And non-traditional protestants?
Well, it depends. I used the qualifier because obviously Protestants are a varied bunch. Some really do think that corporate worship is kind of optional. But it’s not the mainstream view by any means.
Back in the day when I grew up, Catholics in my town wouldn’t be caught dead not going to Mass on Sundays, but the Protestants I knew seemed to go very infrequently and did not seem to mind it. They usually went on Easter (but not Christmas). Just my experience, is all.
Maybe I lived around non-trad protestants - but i think the family next door were Presbyterian which I thought was traditional. (There are so many - what is it about 40,000 protestant churches? - so how can one know which one of their gatherings follows which rules anyways?!)
And I know, I can’t determine the Protestant ‘rules’ from observing what must have been some non-compliant Protestants, so I stand corrected!
Let me remind you that there are in fact a number of Catholics who don’t go to Mass very frequently either! The difference is that in the Catholic Church one can point to a specific rule and say that they are violating it, whereas in mainline Protestantism (which is probably what your Presbyterian neighbors were–“mainline” refers to the old denominations, as opposed to conservative split-offs, non-denominational Protestants, small “free church” denominations, etc.) there really aren’t any sanctions. However, that doesn’t mean that in principle these Protestants don’t think it’s important. And when you get a very conservative version of, say, the Reformed tradition (which is what Presbyterians are, and also, in a much more fundamentalist version, what the church under discussion is), you can get some very strict enforcement of the general principle that everyone acknowledges.
Yes, Protestants are very diverse. The 30,000 figure or whatever it is should not be used by Catholics, because the person who came up with it counted a different denomination in every country automatically, giving him something like 280 denominations within Catholicism (counting the Catholic Church in each country as a separate denomination). However, there certainly are hundreds of variants of Protestantism, and that’s still a lot to keep track of.
J. Gordon Melton’s
Encyclopedia of Religion in America makes it a bit easier by grouping denominations into “families.” His classification isn’t perfect, but it’s not a bad place to start. Other than Catholics and Orthodox, the Christian “families” would be (I’m not counting Mormons and Unitarians here):
Anglicans (a mixed bag, including folks who are largely Catholic in their theology, folks who are Reformed, and many in between, besides the ones who have rejected traditional Christianity entirely, which you get in most of the “mainline” denominations)
Lutherans
Reformed
Pietists/Methodists (arguably these should be separate, and “Pietists” should include a lot of non-denominational evangelicals and many people who belong to denominations that officially pertain to a different “family”)
Holiness (arguably a subset of the Methodist tradition)
Pentecostals (originally an offshoot of Holiness)
“European Free Church” (mostly Anabaptists, but he counts Quakers as well)
Baptists (he includes “Restorationists”)
Fundamentalists
Adventists (including both SDAs and JWs, as well as smaller groups)
Each of these has diversity within it–Pentecostals and Adventists, for instance, have Trinitarian and non-Trinitarian expressions, which is a pretty big difference! And the more traditional groups (Lutherans, Reformed, Methodists, also Baptists) have very big conservative/liberal variation (less so among Methodists for various reasons, one of which is that the conservative versions of Methodism are classified by Melton in the separate “Holiness” camp for the most part).
Anyway, back to the original point: the pastor’s actions are certainly unusual, but the principle that Christians should worship together is recognized by nearly all Protestants. What you observed was nominal Protestantism, not essentially different from nominal Catholicism except that “mainline” Protestants don’t do much to discipline their “nominal” members. Conservative Protestants, however, who don’t want to fall into these lax patterns, are typically much
stricter in their church discipline than Catholics, especially because they actually administer discipline personally, as here.
Edwin
