grace through faith alone, apart from works of the law, with Scripture as the final authority for doctrine. Lutherans retain infant baptism, a high view of the Lord's Supper (Christ's body and blood are truly present in, with and under the bread and wine), liturgical worship, and in Scandinavia a historic episcopate. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 remains their doctrinal charter. The 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, recorded a consensus on the basic truths of justification, and the sixteenth-century condemnations were judged no longer to apply to the teaching set out in that text.

Reformed and Presbyterian

The Reformed tradition follows Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich and John Calvin in Geneva. Its distinctives are the sovereignty of God in salvation, including predestination as set out in Calvin's Institutes and the Canons of Dort, a spiritual rather than corporeal presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper, simplified worship, and government by elders in presbyteries. Presbyterian churches, the Dutch Reformed churches, and much of evangelical scholarship stand in this line, with the Westminster Confession of 1646 as a common standard.

Anglican

The Church of England separated from Rome in 1534 under Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, and its theology settled under Elizabeth I into a via media holding Catholic structure alongside Reformation doctrine. Anglicans keep bishops, the Book of Common Prayer, the creeds and the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, and range internally from Anglo-Catholic to firmly evangelical. Pope Leo XIII declared Anglican ordinations invalid in the 1896 bull Apostolicae Curae, a judgment Anglicans dispute. In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI established personal ordinariates through Anglicanorum Coetibus, allowing Anglican groups to enter full communion with Rome while keeping their liturgical patrimony.

Anabaptist

The Anabaptists of the 1520s went further than the magisterial reformers, rejecting infant baptism in favour of believer's baptism, separating the church from the state, and committing to nonviolence and a disciplined community. Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites and the Brethren in Christ descend from them. They were persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike in the sixteenth century, and their conviction that the church is a voluntary community of disciples has since spread far beyond their own numbers.

6. Baptists, Methodists and the Free Churches

The largest Protestant bodies in the English-speaking world came after the first Reformation generation, growing out of English Puritanism and the eighteenth-century revivals. They are usually called free churches because they organise independently of state establishment, and they account for a very large share of Protestant Christians worldwide.

Baptists

Baptist churches began among English Separatists in Amsterdam and London in the early 1600s, with John Smyth and Thomas Helwys. Their defining commitments are baptism of believers by immersion, the autonomy of the local congregation, the priesthood of all believers, religious liberty, and a memorial or spiritual understanding of the Lord's Supper. Baptists are congregational in government, so there is no Baptist hierarchy; the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Convention and the Baptist World Alliance are cooperative associations rather than governing bodies.

Methodists and the Holiness Churches

Methodism began as a renewal movement inside the Church of England led by John Wesley and his brother Charles in the 1730s, and separated after Wesley's death. Its emphases are personal conversion, growth in holiness toward Christian perfection, disciplined small groups, hymnody, and social reform. Wesley's teaching that grace can be resisted and that sanctification is a real transformation of the believer sits closer to Catholic thought than much Reformed theology does. The nineteenth-century Holiness movement, including the Church of the Nazarene and the Salvation Army, grew from Methodist roots and fed directly into Pentecostalism.

Evangelicalism as a Movement

Evangelicalism is a movement that crosses denominations rather than a denomination itself. The historian David Bebbington's four marks are the standard description: conversion, the authority of the Bible, the centrality of Christ's atoning death, and active mission. Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Pentecostals and independent congregations all contain evangelicals, which is why the word describes a temperament and a set of priorities more clearly than it describes an institution. The prosperity teaching found in parts of this world is a separate matter, examined in our guide to the prosperity gospel.

7. Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

Pentecostalism began in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and now has a presence on every continent, with its heaviest concentrations in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia. Charles Parham's Bible school in Topeka, Kansas saw students speak in tongues in 1901, and the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles under the black preacher William J. Seymour, beginning in 1906, carried the movement worldwide. Its central conviction is that the gifts described in Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 12, including tongues, prophecy and healing, remain available to the Church today.

What Pentecostals Teach

Classical Pentecostal denominations, such as the Assemblies of God, the Church of God in Christ and the Foursquare Church, teach a baptism in the Holy Spirit distinct from conversion, often evidenced by speaking in tongues, alongside conversion, believer's baptism and divine healing. Worship is spontaneous and participatory. Governance varies widely, and a large share of global Pentecostalism sits in independent congregations and networks with no denominational structure at all, which is one reason the worldwide denomination count runs so high.

A significant minority of Pentecostals, known as Oneness or Apostolic Pentecostals, reject the doctrine of the Trinity in favour of a modalist understanding of God and baptise in the name of Jesus alone. That position places them outside the trinitarian faith that Catholics, Orthodox and mainstream Protestants share, and it should be distinguished from trinitarian Pentecostalism, which is the large majority of the movement.

The Charismatic Renewal Inside the Older Churches

From the 1960s the same emphasis on spiritual gifts entered the historic churches. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal is usually dated to a 1967 retreat involving students and faculty from Duquesne University, and it spread rapidly through Catholic parishes and prayer groups. Successive popes have encouraged it while insisting that charismatic gifts serve the sacramental life of the Church rather than replacing it. St Paul's own instruction fits here: test everything, hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21), and remember that the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7).

8. The Restorationist Bodies

Restorationist bodies are movements founded on the claim that the historic Church fell into apostasy and that a true Christianity had to be restored from Scripture. They arose mostly in nineteenth-century America, and they differ from Protestant denominations in an important way: Protestants generally claim to reform an existing Church, while restorationists claim to re-found one. Their teachings vary enormously, and so does their relationship to historic Christian doctrine.

The Stone-Campbell Movement

The Restoration Movement led by Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell in the early 1800s sought Christian unity by returning to the New Testament pattern and dropping denominational creeds. It produced the Churches of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and the independent Christian Churches. These bodies are trinitarian, baptise adult believers by immersion, and celebrate the Lord's Supper weekly. Their aim was to end denominationalism, and the movement itself divided into several bodies over instrumental music and missionary societies.

Seventh-day Adventists

Seventh-day Adventism formally organised in 1863, growing out of the Millerite movement whose expectation of Christ's return in 1844 went unfulfilled. Adventists observe the Sabbath on Saturday, hold to the authority of Scripture, affirm the Trinity, and regard the writings of Ellen G. White as prophetic counsel. Many Adventist teachings, including conditional immortality and the annihilation of the wicked, differ from Catholic doctrine, and the movement's historical origin in a failed date for the Second Coming is a standing lesson about prophetic timetables. Our guide to the Second Coming explains why the Church refuses to set dates at all.

Groups Outside the Trinitarian Faith

Two large restorationist bodies fall outside the doctrine of God that the historic churches confess. Jehovah's Witnesses, organised from the Bible Student movement of Charles Taze Russell in the 1870s and 1880s, deny the Trinity and the full divinity of Christ, whom they identify with the archangel Michael, and reject the immortality of the soul. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, teaches an account of God, of the Godhead, and of human exaltation that departs from the Nicene faith, and adds the Book of Mormon and other texts to the canon; in 2001 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ruled that Latter-day Saint baptism cannot be recognised as valid Christian baptism. Our guide to what Latter-day Saints believe sets out their teaching in their own terms before responding to it.

State these positions accurately and treat their members with respect. The judgment is about doctrine, and the doctrine in question is the one settled at Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381: one God in three persons, and Jesus Christ true God and true man. Our guide to how to tell a cult from a church sets out the marks in detail, and our guide to the Trinity lays out the doctrine itself.

9. The Major Bodies Compared

The table below sets the major families side by side on the questions that actually separate them. Each row states what that body teaches in its own terms.

Positions are summarised from each body's own confessional documents: the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Book of Concord, the Westminster Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Schleitheim Confession, the Baptist Faith and Message, and the Adventist Fundamental Beliefs. Non-trinitarian bodies are excluded from this table because it compares Christian confessions.

10. Where Rome Agrees, and Where It Differs

The Catholic position on other Christians is both more generous and more definite than most people expect. The Second Vatican Council taught that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, and that many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside its visible boundaries (Lumen Gentium 8). Those elements are real, they belong by right to the Church of Christ, and they carry grace.

What Catholics Recognise in Other Christians

Baptism comes first. Everyone baptised with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is truly a Christian and stands in a real though imperfect communion with the Catholic Church (CCC 838). Catholics recognise in other communities the Scriptures, the life of grace, faith, hope, charity, and other gifts of the Holy Spirit (Unitatis Redintegratio 3). The council adds that people born today into communities separated from Rome cannot be charged with the sin of that separation, and are to be received as brothers and sisters with respect and affection.

Recognition varies by body. The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches have valid bishops, priests and the Eucharist through apostolic succession, which is why Catholic documents call them true particular Churches even while the separation remains (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus 17). Reformation communities are described in Catholic documents as ecclesial communities, because Catholic teaching holds that the loss of the historic episcopate broke the succession that guarantees the sacrament of orders and therefore the Eucharist (Unitatis Redintegratio 22).

What Catholics Cannot Concede

Three things stay fixed. The Church visibly gathered around the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter is the Church Christ founded. The seven sacraments are Christ's own instruments of grace. Scripture and Tradition together, read under a living teaching office, are how revelation reaches each generation intact. Every real agreement with another body rests on those, and dialogue that quietly sets them aside would produce a settlement neither side could trust.

Paul wrote that to a Church already quarrelling. He had earlier begged the Corinthians to agree with one another so that there would be no divisions among them, asking whether Christ had been divided (1 Corinthians 1:10-13). Division in the Body of Christ is a scandal in the strict sense: it puts a stumbling block in front of people who might otherwise believe. The Catechism describes such ruptures as wounds to the unity of Christ's body and calls the restoration of unity a duty for all the baptised (CCC 817-822).

11. How to Use This Map

A map of the denominations is worth having for three practical reasons, and each one changes how you act rather than only what you know.

Speak Accurately About Other Christians

Most arguments between Christians run on caricatures: that Catholics worship Mary, that Baptists think baptism is meaningless, that Orthodox Christians reject the papacy out of nationalism. Learn what a body teaches from its own confession before responding to it. Charity in argument begins with getting the other position right, and it is also the only way to be persuasive.

Know Why You Hold What You Hold

Every line on this map marks a question someone thought was worth their life. Where does authority to settle doctrine come from. What happens on the altar. How a sinner is set right with God. A Catholic who cannot answer those questions from Scripture and the Catechism is holding an inheritance without knowing what it contains. Study the questions while the day is calm.

Pray and Work for Unity

Christ asked for one flock and one shepherd (John 10:16), and prayed that his followers would be one so the world would believe (John 17:21). Working toward that unity is required of Catholics, through prayer, through honest dialogue, through repentance for the ways Catholics contributed to the ruptures, and through personal holiness, which the Council calls the soul of the whole ecumenical movement (Unitatis Redintegratio 8). Start with the prayer, today.

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