The Modern Church
Why this section exists
What the Modern Church section is for, how it is written, and the three threads that run through every movement it covers.
You are reading the brief version. Switch the depth control to Complete for the full treatment.
Most of the Christians you will meet at work, at the school gate or online are not Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran or Anglican. They belong to Baptist, Pentecostal, charismatic and non-denominational churches, and many of them hold beliefs they assume the apostles held: that only believers should be baptised, that the true Church will be secretly raptured before a great tribulation, that speaking in tongues is the sign of the Spirit, that God wants every believer healthy and prosperous, that the Church needs new apostles and prophets.
This section traces each of those beliefs to where it actually began. The answer is usually more recent than people suppose. Believer's baptism as a church practice begins in Zürich in 1525. The pre-tribulation rapture takes shape in Ireland and England in the early 1830s. Tongues as the required evidence of the Spirit begins in Topeka, Kansas, on the first day of 1901.
It is written about these movements, for readers in the four traditions. It is not written for them, and this site does not offer teaching material for any of these churches.
Three threads run through almost every movement covered here:
- From Christ to me. The centre of gravity moves from Christ, the sacraments and the Church to personal experience, personal blessing and personal destiny.
- From the creeds to the personality. Authority moves from creeds, councils, liturgy and an ordained ministry to gifted individuals, and ends in self-appointed apostles and prophets.
- "The Church was lost, and we have restored it." The repeated claim that the true Church disappeared and has now been recovered by this movement.
The tone is that of a sober historian writing from a creedal standpoint. Facts and primary sources come first; verdicts follow and are measured against the creeds and confessions. Failures, scandals and false prophecies are recorded where they are documented, without exaggeration. Living people are not named.
Most of the people in these pages were sincere, many were brave, and some were holy. Sincerity is not the question. The question is whether what they taught is what the Church has always taught.
What this section is
The rest of this site teaches the historic creedal faith as the Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican churches confess it. Every section ends with a panel marked Where modern denominations differ, which names who disagrees and gives the answer.
This section goes further back. It asks where the disagreement came from. A Baptist friend who tells you that infant baptism is a later corruption believes he is standing on the ground of the apostles. A Pentecostal colleague who tells you that a Christian who has not spoken in tongues has not received the Spirit believes the same. In each case the belief has a date of birth, a place, and usually a name attached to it, and knowing that history changes the conversation.
It is written about the modern churches, for readers in the four traditions. It is not catechesis for those churches, it is not an invitation to join them, and it is not a guide to their worship. This site does not provide teaching material for any of the denominations described here.
Pause and thinkBefore reading on - a friend says "we just go back to the Bible, the way the early Church did it". What single question exposes the assumption inside that sentence?
"How do you know what the early Church did?"
There are only two ways to know. One is to read the New Testament, which tells us a great deal but does not answer many of the questions that now divide Christians - whether infants were baptised, how often the Lord's Supper was celebrated, what order of ministry the apostles left behind them. The other is to read what the Christians of the next three centuries actually wrote and did.
The second source is almost never consulted by movements that claim to restore the early Church, and when it is consulted it nearly always contradicts them: it shows infants baptised, the Eucharist celebrated every Lord's Day as a sacrifice and a real communion in Christ's body and blood, and bishops, presbyters and deacons in every city. "Going back to the early Church" usually means going back to one's own reading of the New Testament and calling it the early Church.
How it is written
As a historian would write it, from a creedal standpoint. Each topic leads with what happened, when, where, and who said what, drawn from the people's own writings and sermons, contemporary newspapers, court records and academic histories. Only then does it give a verdict, and the verdict is measured against the creeds, the councils and the confessions of the four traditions.
Fairly. Each topic opens by stating the belief the way its own adherents would state it. A reader who belongs to that movement should recognise his own position.
Warts and all. Where a movement's history includes failed prophecies, financial misconduct, sexual scandal, doctrinal error or moral failure, and the record is documented, it is recorded. Nothing uncomfortable is left out to spare a movement's reputation, and nothing is exaggerated to damage it. Where the evidence is disputed, the dispute is described rather than settled by assertion. The four traditions have their own scandals, and those are not hidden either: the Catholic and Protestant drowning of Anabaptists appears in the very first topic.
No living people. Many of the movements covered here are still led by living people. They are described generically - "later promoters", "one prominent televangelist" - and only people who have died are named. Every personality card records the source that confirms the person's death.
Sourced. Every topic ends with a list of sources. Where a specific claim could not be confirmed when this material was prepared, it was flagged for the editor to check before publication.
No mockery. Many of the people here were sincere. Some suffered for what they believed. Several were extraordinarily generous, and a few were plainly holy. A movement can be wrong and its people admirable, and the reverse. Sarcasm teaches the reader nothing and closes the door on the person he is trying to talk to.
Three threads
Read enough of these histories and the same three movements of thought appear again and again. They are worth naming at the start, because once you can see them you will recognise them in movements this section does not cover.
From Christ to me
The historic faith is about what God has done: the Son became man, died and rose, gave His Spirit to the Church, and feeds her with His word and sacraments. The Christian receives what is given.
Across the last two hundred years, the centre of gravity steadily moves. Revivalism makes the decisive moment the sinner's decision. The Holiness movement makes it a second experience. Pentecostalism makes it a third, with a sign the believer can point to. The healing movement promises the body; the prosperity gospel promises the bank balance; the church growth movement designs worship around what the seeker wants. At each step something real is kept, but the subject of the sentence shifts from Christ to the believer.
From the creeds to the personality
The creeds, the councils, the liturgy and an ordained ministry exist so that the faith does not depend on any one person's gifts. They are a deliberate safeguard: the Church's teaching is public, inherited and accountable.
Remove them, and authority does not disappear. It moves to whoever is most gifted, most anointed, most persuasive. The pattern repeats with striking regularity: a movement rejects the historic ministry as a human invention; a gifted founder arises; the founder's private revelations become the movement's doctrine; and the founder, or his successors, end by calling themselves apostles and prophets. The Zwickau Prophets claimed it in 1521. The Catholic Apostolic Church claimed it in the 1830s. John Alexander Dowie claimed it in 1901. The Latter Rain claimed it in 1948. The New Apostolic Reformation claims it now.
Restoration
Almost every movement here begins with the same story: the true Church was lost, corrupted or buried soon after the apostles, and has now been restored - by the Anabaptists, the Brethren, the Restoration Movement, the Pentecostals, the Latter Rain, the new apostles.
The four traditions hold the opposite: that Christ promised the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church (Matthew 16:18), and that He kept the promise. The Church has sinned, and needed reform, many times. But it was never lost, and so it never needed to be restored from nothing by a nineteenth-century preacher with a Bible.
Pause and thinkPause: if each restoration movement claims the true Church was lost until it arrived, what follows when you line them up side by side?
They cannot all be right, and they contradict each other on exactly the points each claims to have restored. The Anabaptists restored believer's baptism and rejected oaths and the sword. The Brethren restored the "breaking of bread" without clergy and taught that the Church was in ruins. Alexander Campbell restored weekly communion and baptism for the remission of sins. The Pentecostals restored tongues. The Latter Rain restored apostles and prophets. Each believed the previous restorers had stopped short.
The pattern suggests a different explanation: that "restoration" is the name each movement gives to its own reading of Scripture, and that without a Church that carries the faith across time, every generation's reading looks like a recovery of something lost.
How the section is organised
The topics run roughly in chronological order, from the Radical Reformation of the 1520s to the megachurch and the New Apostolic Reformation. Three reference pages sit alongside them:
- Timeline of the movements - every movement on one chart, with the lines of influence drawn in, so you can trace a modern belief back through the people who passed it on.
- Where modern beliefs came from - a lookup table. Find the belief, read where and when it began, and follow the link to the full story.
- Personalities - one card per person, in the same format each time: dates, affiliation, teachings and claims, documented controversies, how they died, their legacy and the sources.
Each topic follows the same pattern:
- What is believed - stated fairly, as adherents would put it.
- Where it came from - dates, places, people and source documents.
- What the historic Church taught - the Fathers, the creeds and councils, the confessions.
- The verdict - measured against the creeds.
- How your tradition responded - a panel that follows the tradition you have chosen at the top of the page. Luther and the Lutheran Confessions are quoted wherever they spoke to the issue, because they very often did.
- Key personalities - unvarnished, sourced, and only those who have died.
- Answering a modern Christian - short, respectful answers to the questions you are most likely to be asked.
Why the Reformation matters here
Many of the movements in this section describe themselves as Protestant, and many of their members assume that they are carrying the Reformation further. It is worth knowing that the Reformers themselves saw most of these ideas coming, and opposed them in the strongest terms.
Within months of Luther's protest, men appeared in Wittenberg claiming direct revelations from the Spirit, rejecting infant baptism and dismissing the outward word and sacraments as dead letters. Luther called them Schwärmer - fanatics, or enthusiasts - and spent much of the 1520s writing against them. The Lutheran Confessions condemn by name those who "think that the Holy Ghost comes to men without the external Word" (Augsburg Confession V) and those "who reject the baptism of children" (Augsburg Confession IX). The Smalcald Articles go further and call enthusiasm, the claim to have the Spirit apart from the Word and sacraments, "the origin, power, and strength of all heresy".
Calvin and Zwingli opposed the Anabaptists too, and the Church of England wrote articles against them. The Reformation was a quarrel inside the sacramental Church about how grace is given. It was not a charter for every Christian to found his own church on his own reading of the Bible, and the Reformers said so.
Catholic
For Catholic readers this history has a particular edge. The Catholic objection to the Reformation from the beginning was that private judgement would not stop where Luther wanted it to stop - that once the Church's teaching authority was set aside, nothing would hold the line against endless division. The movements in this section are in one sense the proof of that warning, and Luther's own struggle against the Schwärmer was an early sign of it. But the honest Catholic reader will also notice how much in these movements - hunger for Scripture, longing for the Spirit, missionary zeal, care for the poor - is genuinely Christian, and the Second Vatican Council's teaching that elements of sanctification and truth exist outside the visible structure of the Church (Lumen Gentium 8; Unitatis Redintegratio 3) applies to them as well.
Orthodox
For Orthodox readers, the movements here are in an important sense the West's quarrel with itself. Orthodoxy never had a Reformation, and its theologians have often viewed Protestantism and Catholicism as two sides of one Western coin. But the movements in this section are now very active in traditionally Orthodox lands - Pentecostal and charismatic churches in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Ethiopia, Kerala and the Middle East - and the Orthodox reader increasingly meets them first-hand. The Orthodox tradition has its own long experience of false spiritual experience, which it calls prelest (spiritual delusion), and its own discipline for testing spirits, which this section draws on.
Lutheran
For Lutheran readers this section is in part a family history. Luther met almost every idea in it in the 1520s: the claim to direct revelation, the rejection of infant baptism, the symbolic Supper, the expectation of an earthly kingdom of the saints, the authority of the self-appointed prophet. The Confessions answer them directly, and those answers are quoted throughout. The point is worth holding onto: when a modern Christian tells you he is the true heir of the Reformation, the Reformation's own documents are on your side.
Anglican
For Anglican readers, the history is close to home. Several of the founders in this section were ordained or raised in the Church of England or the Church of Ireland: John Wesley, John Nelson Darby, Alexander Boddy, and many others. The Thirty-Nine Articles were written in part against the Anabaptists, and the Prayer Book's insistence on order, on a ministry "lawfully called", and on baptism of young children is the Anglican answer to most of the movements here. The Church of England also has a long and instructive history of trying to hold enthusiasts within its walls, and of losing them when it could not.
Work with it
Check yourself
What does this section of the site set out to do?
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Yes. It is written about these movements, not for them, and it is not teaching material for any of these churches.
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No. It traces each belief to its origin and measures it against the creeds and confessions.
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No. The site does not provide teaching material for these denominations.
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No. The section is careful about this: many were sincere and some were admirable. The question is whether their teaching matches what the Church has always taught.
Check yourself
Which of these is one of the three threads the section traces through every movement?
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Correct. The pattern ends, again and again, in self-appointed apostles and prophets.
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The Fathers are rarely consulted by these movements, and usually contradict them when they are.
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Mostly the reverse: the movements here generally abandon inherited liturgy.
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The record is one of repeated division.
Check yourself
What does the Augsburg Confession condemn in Article V?
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Nothing of the kind.
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Article IX condemns the opposite - those who reject infant baptism.
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Yes. This is the Lutheran answer to "enthusiasm", the claim to direct inner revelation apart from the preached Word and the sacraments.
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The Reformers encouraged it.
Objection drill
You are judging these movements by your church's traditions. But the Reformation itself said Scripture alone is the authority. If a Pentecostal reads Acts and finds tongues, or a Baptist reads Acts and finds believers being baptised, they are doing exactly what Luther did.
A model answer
There is something fair in this, and it should be granted: the Reformation did appeal to Scripture over the Church's later traditions, and Luther did say that a simple layman armed with Scripture could be right against a pope.
But two things follow that the objection leaves out.
Luther never meant Scripture without the Church's reading of it. He kept the creeds, infant baptism, the real presence, private confession, the church year and much of the Mass. When men in his own town read Scripture and concluded that infants should not be baptised and that the Spirit spoke to them directly, he did not say "they are doing what I did". He called them Schwärmer and wrote the Augsburg Confession's condemnations against them. Scripture alone meant Scripture as the final judge within the Church's confession, not Scripture in the hands of each reader without it.
The early Church read Acts too. The Christians of the second and third centuries read the same texts and baptised infants, celebrated the Eucharist as a real communion in Christ's body and blood, and did not treat tongues as the sign that someone had received the Spirit. When a modern reading of Acts arrives at conclusions that no Christian reached for eighteen centuries, that is not proof that it is wrong. But it is a reason to ask whether it is a recovery of the apostles' meaning or a new one.
So the question is not tradition against Scripture. It is whose reading of Scripture is more likely to be the apostles' - the one held by the Church that received the Scriptures from them, or the one that first appeared in Zürich in 1525 or Topeka in 1901.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.