The Church’s Family Tree
Where do you fit on the church’s family tree? The tree is usually depicted something like this image from Wikipedia, but things are not as simple as they appear. This particular illustration does not include the various flavors of Reformation Protestantism or the movements influenced by continental pietism, American revivalism or the worldwide missionary movements. Neither does it portray the sometimes wide diversity that exists within each confessional stream. But the tree metaphor is still useful. I am a United Methodist, a church that traces its roots to John Wesley and his brother Charles in England in the 18th century. The Wesleys were priests in the Church of England, a church that broke from Catholicism under King Henry VIII in the 16th century. The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church officially split in the East-West Schism of 1054. Other major splits from the Orthodox-Catholic branch occurred after the Council of Chalcedon (the Coptic Church) and the Council of Ephes...