Hard Questions: Why is the church so divided, and does it matter?

There are somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 Christian denominations in the world, depending on how you count. They range from the Roman Catholic Church, with over a billion members, to congregations of thirty people meeting in strip malls who believe everyone else has it wrong. They disagree about baptism, about who can lead, about what happens at the Lord's table, about the end times, about which translation of the Bible counts, about whether instruments belong in worship, about almost everything except, in most cases, the basic facts of the Nicene Creed.

If you're looking for a reason to dismiss Christianity, this is a reasonable place to start. If Christianity is true, why can't the people who believe it agree on what it means?

The church has been divided since almost the beginning. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, written around 55 AD, opens with him dressing down a congregation that has already split into factions — people declaring allegiance to Paul, to Apollos, to Cephas, to Christ himself. "Is Christ divided?" Paul asks, and the question has been answering itself ever since.

The major ruptures came in waves. The East-West Schism of 1054 divided the church into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy — primarily over papal authority, though centuries of theological, political, and cultural divergence fed into it. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century fractured Western Christianity further, and the fractures kept multiplying. Luther's reform produced Lutheranism. Calvin's produced Reformed churches. Henry VIII's political break with Rome produced Anglicanism — the tradition we inhabit. The radical Reformers produced the Anabaptists. Within decades, Protestantism had divided into scores of competing streams, each convinced it had recovered the true gospel the others had obscured.

The divisions were not always purely theological. Race drove some of them — the African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in 1816 because Black Christians were literally pulled from their knees at a white church in Philadelphia. Culture drove others — immigrant communities worshiped in their own languages and built their own institutions. Power drove most of them at least in part. The church's divisions are a map of human failure as much as theological disagreement.

Jesus prayed for unity. In John 17, on the night before his crucifixion, he prays for his disciples and for all who will believe through them: "that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I am in you — so that the world may believe that you have sent me." The unity Jesus prays for is not uniformity. He is not asking for identical liturgies or resolved debates about baptism. He is asking for the kind of unity that makes the church's witness to the world legible — that makes the claim "God is love" visible in how the people who follow God treat each other and the world.

By that standard, the church has largely failed. The spectacle of Christians condemning other Christians, splitting over secondary matters, building walls around their particular expressions of the faith, has been one of the most persistent impediments to the gospel's credibility in the modern world. When someone outside the church looks at Christianity and sees 40,000 denominations telling each other they're wrong, the reasonable response is to wonder why any of it should be taken seriously.

That failure is real. It should be named as failure, not explained away as healthy diversity.

And yet.

The distinction between division and diversity matters. Diversity is not inherently bad. A tradition as ancient and geographically scattered as Christianity, practiced across every human culture for two thousand years, is going to look different in different places. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Korean Presbyterian church, the Black Baptist tradition, the Quaker meeting — these are not errors to be corrected. They are what happens when the gospel takes root in different soils and grows differently in each. The New Testament itself contains four Gospels, not one, each telling the same story from a different angle, each emphasizing what the others don't.

The problem is not diversity. The problem is division — the refusal to recognize Christ in the other, the use of theological disagreement as a weapon, the splitting that happens when an institution protects its own power rather than serving the gospel it was built to carry.

Where does the Episcopal tradition sit in all of this?

The Anglican via media — the middle way — was never a claim to have found the perfect synthesis. It was an attempt to hold together what other traditions had split apart: Catholic and Reformed, Scripture and tradition, order and freedom, ancient and contemporary. The comprehensiveness of Anglicanism is not theological laziness. It is the insistence that the whole is larger than any single part, and that living inside the tension is sometimes more faithful than rushing to resolve it.

That comprehensiveness has costs. The Anglican Communion has been torn apart by the same debates that divide other churches — about sexuality, about women's ordination, about authority, about who belongs. The via media did not make us immune to fracture. It gave us a framework for trying to stay together that other traditions don't have, and we have not always used it well.

What it does offer, at its best, is a tradition that takes disagreement seriously without making it the last word. Episcopalians recite the same creeds, share the same sacraments, and renew the same baptismal covenant across genuine theological difference. The liturgy holds together people who read the Bible differently, who pray differently, who came from different places and carry different wounds. In a world that is very good at splitting into factions, a community that keeps showing up to the same table across real disagreement is bearing witness to something the world doesn't have many other models for. That is not nothing.

Does it matter that the church is divided?

Yes. Jesus said so. The fractured witness of a fractured church is a real impediment to the gospel — not the only one, but a significant one. When the watching world sees Christians divide over worship styles or secondary doctrines or the color of the carpet, it sees an institution that doesn't believe its own message about reconciliation.

But the answer is not enforced uniformity. The answer is the harder work of remaining in relationship through difference — of finding the unity the creeds point to without flattening the diversity that the same Spirit produces. That work is never finished. It requires more humility than most institutions can sustain for long.

The Anglican tradition has been trying to practice it for five hundred years, with mixed results. The trying is still worth something.

Where are you with this today? Maybe the church's divisions are part of what exhausted you — the sense that every congregation is a faction, that everyone is certain they're right, that the thing Jesus prayed for looks nothing like what he got. That exhaustion is honest. What I can offer is this: the church you're sitting in has chosen, deliberately and at cost, to stay inside the tension rather than walk away from it. We don't all agree. We don't pretend to. What we share is a table, a liturgy, a set of promises, and a God who seems to have a higher tolerance for our disagreements than we do. That's not a solution. It might be a beginning.

Sources and further reading: John 17:20-23; 1 Corinthians 1:10-17 (NRSV). The Nicene Creed, Book of Common Prayer (1979), p. 358. The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886/1888). Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1 and 2 (HarperOne, 1984; rev. ed. 2010). Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (Baker Books, 2008). Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Eerdmans, 2006). The World Council of Churches, "The Church: Towards a Common Vision" (Faith and Order Paper No. 214, 2013).