full image - Repost: The Myth of Thousands of Protestant Denominations: Quick Notes (from Reddit.com, The Myth of Thousands of Protestant Denominations: Quick Notes)
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A good summary is to be found here: We Need to Stop Saying That There Are 33,000 Protestant Denominations| National Catholic Register. Of course, the purported number keeps growing. The mythical number started off as 20,000 and has since grown to 45,000 as we will see shortly.To understand the source of the myth one should turn to the *World Christian Encyclopedia* at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Here is an excerpt from the page at the end of the hyperlink (w/emphasis added):«How do you define a "denomination"?The most detailed level of our taxonomy of global Christianity is Christian denominations, defined as an organized Christian church, tradition, religious group, community of people, aggregate of worship centre, usually within a specific country, whose component congregations and members are called by the same name in different areas, regarding themselves as an autonomous Christian church distinct from other churches and traditions. Denominations are defined and measured at the country level, creating a large number of separate denominations within Christian families and Christian traditions. For example, the presence of the Catholic Church in the world’s 234 countries results in 234 Catholic “denominations”, though these can be further subdivided by rite (e.g., Byzantine or Latin). The typical way for Christians to count themselves is at the local congregational level and then aggregate these totals at the city, province, state, regional and finally, national levels.Individual congregations are not counted as “denominations.” We do make note of the fact that many independent congregations are not a part of any denomination. If those churches were to form an independent network with a name, we would consider them a denomination. Using this method, we report 45,000 Christian denominations in the world in 2019.»This method of measurement may be useful to some sociologists, but its results are ridiculous according to the metrics of the masses of everyday people. For example, virtually no one would agree that the Episcopal Church became two denominations in virtue of its simply establishing a parish outside the U.S. Likewise, as history progresses and new countries are formed the Roman Catholic Church does not become two in number in virtue of simply setting up a new parish in South Sudan in 2011 or the United States of America in 1776.To arrive at Protestant denominational numbers that are more meaningful, one could start with the original big three branches: Lutherans, Anglicans and the Reformed. From the latter two groups are derived the greatest number of denominational splits, bifurcations, and indirect founding of new “nondenominational churches.”[1] At Appendix B: Classification of Protestant Denominations | Pew Research Center roughly 277 different American groups are listed, and this is a more realistic number of Protestant denominations in general.--- ENDNOTE[1] Within Lutheranism one will find just a few state churches and self-recognized denominational boundaries. From Anglicanism we get Methodism, the Holiness movement, and Pentecostalism on the one hand; from the other hand comes Baptist and crypto-Baptist (i.e. ≈nondenominational) teaching and practice. Meanwhile the Calvinists have their own splits and bifurcations, and the merger of credobaptist and Reformed theology seems to play a part in the emergence of American Restorationism; for example, note the presence of a strict application of the Regulative Principle of Worship in Stone-Campbell congregations.
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