About Mainline Christian
Mainline Christian is an independent guide to the faith of the mainline Protestant churches of the United States. Its articles take up the questions people search for about God, the Bible, and the Christian life, and they explain what Scripture says, what the church has taught since its early centuries, and what these churches teach today.
What the articles draw on
The articles draw on Scripture; on the Church Fathers of East and West, from Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nyssa to Augustine; on later teachers such as Maximus the Confessor, Isaac the Syrian, and Julian of Norwich; and on the teaching of the mainline churches today.
Those churches are chiefly the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church, along with the American Baptist Churches USA, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and the United Church of Christ. The churches page describes each one and links to its own website. The prayers on the prayers pagecome from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which is in the public domain.
How the articles read Scripture
Richard Hooker, a sixteenth-century English theologian, taught that what Scripture plainly says comes first, then what reason can show, and then the voice of the church. The United Methodist Church names Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason as the sources and guidelines of its theology.
Augustine of Hippo gave the church a rule for reading the Bible in On Christian Teaching (book 1, chapter 36, section 40). Anyone who thinks they understand Scripture, he wrote, but whose reading does not build up the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not yet understood it. The articles test hard passages against that rule.
The articles also rely on historical-critical scholarship, the study of when, where, and by whom the books of the Bible were written, as the seminaries of the mainline churches teach it.
Where Christians disagree, an article states the other view fairly before explaining what the mainline churches teach and why. The beliefs page summarizes that teaching.
Independence
Mainline Christian is not affiliated with, funded by, or speaking for the ELCA, the PC(USA), the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, or any other denomination. When an article describes what a church teaches, it links to that church’s own documents so you can read them for yourself.
Scripture and sources
Most Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible Updated, a public-domain translation, and link to the verse on eBible.org.
Some well-known verses are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE), the translation read in many mainline churches. Those citations are marked NRSVUE.
Where an English translation obscures the original, an article gives its own translation, marked “translated from the Hebrew” or “translated from the Greek.” A note prints the original words from the Westminster Leningrad Codex or the SBL Greek New Testament, with a plain gloss of the key words. Each article ends with a list of its sources.
How the articles are made
These articles were drafted with the help of AI and edited by people. Every Scripture quotation is checked against the text of its translation or the original, and every source is linked so you can check it yourself. If you find an error, please tell us.
The paintings and photographs on the site are in the public domain or shared under Creative Commons licenses. The image credits page lists each one with its creator, its source, and its license.