‘NEW’ CHURCHES

‘New’ individual churches come into being. They understand their inception or their continuance (for many of them believe themselves to be not new but continuing) in ways which can differ radically, and are sometimes inherently incompatible. Within the churches of the centuries before the Reformation in the West, a new local Church typically began through mission to hitherto unchristianised territories. Or it might prove necessary, as a local church grew, to divide its membership into multiple congregations; these remained under the pastoral care of the bishop, but were served by priests to whom he delegated the care of portions of his flock. In neither case was it necessary to justify what was done by rethinking the underlying ecclesiology. The new church was simply the Church in a new place. Since the Reformation the picture has become much more complicated. Churches have come into being which have not thought of themselves in that way, or which have not been thus regarded by other churches. Paradoxically, they have often seen themselves not as ‘new’ but as the original apostolic Church, in a way that it seemed to them previously existing churches were not. But what begins as, in intention, a reform of something existing, frequently comes to be seen as ‘constitutive of something new’.