Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 60

Unlike Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Protestantism has no overarching church structure that holds the tradition together. Protestantism is a movement, not a church, supported and carried forward by a variety of denominations, congregations, missionary agencies, parachurch service organizations, and schools (ranging from grade schools to universities and seminaries). No one controls this varied assemblage of organizations, and their sheer number is overwhelming. In fact, Protestantism is so divided and unfettered as a movement that some Catholic and many Orthodox Christians find it difficult to think of Protestant churches as genuine churches at all. Instead they consider Protestant denominations to be something like Christian clubs.

Focusing on Protestant diversity and fragmentation can, however, make it easy to get lost in the trees and miss the Protestant forest. Viewed from a distance, Protestantism is more organized than it looks close up. Two thirds (67 percent) of Protestants identify with one of five large Protestant families or sub‐traditions: Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, and Reformed (which includes Presbyterian). During the last century and a half, all five of these groups have organized themselves into worldwide fellowships of churches (see Table 3.1).

A different way to make sense of the Protestant world is to see each church as historically aligned with one or another of two institutionalized forms of organization, either the nation‐centered Protestantism that has flourished in Europe or the more free‐wheeling, start‐from‐scratch Protestantism that has flourished in the United States.

Almost all the earliest forms of Protestantism followed the European model, which resulted in the creation of a host of Protestant state churches in Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. While the leaders of these Protestant state churches believed that Christian faith was personal, they also assumed it was necessarily public and even political. Following that way of thinking, they believed that only one church should prevail in any given nation. Having different individuals determine their own beliefs or multiple churches existing within one state was considered to be antithetical to public order. Europe’s Protestant state churches were (and still are) intended to serve the spiritual needs of everyone in the nation. Historically their duties included instruction in right doctrine, opportunities for worship, and administration of the sacraments, but they also included practical concerns such as caring for the sick, the poor, and the orphaned. Today, Europe’s state churches no longer enjoy the legally enforced monopoly status they once had, but many of them continue to provide a host of social services to the nation and still receive some support from tax revenue. Membership and participation in these state churches, which are now frequently called “folk churches,” has declined in recent decades, but they continue to dominate the European Protestant landscape both spiritually and architecturally (see Figure 3.3).

Table 3.1 Five main “families” of Protestantism, representing two thirds of all Protestants worldwide

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Family name	Global organization (year founded)	Number of denominations represented	Number of countries represented	Number of global adherents
Anglican	Anglican Communion (1931)	46	165	85,000,000
Baptist	Baptist World Alliance (1905)	239	125	50,000,000
Lutheran	Lutheran World Federation (1947)	148	89	75,000,000
Methodist	World Methodist Council (1881)	80	138	80,000,000
Reformed	World Alliance of Reformed Churches (1970)	218	100	75,000,000

Figure 3.3 The Evangelical Lutheran Cathedral, located on the Senate Square (Helsinki, Finland), illustrates the continuing prominence of the state church in Finnish society.

Photo by author.

Figure 3.4 God’s Missionary Church (Camp Hill, Pennsylvania). About a third of the Protestant churches in the United States are this size or smaller.

Photo by author.

In the United States a very different kind of Protestantism emerged. No single church enjoyed monopoly status in any of the North American British colonies. The New England colonies tried to reproduce something like the church state model, hoping that Puritan ideas and values would saturate the region. But after the American Revolution (1776), none of the former colonies called for a specific church to be placed in charge of all the others, and everyone wanted freedom for their own church to continue to exist. The solution was church–state separation, with every church maintaining itself through voluntary membership and support.

In this new North American context, different kinds of Protestants stopped thinking of each other as heretics or dissenters and started treating each other simultaneously as colleagues and competitors. There was a great deal of agreement among the American churches regarding public standards and values, which meant there was lots of room for cooperation and joint action. But there was also a limited population, which meant that various organized church groups (Anglican, Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and others) found it necessary to compete for members and money. This new North American social structure of Protestantism eventually came to be called “denominationalism” and different Protestant church bodies became “denominations.” In the freewheeling, cooperative but competitive religious context of North America, some churches have seen large size as a competitive advantage, leading in recent years to the burgeoning of megachurches (congregations with more than 2,000 members), while other churches have touted their smallness as a sign of spiritual strength and vigor (see Figure 3.4). As Protestantism has spread around the world during the last two centuries, it is this freewheeling, cooperative but competitive, denominational style of Protestantism that has come to dominate the movement rather than the state church model of Protestantism that still exists in Europe.