A family moves to Big Rapids in August with a rented truck, two kids, and a job at the hospital. On the first Saturday night somebody types "non-denominational church near me" into a phone and gets a list. Eight or ten of them.
What nobody tells that family is that those eight churches may have almost nothing in common with each other besides what they are not.
That's the whole problem with the word. It's the most-used label we've got and it's the least informative one. And TheWay uses it too, which is exactly why this post has to be more honest than the rest of the series instead of less.
Non-denominational is not a doctrine
It's the absence of an affiliation. That's all it is. It tells you where a church doesn't send money and who doesn't get to appoint its pastor. It tells you nothing about what that church believes about the Bible, about who Jesus is, about how a sinner gets made right with God, about baptism, about the Lord's Supper, or about who is actually in charge on a Tuesday afternoon when something goes badly wrong.
It's a label like "sugar-free." Genuinely useful information if you need it. Tells you nothing about whether it's any good.
Almost every non-denominational church came out of somewhere
Churches don't appear from nowhere. Somebody planted it. That somebody was trained somewhere, read somebody, sat under somebody, and carried a whole set of instincts in the door with him whether he ever named them or not. Around here, and around most of the country, the roots usually run back to one of about seven places.
- Bible church fundamentalism. Out of the fights of the early 1900s. Verbal inspiration and inerrancy, dispensational and premillennial, heavy expository preaching, believer's baptism as a symbol, memorial communion, and usually a pastor with a board. A lot of churches with "Bible Church" or "Community Church" in the name and some decades behind them come from here.
- The Restoration Movement. Frontier America in the early 1800s. No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible. Weekly communion, immersion of believers, congregational elder rule, and a deep principled resistance to written confessions. Many of these are technically independent Christian Churches and function like non-denominational churches.
- Calvary Chapel. Out of the Jesus Movement in California in the late sixties. Verse-by-verse preaching straight through books of the Bible, informal worship, a mild continuationism, and a pastoral model that concentrates a lot of authority in one man.
- The Vineyard. A cousin of that stream. More explicitly charismatic, kingdom-of-God theology, worship understood as encounter.
- Independent Pentecostal. Assemblies-shaped churches that never affiliated, or affiliated once and left. Spirit baptism with tongues as the pattern, expressive worship, strong emphasis on healing.
- Seeker-driven and attractional church growth. Late eighties forward. Build the hour for the person who isn't there yet, remove every barrier, keep it excellent, keep it moving. This one is a strategy more than a theology, which is why it can attach itself to almost any doctrine underneath.
- Acts 29 and the newer Calvinism. The last twenty-five years. Reformed soteriology, expository preaching, plural elder rule, church planting as the whole point.
I'm not running any of those down. Every one of those streams has produced churches that preach the gospel and people who love Jesus and would give you the shirt off their back. Having roots isn't the problem. Having roots and not telling anybody is the problem, because the visitor is left guessing and usually guesses wrong.
Four questions worth asking any of us
So here's what I'd tell that family with the rented truck. Don't ask a church what it isn't. Ask it four things, and ask them out loud.
One. What do you actually believe? Not the three words on the wall. What do you hold about Scripture, about the person of Christ, about how a sinner is justified, about baptism, about the Lord's Supper, about what happens when a person dies.
Two. Who governs you? One man? A board he picked? A plurality of elders? The congregation? Somebody in another state?
Three. Who can remove your pastor? That's the sharpest one and almost nobody asks it. If the answer is nobody, walk slowly.
Four. Where is it written down? Not what gets said from up front. What's published, in writing, that a member could hold the leadership to five years from now.
How TheWay answers those four
What we believe: our convictions are published, and a fuller doctrinal statement is coming — the long version, with the passages attached, so a person can read the whole thing before they ever walk in and know exactly what they're getting. A church that won't put it in writing is asking you to trust a personality instead of a position.
Who governs: a plurality of biblically qualified elders, and the congregation. Both. Acts 14:23 and Titus 1:5 give the elders. And the congregation is not decorative — in Acts 6:3 the congregation picked the men, in Acts 15 the whole church was in the room, in 1 Corinthians 5 Paul tells the gathered church to act, and in 2 Corinthians 2:6 the discipline is described as inflicted of many.
Who can remove the pastor: the congregation can. It calls him and it can un-call him. And the elders can bring a charge against one of their own. 1 Timothy 5:19-20 says don't receive an accusation against an elder except before two or three witnesses, and them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear. Read that twice. It's a procedure for handling a charge against an elder, which means the New Testament assumed there would be charges.
Where it's written: on the website, publicly, not in a folder you get handed after you've been coming six months.
Unaffiliated is not the same as unaccountable
Now the honest part, because a post like this is worthless without it.
The failure mode of non-denominational churches is not obscure. Everybody's watched it happen. A gifted man starts a church. The church grows because he's gifted. The board ends up made of people he chose and people who owe him. And there is no human being on earth who can tell that man no. Then something gives out — money, a woman, a temper, or just twenty years of nobody ever contradicting him — and the whole thing comes apart, and two hundred people who genuinely loved Jesus get hurt so badly that some of them never sit in a church again.
That's not hypothetical and it's not rare. It repeats because the structure permits it. A denomination at least has a bishop, a district superintendent, a presbytery, somebody with a phone number and standing. Take that away and put nothing in its place, and you've built a church on one man's character. Character is a wonderful thing. It is a terrible load-bearing wall.
Scripture saw it coming. Third John names a man who loved to have the preeminence, who wouldn't receive the apostle's people and put out the ones who tried. That's in the Bible, and it's in the Bible in the form of a letter, which means somebody had to write from outside because nobody inside the room could handle it.
Anybody who's ever framed anything knows you don't hang a roof on one post. Not because the post is weak. Because posts fail, and when there's only one, everything under it comes down at the same time.
So here is what TheWay is doing on purpose so that isn't us:
- More than one elder, from the start, and the pastor is one of them and not over them. Qualified men measured against 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. Not a title I hand out to friends, and not a list I get a veto over.
- The congregation owns the property and calls the pastor, and can dismiss him. Nothing is held in trust for anybody else, and nothing is held by me.
- The money is open. Members can see it. If a man can't show people the books, he shouldn't be holding the plate.
- Doctrine in writing before anybody joins, so nobody can quietly move the fence posts three years in.
- Real people close enough to ask hard questions and expect an answer — wives, other elders, men outside this church who know me and aren't impressed by me.
None of that makes a church bulletproof. Structure doesn't make a man holy. But structure decides how far the damage travels when a man isn't, and that's worth building on the front end instead of the back end.
Which leaves the label about where it started
No affiliation. Plenty of accountability. And if a church down the road publishes the same four answers, praise God, go there if it's closer to your house. What I'd hate is for somebody to pick a church because the sign used the same word ours does, and find out three years in that the word was the only thing they had in common.
Not better. Different. With non-denominational churches, "different" might be the only honest thing anybody can say until you know which one you mean.
Two people are reading this
One of you is church shopping. The other one has never actually been saved, and reading about church government isn't going to touch that. So let me put the important part in plain words. No structure saves anybody. Not an elder board, not a statement of faith, not a set of bylaws, not a good pastor. A man named Jesus took your guilt to a cross, died under it, and came out of the tomb on the third day with the receipt in His hand. He saves every single person who asks Him to and He has never once turned one away. You don't need to find the right church first. You need Him first, and then a church.
Believer, your week is easy and it's a little uncomfortable. Go find the statement of faith at whatever church you attend — not just here — and read the entire thing. If you can't find one, ask for it. If nobody has one, ask why. Not to be a problem. So you know what you've handed your family over to on Sunday mornings.
You'd read a mortgage before you signed it. Read this.