Community
who belongs, how you join, how it is organized
The parish.
A building, a patch of ground, and a list of households — the unit that made the church a piece of civic infrastructure rather than a voluntary society. In most of the world people now choose a congregation instead of inheriting one, which changed the incentives of every pastor in it.
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The church — one body, many members.
Paul's image: believers as limbs of a single body, the local congregation and the universal church at once.
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Who pays.
The plate, mostly. Germany is the exception worth knowing: a church tax of eight to nine percent of income tax, collected by the state and handed over, which gives the German churches enormous budgets and gives Germans a bureaucratic way to leave — a few hundred thousand file the form each year.
⚖ contested within
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Joining: baptism.
Water and the triune name — as an infant or an adult, by branch. The one initiation nearly every stream recognizes.
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Monastics.
Benedict wrote a rule in the sixth century for people who wanted to stop travelling and stay put; it is still the constitution of Western monasticism. Mount Athos has twenty ruling monasteries and an ancient ban on women setting foot on the peninsula, which EU law has never dislodged.
held by most
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Ordered ministry — or none.
Bishops, priests, and deacons in the catholic streams; pastors called by their congregations in the free churches; no clergy at all among Friends.
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The councils.
Bishops assembled seven times between 325 and 787 and produced the sentences most Christians still say aloud on Sunday. The councils are also where the splits are dated from: the churches that could not accept Chalcedon in 451 have been separate ever since.
held by most
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The splits.
451 over how to say Christ is one person; 1054 between Rome and Constantinople; 1517 across the West. The 1054 excommunications were mutually lifted in 1965 and the churches still do not share communion, which shows how little the formal gesture settles.
⚖ contested within
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Mission.
It travelled with empire, and honest church historians say so. It also built the schools and clinics, translated several hundred languages into writing for the first time, and produced churches that now send more missionaries than they receive — Korean, Nigerian and Brazilian boards operating in Europe.
⚖ contested within
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Women and ordination.
The Church of England ordained women priests in 1994 and bishops in 2014; most mainline Protestant churches did so earlier. Rome holds the question closed. The Orthodox churches are re-examining the ancient order of deaconesses, which existed and then stopped, and nobody quite agrees why.
⚖ contested within
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Abuse, and the reckoning.
State and church inquiries in Ireland, Australia, France, Germany and the United States have documented decades of clerical sexual abuse and of bishops moving offenders rather than reporting them. The French commission estimated 216,000 victims of clergy since 1950. No branch is clear of it; the Catholic record is the largest and the best documented.
⚖ contested within
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The centre of gravity moved south.
Most Christians now live in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Nigeria has more practising Anglicans than England does, and the growth is Pentecostal and independent rather than denominational — which is why the doctrinal arguments in Western churches keep being decided by votes from the global South.
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