One movement that made every reader responsible to the text — and so produced as many churches as there are ways to read it.
Why So Many
Protestantism fractures. Because it locates final authority in scripture rather than in a single teaching office, and because it makes each conscience answerable to the Word, it has no mechanism for enforcing unity comparable to the papacy. The result is a tradition of many thousands of denominations, families of churches that agree on the Nicene core — The Holy Trinity, the incarnation, salvation by grace — but divide over a handful of recurring questions: who may be baptized and how, who governs the church, what happens in the sacraments, and how the Holy Spirit works. The major families below cover the great bulk of Protestant Christians in the world.
The Major Families
Lutheran churches are the oldest, descending directly from Luther. They hold justification by faith at the center, keep infant baptism, and affirm a "real presence" of Christ in, with, and under the bread and wine of the Supper — closer to Catholicism on the sacrament than most other Protestants. Their worship is liturgical and their governance varies from episcopal to synodical.
Reformed and Presbyterian churches descend from Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox. They emphasize the sovereignty of God and covenant theology, practice infant baptism as a covenant sign, read the Supper as a real but spiritual feeding on Christ, and govern themselves through elders — "presbyterian" polity — rather than bishops. This is the stream the vault documents in full at Calvinism.
Anglican and Episcopal churches arose from the English Reformation as a via media, Catholic in structure and much of their worship yet Protestant in doctrine. They keep bishops in apostolic succession, worship from the Book of Common Prayer, and span a wide range from Anglo-Catholic to evangelical within a single communion.
Baptist churches make the believer's baptism their defining mark: baptism belongs only to those who can personally confess faith, and it is by full immersion. They stress the autonomy of the local congregation, the priesthood of all believers, and the separation of church and state — an inheritance from the radical Reformation.
Methodist churches grew from John Wesley's revival within Anglicanism. They are Arminian rather than Calvinist on the will, emphasize personal holiness and "sanctification," practice infant and believer's baptism alike, and historically married fervent evangelism to vigorous social reform.
Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, born in the early twentieth-century revivals, center on the baptism and gifts of the Holy Spirit — speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy — as available to believers now. This is the fastest-growing wing of Christianity worldwide, and its charismatic emphasis has since spilled across denominational lines into Catholic and mainline churches too.
Non-denominational churches, a largely modern and American phenomenon, reject formal denominational labels altogether, typically holding broadly evangelical convictions with contemporary worship and congregational independence. They are among the fastest-multiplying forms of Protestant church today.
What Divides Them
Four questions recur across nearly every split. Baptism: infant (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist) or believer's-only by immersion (Baptist, Pentecostal, most non-denominational). Church governance: episcopal rule by bishops (Anglican, some Lutheran and Methodist), presbyterian rule by elders (Reformed and Presbyterian), or congregational self-rule (Baptist, non-denominational). The sacraments, especially the Supper: real bodily presence (Lutheran), spiritual real presence (Reformed), or memorial only (many Baptist and evangelical bodies) — the same fault line Luther and Zwingli could not cross at Marburg. The Holy Spirit: whether the dramatic gifts of tongues and healing continue today (the charismatic and Pentecostal answer) or ceased with the apostolic age (the "cessationist" answer of much of the older tradition).
These are the seams of the whole tradition, all of them ultimately downstream of the principle set out in The Five Solas: scripture alone, read by each community for itself.
Related
- Protestantism — Collection index
- Calvinism — The Reformed and Presbyterian family, in depth
- The Reformation — Where the families originated
- The Five Solas — The shared theological root
- Evangelicalism — The current that crosses these families
- Catholicism — The single communion Protestantism divided from
- Christianity — The wider tradition