This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A nondenominational church typically governs itself congregationally: its own board or elders, its own budget and property, and no denominational assembly with authority to discipline, relocate or remove its pastor. Congregations sometimes join loose networks or church planting movements for fellowship, training or shared missions funding, but these differ from a denomination in the one respect that matters most: a network cannot bind a member congregation's doctrine, discipline its leadership or claim its property the way a denominational polity can.
This independence produces the family's defining variety. A nondenominational congregation may hold beliefs and practices drawn from evangelical, charismatic, Baptist or Reformed traditions, or some congregation-specific mixture of them, and two nondenominational churches a few miles apart can differ sharply on worship style, baptism, spiritual gifts or church governance while both correctly call themselves nondenominational. Because of that, no single doctrinal position can honestly be attributed to the category as a whole: unlike a denomination whose confession binds its member churches, nondenominational Christianity has no confession to state, and asserting one would misstate what the category actually is.
What can be said honestly is structural rather than doctrinal: congregational autonomy, no shared confession, and a documented and continuing rise in the number of Americans who describe their own church, and themselves, this way.