Church

The purpose of the directory

The directory exists for the formal education of anyone about other world views. A world view is not only a set of ideas. It is carried by real bodies, in real places, with real histories. This directory names those bodies and orders them, so that anyone can study another world view as it is actually held and practiced, from the tradition's own organizations and sources.

What this directory is

The Church directory is a directory of the church in the world, and of the faith traditions beyond it. It names the bodies a reader will meet when studying the world views on this site: the organizations that carry each tradition, the congregations that gather in each place, and the buildings where they meet.

The World Views pages describe what each tradition believes. This directory describes the bodies themselves: who they are, where they are, and how they are ordered.

The two branches

The directory has two branches. The Christian branch holds the churches and traditions that confess Jesus Christ. The Non-Christian branch holds the faith traditions of the world beyond the Christian church. The site presents the Christian world view, and it enumerates both branches so that any body a reader meets can be found and understood.

Traditions and organizations

Within each branch, the bodies are gathered under their traditions. A tradition is the family a body belongs to: Catholic, Baptist, or Methodist in the Christian branch, and Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu in the Non-Christian branch. Under each tradition stand its organizations, the churches, communions, conventions, and movements that carry it. Each organization is linked to its primary website where one exists. The lists stand in alphabetical order, in no particular order.

Congregations and buildings

Under the organizations come the congregations, the local churches and meetings where people actually gather, and the buildings where they meet. A congregation and its building are recorded separately, because a congregation moves and a building changes hands. Their relationship is kept with dates, so the record can say where a congregation met, and when. Congregations and buildings are being added under the organizations now.

One taxonomy for the whole site

The directory is ordered by the site's taxonomy, the one vocabulary that classifies everything here. The taxonomy has three dimensions. Tradition holds the branches, the traditions, and their organizations. Doctrine holds the questions every body answers, such as the Trinity, Scripture and authority, and the sacraments, so that what different bodies teach on the same question can be compared. Topic holds the subjects of the essay library. Because the same terms classify the essays, the world views, the libraries by doctrine and theology, and this directory, the same word means the same thing everywhere it appears.

How an entry is kept

An entry is kept as dated facts, each with its source. A fact that changes is not overwritten; the new fact is added with its date, and the history stands. Where a body's standing is contested, as where a movement is claimed by a tradition it does not claim for itself, the page states the contest and names whose classification it is. Nothing in the directory rests on an unnamed source.