Nondenominational Churches Explained

1. What Nondenominational Means in Practice

Nondenominational means that a congregation owns itself. No outside body approves its pastor, holds the deed to its building, audits its books, ratifies its doctrine or hears an appeal against its decisions. In American law the church is normally a single nonprofit corporation, chartered in one state, governed by articles of incorporation and a set of bylaws that the founders wrote and the current board can amend. Everything else follows from that one structural fact.

A denominational congregation sits inside a larger machine. A Lutheran parish belongs to a synod, a Methodist church to an annual conference, a Presbyterian church to a presbytery, a Catholic parish to a diocese. That larger body ordains and assigns clergy, holds or supervises property, publishes the confession the congregation is bound to teach, runs the seminaries, funds the missionaries, pays the pensions, and provides a court of appeal when something goes wrong locally. A nondenominational church does all of that for itself, contracts it out, or does without it.

What the Word Signals to the People Who Use It

Members rarely choose the word for structural reasons. For most of them nondenominational is a promise about tone. It signals a church that will not spend a Sunday defending a sixteenth-century argument, will not ask a newcomer to learn a vocabulary before he can follow the service, and will not treat a family's history in another tradition as a problem to be fixed. Ask a member of such a church what she is and the usual answer is "I am just a Christian," or "I follow Jesus, I do not follow a denomination." That answer describes a real intention, and it deserves to be heard as sincerity rather than as evasion.

Where These Churches Actually Come From

Nondenominational Christianity is Protestant in descent, and its convictions have traceable sources. The conviction that Scripture is the final authority for doctrine comes from the Reformation. The conviction that a local congregation needs no bishop above it comes from the English Independents and the Baptist tradition, which our guide to Baptist belief and practice sets out in detail. The style of worship, the emphasis on personal conversion and the expectation that ordinary members will speak about their faith come from the revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The music, the informality and the openness to the gifts of the Spirit in a great many of these churches come from the Pentecostal and charismatic renewal covered in our guide to Pentecostal Christianity.

The Pew Research Center and other survey organisations classify nondenominational congregations within Protestantism for exactly this reason. Members who dislike the label usually dislike the associations it carries rather than the doctrines it names. A congregation that teaches justification by faith, treats the Bible as the sole final authority and governs itself locally is Protestant by every standard definition, whatever it prefers to be called.

How Large the Category Has Become

Nondenominational churches now account for a very large share of American Protestant churchgoing, and the direction of travel in the survey data has been consistently upward for decades. The National Congregations Study, run at Duke University, has documented a steady rise in the proportion of American congregations that report no denominational affiliation. The Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study has found the same rise among individuals, alongside a broader decline in the willingness of Americans to attach themselves to any denominational label. Faith Communities Today, the multi-tradition survey partnership coordinated by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, reports that a substantial share of the country's very largest congregations carry no denominational name, a pattern our guide to how megachurches actually work takes up in detail.

Sources: the National Congregations Study (Mark Chaves, Duke University), the Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study, and the Faith Communities Today surveys coordinated by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Figures differ between these projects because they count congregations, attenders and self-identifiers respectively, and because some churches with a denominational affiliation no longer display it in their name. The direction each project reports is the same.

2. What a Statement of Faith Affirms

A nondenominational church states its doctrine in a document called the statement of faith, usually eight to twelve short paragraphs published on the website and printed in the membership materials. That document does the work a confession does in a denominational church, with one difference: this congregation wrote it, and this congregation can change it. Reading it is the fastest way to learn what a given church actually teaches.

The Points Almost Every Statement Includes

• The Trinity. One God eternally existing in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The doctrine defined at Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 is affirmed by name or in substance in nearly every statement, and our guide to the doctrine of the Trinity covers what the councils settled.
• Christ. Fully God and fully man, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified for sinners, raised bodily on the third day, ascended, and returning.
• Scripture. Inspired by God, authoritative for faith and practice, and in many statements described as inerrant in the original manuscripts. Our guide to the Bible and how it came together explains how the canon was fixed.
• Salvation. By grace through faith in Christ, received personally, apart from any merit of the believer's own.
• The Holy Spirit. A divine person who indwells believers, gives assurance, produces holiness and distributes gifts for service.
• The Church. The whole body of believers, expressed locally in the gathered congregation.
• The ordinances. Baptism and the Lord's Supper, commanded by Christ and practised in obedience to him.
• Last things. The bodily return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and a final judgment.

A Catholic reading that list will recognise a great deal of it. The Trinity, the incarnation, the virgin birth, the atoning death, the bodily resurrection, the return of Christ and the final judgment are the content of the Nicene Creed, which the Catholic Church confesses at every Sunday Mass. The Second Vatican Council said plainly that separated Christians who hold these truths are joined to Catholics in a real communion, and the Catechism states that all who are justified by faith in baptism are incorporated into Christ and rightly called Christians (Catechism of the Catholic Church 818, 838).

Baptism and the Lord's Supper in These Churches

Two of the affirmations carry meanings a Catholic reader should not assume. Baptism in most nondenominational churches is by full immersion and is offered to those old enough to profess faith for themselves. The rite is generally understood as an outward testimony to a conversion that has already happened, rather than as the moment God works regeneration. Catholic teaching holds that baptism itself effects what it signifies, cleansing from original sin and joining the person to Christ, which is why infants are baptised (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1213, 1250). Our guide to what baptism does sets out both positions and the biblical texts each side leans on.

The Lord's Supper is usually observed as a memorial and a spiritual communion with Christ, with the bread and cup remaining bread and cup. Some nondenominational churches hold to a real spiritual presence in the Reformed sense, and some teach a purely commemorative view. The Catholic Church teaches that the whole substance of the bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ, and reads John 6 and the accounts of the Last Supper as saying so directly. Our guide to the Eucharist and the real presence gives the Catholic argument from the text and from the earliest Christian writers.

The Words Everyone Signs and the Words Left Open

A statement of faith is written to be signed by everyone the church wants to keep. That gives it a characteristic style: strong on the affirmations all evangelicals share and quiet on the questions that split them. When a statement says "we believe in the authority of Scripture," the sentence is doing real work and every reader agrees with it. When it says "we practise baptism," a great deal has been left unspecified on purpose. The next section describes what gets left out, and why leaving it out is a deliberate strategy rather than an oversight.

3. What the Statement Leaves Open

Nondenominational statements of faith are short by design, and the shortness is the point. Every additional sentence excludes somebody. A church drawing members from Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal and Catholic backgrounds keeps its statement narrow so that all of them can belong without renouncing what they came in holding. The questions left open are usually these.

Predestination and Free Will

Whether God's election of the saved is unconditional, and whether saving grace can be resisted, divides evangelicals sharply and is almost never settled in a nondenominational statement. Congregations in the Acts 29 network generally teach the Reformed answer set out in our guide to Calvinism and the five points. Congregations of Wesleyan or Pentecostal background generally teach the opposite. Many nondenominational churches contain both convictions in the same room and treat the question as one for small groups rather than for the pulpit. The Catholic position, which holds together God's initiative and genuine human freedom, is set out in our guide to grace and free will.

The Spiritual Gifts

Whether prophecy, tongues and healing continue today is the second great open question. Cessationists hold that the miraculous gifts ceased with the apostolic age. Continuationists hold that they continue and should be sought. Vineyard and ARC churches are firmly continuationist. Many Bible churches are cessationist. A large number of nondenominational congregations adopt a middle policy, affirming that God still heals while restricting tongues and prophecy to settings outside the main service. Our guide to the person and work of the Holy Spirit covers what Catholic teaching says about charisms.

The End Times

Eschatology is left open more often than any other topic. Some Bible churches, following the dispensational tradition taught at Dallas Theological Seminary, specify a pre-tribulation rapture in their statements. Most other nondenominational churches affirm only that Christ will return bodily and leave the sequence unstated, since members hold three or four incompatible schemes. Our guide to the rapture and where the idea came from traces the history of the dispensational reading and the Catholic response to it.

Women in Ministry

Whether a woman may preach on Sunday or serve as an elder is decided congregation by congregation, and the decision is frequently made in the bylaws rather than in the statement of faith, where it is less visible. Acts 29 requires its churches to reserve the office of elder to men. Vineyard USA and many independent congregations ordain women to pastoral roles. Two churches with identical published doctrine may practise oppositely on this point.

What Deliberate Silence Achieves and What It Costs

The silence is genuinely useful. It lets a couple who grew up in different traditions worship together without one of them being told they were wrong, and it keeps a congregation focused on what its members hold in common. The cost appears when a question that was left open becomes urgent. If a respected member begins prophesying over people in the lobby, if a candidate for elder is a woman, if a teacher starts preaching unconditional election to a congregation that has never heard it, the church has no settled answer and no document to appeal to. The matter is then decided by whoever has the standing to decide it, which in practice means the senior pastor or the elder board. Section 10 returns to that mechanism, because it is the whole of the Catholic argument.

4. How a Nondenominational Church Is Governed

Governance in a nondenominational church is whatever its bylaws say, and the bylaws function as its constitution. Because there is no denominational rulebook standing above them, two churches that look identical on Sunday morning can be organised in completely different ways, with completely different consequences for the members. Three patterns cover most of them.

Congregational Government

The members are the highest authority. They vote to call and dismiss the pastor, approve the annual budget, amend the bylaws and authorise major purchases, usually at an annual meeting with provision for special meetings. This is the inherited pattern of the Baptist and Congregationalist traditions, and the churches that hold it hold it on theological grounds rather than practical ones. Their reasoning is that Christ is the head of each gathered congregation, that every baptised believer is a priest before God (1 Peter 2:9), and that the whole church, taught by Scripture and led by the Spirit, is competent to judge its own affairs. Congregationalists point out that Paul writes his corrective letters to whole churches and expects the assembly to act (1 Corinthians 5:4-5). The practical strain that congregations themselves discuss most often is turnout: a determined faction can carry a poorly attended meeting, which is why these churches usually set quorum rules and notice periods in the bylaws.

Elder-Led Government

A board of elders holds final authority, and the members elect them, ratify them or affirm them at intervals. The elders appoint the pastoral staff, own the doctrine, exercise discipline and control the budget. This is the most common arrangement in newer nondenominational churches, and its supporters point to the plural leadership of the New Testament churches, where Paul appoints elders in every town (Acts 14:23, Titus 1:5). The arrangement works well when the elders are genuinely independent of the pastor. It works badly when they are his employees, his friends or his appointees, which is the failure mode the next section describes.

Board-Governed or Founder-Governed Churches

A self-perpetuating board holds authority and chooses its own successors, with the congregation having no vote at all. The founding pastor typically selected the first board and often chairs it or holds a permanent seat. Calvary Chapel's traditional "Moses model" belongs broadly to this family: the senior pastor leads the church under God, and a board serves in an advisory and supportive role, on the reasoning that Moses led Israel while the elders assisted him. Churches organised this way can move faster than any other kind of Christian body on earth. They also concentrate more authority in one person than almost any other kind, and if that person fails there is no mechanism outside the church to intervene.

Membership, Property and Money

Three practical consequences follow from the corporate structure. Membership is a contract with the corporation, and the bylaws set out who may join, who may vote and how someone can be removed. Property belongs to the corporation outright, so a nondenominational church that splits keeps its building with whichever side holds the board, and no outside authority can award it, which is why such splits go to civil court. Money is governed by whatever financial controls the bylaws require, and a church with a single unaudited account and one signatory is legal in most states.

None of this is a criticism of the people involved. Thousands of nondenominational churches are run with more transparency than the average denominational parish, publish audited accounts and rotate their elders on fixed terms. The point is that the transparency is a choice each congregation makes rather than a standard imposed on it, and the choice can be unmade by the same board that made it.

5. Accountability Without a Denomination

Accountability in a nondenominational church has to be built rather than inherited, since there is no bishop to appeal to and no synod to file a complaint with. Churches that take the problem seriously assemble a substitute out of several parts, and the parts are worth naming because a member can check whether his own church has them.

The Substitutes That Actually Exist

• Outside elders. Some churches seat one or more elders who draw no salary from the church and hold no other role in it, so that the board contains people the pastor cannot dismiss.
• Independent financial audit. An annual audit by an outside accounting firm, with the results shown to the members.
• The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. A voluntary accreditation body whose member organisations agree to standards on governance, audited financial statements, board independence and fundraising disclosure. Membership is optional, and a church's status can be checked directly with the ECFA.
• Network membership. Belonging to Acts 29, ARC, Vineyard USA or a similar body brings an outside relationship that can be withdrawn, which gives the network real leverage even without formal jurisdiction.
• Bylaws with teeth. Fixed terms for elders, a required congregational vote to remove a senior pastor, a whistleblower policy, and a conflict-of-interest policy that names the pastor's relatives.

Where the Substitutes Fail

Each substitute has a known weakness. Outside elders can be personal friends of the pastor. An audit verifies that money was spent as recorded and says nothing about whether the spending was appropriate. ECFA membership is voluntary and can lapse. Network membership can be resigned by the church the moment the network starts asking questions, and that resignation costs the church nothing legally. The common failure runs the same way each time: a church founded by a gifted leader grows quickly, the leader appoints the board that is meant to hold him accountable, the board's members owe their positions and often their salaries to him, and when a serious allegation arrives the body that must judge it is composed of people he chose.

The Comparison a Catholic Should Make Honestly

A Catholic pressing this point owes his neighbour a plain admission first. The Catholic Church has a bishop over every parish, a metropolitan over every province, a curia, a code of canon law and a court of final appeal in Rome, and that apparatus failed catastrophically in the abuse crisis. Structure did not save the Catholic Church from the worst institutional scandal in its modern history, and any Catholic argument that begins by pointing at somebody else's governance is answered in a sentence. Our guide to the scandals and what the Church has done since treats that record without softening it.

The honest version of the Catholic point is narrower and survives the comparison. Catholic structure gives a wronged person somewhere to go that is outside the parish, a canonical procedure that exists whether or not the accused agrees to it, and a body with the authority to remove a priest from ministry over his own objection. Whether that machinery is used well is a separate question, and for decades it was used disgracefully. A congregation whose only authority is its own board does not have the machinery at all. When such a board decides to close ranks, the members' remaining options are civil litigation, the press, or leaving.

6. Why People Are Drawn to Them

People choose nondenominational churches for reasons that are largely good, and a Catholic who cannot state those reasons sympathetically has not understood what is happening. The growth is a response to genuine strengths in these churches and to genuine failures elsewhere.

No Inherited Quarrel

A newcomer walking into a nondenominational church is not asked to take a side in an argument he has never heard of. He is not asked whether he is Arminian, whether he accepts the Westminster Confession, whether his parents' marriage was regularised, or what he thinks of a schism from 1054. For someone with no church background at all, and increasingly that describes the person walking through the door, a tradition-free welcome removes an obstacle that has nothing to do with Christ.

Speed

A church with no wider body to consult can change a service time, launch a second location, hire a worship leader, start a recovery ministry or plant a congregation in another town within weeks. Denominational churches often need a committee, a vote at a regional meeting and a year. In a period when the surrounding culture changes fast, that difference in tempo is decisive, and it explains a large part of why the fastest-growing congregations in the United States tend to carry no denominational name.

Plain Speech

Preaching in these churches is direct, applied and free of technical vocabulary. A sermon works through a passage and states what a listener should do about it on Monday. Catholic preaching at its best does this too, and Catholic preaching at its average does not, which many Catholics who have left will say without prompting. Our guide to why people leave the Church examines what the survey data actually shows about the reasons for departure, and the quality of preaching appears in it repeatedly.

Belonging in Small Groups

Nondenominational churches almost universally organise members into small groups of eight to fifteen people that meet midweek in homes. That structure delivers something a large parish frequently fails to deliver: a handful of people who notice when you stop coming. Anyone comparing the two honestly should concede that a well-run small-group system is one of the most effective pastoral instruments in modern Christianity.

The Failures That Push People Out

Some of the growth is not attraction at all. People leave parishes and congregations over the abuse crisis, over money handled without explanation, over sermons that never touch their lives, over a welcome that never arrived, and over a decade of attendance in which nobody learned their name. A church that then offers warmth, competence and clarity will receive them. Catholics who find this painful should notice that the remedy is inside their own control, since none of the qualities listed above are Protestant property. Any parish can preach plainly, publish its accounts, and put its people into small groups that notice absence.

7. The Networks That Work Like Denominations

Most large nondenominational churches belong to a network, and the networks perform much of what a denomination performs. They plant churches, vet and train pastors, publish doctrinal standards, run conferences, share curriculum and lend money. What they generally decline is jurisdiction: a network can withdraw its name from a church, and it cannot remove that church's pastor, seize its building or overturn its decisions. Understanding these networks is the fastest way to place an unfamiliar nondenominational church on the map.

Acts 29

Acts 29 is a church-planting network founded in 1998 that assesses, trains and funds men planting new congregations. Its doctrinal position is Reformed on salvation, holding to the sovereignty of God in election, and complementarian on office, reserving the eldership to men. It is continuationist on spiritual gifts, which distinguishes it from most Reformed bodies. Acts 29 churches carry a range of names and often do not display the affiliation, so the network is much larger in influence than its public profile suggests. A prospective member who wants to know what an Acts 29 church teaches on predestination has a reliable answer before he walks in.

The Association of Related Churches

ARC, founded in 2000, is a church-planting association that provides new churches with launch funding, coaching, a launch methodology and a peer network of pastors. Its congregations are typically contemporary in worship, charismatic in sympathy, strongly focused on reaching people with no church background, and organised around a founding lead pastor with a board. ARC's contribution is operational as much as theological: it supplies a repeatable model for opening a church with a large first-Sunday attendance, and ARC's own reporting describes that model being used to launch new congregations across the United States and beyond.

Calvary Chapel

Calvary Chapel began in Costa Mesa, California, under Chuck Smith in the 1960s, and grew out of his ministry among the young people of the Jesus movement. Its distinctives are verse-by-verse expository preaching straight through whole books of the Bible, informal worship, a moderate charismatic position that affirms the gifts while restraining their public exercise, and generally a dispensational reading of prophecy. Governance follows the Moses model described in section 4. Calvary Chapel is a fellowship of affiliated churches rather than a denomination, and individual Calvary Chapels are legally independent.

The Vineyard

The Vineyard movement took shape under John Wimber in the early 1980s and teaches what Wimber called the kingdom of God as "already and not yet," with healing, prophecy and deliverance understood as signs of a kingdom that has broken into the present age and awaits its completion. Worship is intimate and sung directly to God, and the movement's music has spread far beyond it. Vineyard USA is an association of churches with a more formal structure than most networks on this list, including regional leaders and a national board, which places it close to the line between network and denomination.

Bible Churches

Bible churches are independent congregations, usually with "Bible Church" in the name, shaped by the dispensational theology associated with Dallas Theological Seminary and by the Plymouth Brethren tradition before it. They are typically cessationist, strong on systematic expository teaching, governed by a plural elder board, and specific about eschatology where other nondenominational churches are vague, often naming a pre-tribulation rapture in the statement of faith itself. A Bible church and a Vineyard church are both nondenominational and hold opposite positions on the gifts of the Spirit.

What the Networks Show

Network members give a positive account of why they belong, and it is worth hearing before any Catholic comment on it. Their reading is that the New Testament shows independent churches in voluntary partnership rather than under a central government: Paul writes to congregations he founded and does not govern, Antioch sends and receives, the churches of Macedonia raise a collection for Jerusalem of their own free will (2 Corinthians 8:1-5), and letters circulate between assemblies (Colossians 4:16). Cooperation on that model is apostolic, and jurisdiction is the thing they judge the New Testament does not require. Networks are therefore built to give real help and to hold no power, and members regard that combination as a feature.

Catholics reading the same development notice how much of a denomination the networks reproduce once a church stays in one for a generation: shared doctrine, shared training, shared money, a shared name that can be withdrawn, and a pipeline that vets who may plant a church at all. The Catholic reading is that these functions turn out to be necessary to church life, which is part of why the Catholic tradition treats the wider communion as belonging to the Church's structure rather than to its convenience. Section 10 takes up the one function the networks have deliberately declined to build, which is the standing to settle a disputed question for everyone.

8. The Main Networks Compared

The five families below cover most of the nondenominational churches an American reader is likely to encounter. The table states each one's characteristic position on the questions that divide them, so that an unfamiliar church can be placed quickly. Individual congregations vary, and the network position is a starting point rather than a guarantee.

Each network's positions above are drawn from its own published doctrinal statements and self-descriptions. Networks revise these documents, and any specific claim should be checked against the current text on the network's own site before it is relied on.

Reading down the columns shows the situation plainly. Two churches that both call themselves nondenominational can hold opposite positions on election, opposite positions on the gifts of the Spirit, opposite positions on women in the eldership, and opposite structures of authority. The word describes what these churches have declined rather than what they hold in common. Our guide to the wider map, the Christian denominations and where each one came from, places these bodies within the whole family tree.

9. What Happens When the Founder Leaves

Succession is the hardest structural problem a nondenominational church faces, because a congregation gathered around one preacher has to survive the loss of the person who gathered it. A denominational church in the same position asks its regional body to send another minister, and the parish continues. A nondenominational church has to solve the problem entirely from inside, at the moment it is least able to think clearly.

Why the Problem Is Sharper Here

Three factors compound. The founder is usually the church's principal teacher, so the preaching that drew people is his. He is usually the chair or a permanent member of the board, so the body that must choose his successor is one he assembled. And the church's identity is frequently bound to his name, his style and his story, which means a successor is measured against him from the first Sunday. Denominational churches distribute these three things across an office, a confession and a hierarchy, so the loss of one person removes less.

The Four Outcomes

1. A planned handover. The founder names a successor years ahead, hands over teaching gradually, then leaves the board and the building entirely. This works when the departure is genuine and complete. It fails when the founder keeps a title, an office or an ongoing voice, since the staff continue to route decisions to him and the successor never governs.
2. A dynastic handover. The founder's son or son-in-law takes the pulpit. This is common and can be entirely healthy, since the successor knows the church deeply. It also removes the appearance of an open search, and it makes a later removal for cause very difficult for a board of family friends.
3. An outside hire. The board recruits a pastor from elsewhere. Attendance normally falls for a period while people who came for the founder leave, and the church that emerges is smaller and more stable, held together by its members rather than by one voice.
4. A sudden departure. Illness, death, moral failure or a dispute removes the founder without preparation. Where the bylaws vest authority in a board he chose and no outside body has any standing, the church has to conduct an investigation, a removal and a search simultaneously, in public, with the giving falling. Congregations have split, closed or lost their buildings in civil litigation over exactly this sequence.

The public record contains examples of all four. This site covers individual leaders on their own pages rather than in generalisations, and profiles of prominent pastors including Rick Warren, Andy Stanley and Craig Groeschel set out what each has actually taught and done. Where a leader has been credibly accused of serious wrongdoing, our guide to abuse and financial scandal in the churches treats the documented cases across traditions, Catholic ones included.

What a Member Can Check Before Any of This Happens

A member who wants to know how his church would handle a succession can find out today, quietly, by asking four questions. Who has the legal power to appoint and remove the senior pastor? Are any elders financially independent of him? Does an outside firm audit the accounts, and are the results shown to members? Is there a written succession plan? A church that answers all four clearly is well governed whatever its structure. A church that treats the questions as disloyal has given the most informative answer of all.

The apostolic pattern in Acts has leadership installed by those sent before them, in a plurality, and left in place when the founders move on. The Catholic Church reads that pattern as the beginning of apostolic succession, in which the office outlives the man who holds it. Our guide to holy orders and the ministerial priesthood sets out how Catholics understand ordination to work and what it is meant to guarantee.

10. Who Settles a Disputed Question

The Catholic difference with nondenominational Christianity comes down to one mechanical question: when sincere Christians read the same Bible and reach opposite conclusions, what procedure ends the dispute? Every Christian body needs an answer, because the disputes arrive whether or not anyone wanted them. The Catholic claim is about the existence of that procedure and where Christ placed it.

How the Question Arises in Practice

The question is rarely abstract. A congregation has to decide whether to baptise the infant of a couple who ask for it, whether a divorced and remarried man may serve as an elder, whether a woman may preach, whether a member's prophecy is from God, whether a doctrine taught in a small group has crossed a line. Each of these has been argued from Scripture by serious people on both sides for centuries. Somebody in the room has to decide, and the identity of that somebody is the whole matter.

The Answer a Nondenominational Church Gives

The standard answer is that Scripture decides, and the elders judge what Scripture says for this congregation. Stated carefully, and thoughtful nondenominational pastors do state it carefully, the position is that the Bible is clear on what is necessary for salvation, that secondary matters may be held differently by faithful Christians, and that the local eldership rules on them for the local church while claiming no authority over anyone else. That is a coherent position with a long pedigree, and it is held by many people of deep learning and evident holiness.

Its consequence is that the ruling binds only that congregation. A second church across town, reading the same texts, rules the other way with equal sincerity and equal authority. Neither can correct the other. When a member disagrees with his elders he can submit or he can leave and join a church that agrees with him, and in a country with a church on every corner leaving costs him little. Doctrinal questions are therefore settled by sorting rather than by resolution: people distribute themselves among congregations that already hold what they hold. Our guide to the Catholic and Protestant differences traces how this dynamic followed from the Reformation principle of Scripture alone.

The Answer the Catholic Church Gives

The Catholic answer is that Christ established a living teaching authority to settle such questions, and that the New Testament shows it operating before a line of the New Testament had been collected. The first great doctrinal dispute in Christian history, whether Gentile converts had to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, was argued from Scripture on both sides and could not be resolved by producing more texts. The apostles and elders met at Jerusalem, deliberated, and issued a decision in the form of a letter to the churches (Acts 15:6-29). The decision bound every congregation, and the letter states the ground of its authority in a striking phrase: "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us."

Christ's own procedure for a dispute ends at "the church," which is treated as an identifiable body capable of hearing a case and giving a verdict. Paul calls that same body "the pillar and foundation of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15), which is a claim about an assembly rather than about a text. Catholic teaching holds that the task of authentically interpreting the Word of God has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church, which serves Scripture rather than standing above it, teaching only what has been handed on (Catechism of the Catholic Church 85-86; Dei Verbum 10). Our guide to Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium works through those texts in full.

Stating the Argument Fairly

Three honest qualifications belong here. First, Catholic teaching does not claim that the Magisterium answers every question; a great many matters are left genuinely open, and Catholics dispute them freely. Second, having a mechanism has never prevented Catholics from ignoring it, and the gap between what the Church teaches and what Catholics in the pews believe is wide and well documented. Third, a nondenominational Christian can reply that the Catholic mechanism has produced doctrines he believes Scripture excludes, and that reply deserves an argument from the texts rather than an appeal to the mechanism itself. Our guides to how a person is saved and faith and works in Paul and James make those arguments from the texts.

What survives all three qualifications is the mechanical point. A body with a teaching office can say that a question is closed, and the answer holds across the whole communion, in every country, after the current generation of leaders has died. A congregation without one can say what it holds today, for its own members, until its eldership changes. Those are different kinds of thing, and the difference is what the Catholic Church means when it says the Church is one.

11. Questions to Ask About Your Own Church

Anyone attending a nondenominational church, and anyone considering one, can learn most of what matters by asking a short list of concrete questions. None of them is hostile, and a healthy church answers all of them without difficulty.

The Doctrinal Questions

• Where is the statement of faith published, and when was it last changed?
• What does this church teach about election and free will, and about the gifts of the Spirit? If the statement is silent, what does the senior pastor actually hold?
• What happens in baptism here, and who may be baptised?
• What is the Lord's Supper understood to be?
• Who has the standing to correct this church's teaching if it goes wrong?

The Governance Questions

• May I read the bylaws?
• Who appoints and who can remove the senior pastor?
• Are any elders financially independent of the church, and do elders serve fixed terms?
• Does an outside firm audit the accounts, and are the results given to members?
• Is there a written succession plan, and a written policy for handling an allegation against a leader?

What a Catholic Reader Should Take From This

Catholics reading this page have work of their own to do. The strengths described in section 6 belong to no tradition exclusively: plain preaching, warm welcome, published accounts and small groups that notice absence are available to every parish that decides to have them. A Catholic who wants his neighbours to consider the Church's claim about authority will get nowhere while his own parish is cold, opaque and badly preached. The argument in section 10 is only heard in a place where the life is visible.

And Catholics owe their nondenominational neighbours accuracy. These congregations preach Christ crucified and risen, they baptise in the name of the Trinity, they take the Bible with a seriousness many Catholics do not, they give generously, and they send people into hard places. The Catholic Church says the communion is real and incomplete, and both halves of that sentence are load-bearing.

The Urgency Underneath the Whole Question

No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). Whatever building you walk into on Sunday, the question of whether you are being fed, taught and prepared is a present question rather than one to revisit in a few years. A Christian who cannot say what his church teaches about baptism, about the Eucharist, or about who settles a disputed question has left something important unexamined, and the time to examine it is the time in front of him now.

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