Beyond Denominations

Is there a better way?

This past Sunday, Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas voted to end its already-loose relationship with the Southern Baptist Convention. Founded in 1939, the affluent congregation has had connections to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a moderate denomination that broke away from the SBC during its “conservative resurgence” in the Eighties and Nineties. But moving forward, it seems that Park Cities will have no denominational affiliation beyond its state convention.

That announcement came just a few weeks after the Wild Fig Network launched. Describing itself as an “emerging relational network for ministers and ministries looking for an alternative to traditional denominational structures” that “are proving unable to adapt to an increasingly complex and fast-changing world,” Wild Fig was founded by a group of pastors frustrated by “the bureaucracy and top-down hierarchies of traditional denominations” like the one they either left or still serve, the Evangelical Covenant Church.

Both announcements came at a time when non-denominational churches have become the fastest growing Christian group in the United States, claiming a larger share of the population than the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination.¹ And that doesn’t include all the large churches that already function autonomously within denominations to which people in those congregations don’t even know they belong.

So I’ve been asking myself an old question: Is Christianity in the United States entering a post-denominational phase? If so, what will take the place of the American denomination? A recentered focus on individual congregations like Park Cities Baptist, or the development of alternative networks like Wild Fig? (Both?)

Cue the standard disclaimer: historians aren’t necessarily good at prognostication. But if we can’t see the future clearly, our studies of the past can at least remind us that the idea of denominations is historically contingent, a relatively recent addition to church history that responded to conditions that have changed. And if the Body of Christ got along without denominations for centuries past, why can’t it outgrow them in the decades to come?

The signing of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years War and established Calvinism, Catholicism, and Lutheranism as official religious alternatives in German-speaking Europe - Wikimedia

It’s tempting to equate denominations with the European Protestant churches that grew out of the Reformation era, breaking first with the papal hierarchy and then with each other, along theological, national, and political lines. But the denomination is really a more recent creation of the New World.

What makes American Christianity unique, argued the church historian Sidney Mead in 1954, is not its theology (“surprisingly derivative”) but the way that it has organized “free churches” that “are independent of the State and autonomous in relation to it” into denominations that are not primarily confessional or territorial, but “purposive… a voluntary association of like-hearted and like-minded individuals, who are united on the basis of common beliefs for the purpose of accomplishing tangible and defined objectives.”²

The Covenant Church is a good example of the theme. Its founders were pietistic evangelicals who tried to renew Sweden’s state Lutheran church from within, then migrated to a country that had long since opted for what Mead calls “the removal of traditional civil and ecclesiastical restrictions on vocal and organizational expressions of the religious convictions.” Most of those immigrants settled on an American frontier that “provided the necessary space and opportunities in which such expressions could thrive.” In 1885, their congregations opted to covenant together for the sake of shared mission, remaining largely autonomous — rather than joining other Swedish Lutherans in a more hierarchical body — but pooling their resources to send missionaries and build educational and charitable institutions.

The existence of the denomination, as Methodist scholar Russell Richey defined it in 2001, assumes the existence of plural denominations, each one a voluntary body “understanding itself to be… legitimate and self-sufficient” and conceding “the authenticity of other churches even as it claims its own.”³ That marks a significant break from the Christian past, when churches allied to states fiercely protected their own legitimacy but rejected that of would-be rivals, even manipulating political power to extinguish dissent from within and competition from without.⁴

So what’s the problem? The fact that denominations are relatively new in the grand sweep of church history doesn’t mean that they’re played out. Don’t they still represent a reasonable organizational response by Christians to the conditions of religious freedom and religious pluralism?

The Louisville headquarters of the Presbyterian Church USA under construction in 1988, when the denomination had almost 3 million members (vs. just over 1 million now) - CC BY-SA 2.0 (William Alden)