Nondenominational Christianity

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Nondenominational Christianity names a large and growing family of self-governing Christian congregations that deliberately hold no affiliation with any denomination. Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study classifies nondenominational Protestants as their own family within American Christianity, distinct from Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran and the other named traditions the study tracks. The distinguishing fact about the family is not a shared belief but a shared refusal: each member congregation has chosen not to answer to a denominational headquarters, confession or governing body above the local church.

The category is not new, but it has grown sharply. The National Congregations Study, the ongoing national survey directed by Mark Chaves at Duke University since 1998, documents a rising share of American congregations identifying as nondenominational across the study's four survey waves, a trend Chaves and Shawna Anderson report directly from the study's third wave. Scholars writing on what is sometimes called post-denominational Christianity trace the pattern to the independent Bible church and megachurch movements that grew rapidly in the United States from the mid twentieth century onward, though unaffiliated congregations following the same pattern exist elsewhere.

Because the category is defined by what its members refuse rather than by what they affirm, no single confession, polity detail or liturgical practice can honestly be attributed to it as a whole. A reader looking for what nondenominational churches believe should expect the answer that follows in the next entry: not a creed, but a range.

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.