Consider what happened during World War 1,, when the Protestant churches united to push the Prohibition law through Congress.

The general board declared: `` Most of the Protestant churches hold contraception and periodic continence to be morally right when the motives are right.

An action once universally condemned by all Christian churches and forbidden by the civil law is now not only approved by the overwhelming majority of Protestant denominations, but also deemed, at certain times, to be a positive religious duty.

The expense of this type of organization in religious life, when one recalls the number of city churches which deteriorated beyond repair before being abandoned, raises fundamental questions about the principle of Protestant survival in a mobile society ; ;

From many sides come remarks that Protestant churches are badly attended and the large medieval cathedrals look all but empty during services.

The Protestant themselves are the first to admit the great falling off in effective membership in their churches.

The general tone of articles appearing in such important newspapers as the Manchester Guardian and the Sunday Observer implies a kindly recognition that the Catholic Church is now at least of equal stature in England with the Protestant churches.

In Lutheran churches the title of abbess ( Äbtissin ) has in some cases ( e. g. Itzehoe ) survived to designate the heads of abbeys which since the Protestant Reformation have continued as Stifte.

The lack of apostolic succession through bishops is the primary basis on which Protestant communities are not considered churches by the Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic Church.

Some Protestant charismatic and British New Church Movement churches include " apostles " among the offices that should be evident into modern times in a true church, though they never trace an historical line of succession.

In common usage among many Protestant churches, an " anthem " often refers to any short sacred choral work presented during the course of a worship service.

Because Athanasius ' canon is the closest canon of any of the Church Fathers to the canon used by Protestant churches today, many Protestants point to Athanasius as the father of the canon.

The Books of the Bible are listed differently in the canons of Judaism and the Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Slavonic Orthodox, Coptic, Georgian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Syriac, Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches, although there is substantial overlap.

Some Protestant churches including the Lutheran and Methodist churches have bishops serving similar functions as well, though not always understood to be within apostolic succession in the same way.

In some smaller Protestant denominations and independent churches the term bishop is used in the same way as pastor, to refer to the leader of the local congregation, and may be male or female.

In The Encylopedia of Protestantism, JG Melton writes: " While often associated with Evangelical Christianity, the again phenomenon is common across the entire spectrum of Protestant churches.

The Nicene Creed is " accepted as authoritative by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and major Protestant churches.

History of Protestantism | Historical chart of the main List of Protestant churches | Protestant branches

Some Anglican churches consider themselves both Protestant and Catholic.

One way was greater cooperation between groups, such as the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of Protestants in 1910, the Justice, Peace and Creation Commission of the World Council of Churches founded in 1948 by Protestant and Orthodox churches, and similar national councils like the National Council of Churches in Australia which includes Roman Catholics.

Steps towards reconciliation on a global level were taken in 1965 by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches mutually revoking the excommunications that marked their Great Schism in 1054 ; the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission ( ARCIC ) working towards full communion between those churches since 1970 ; and the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches signing The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999 to address conflicts at the root of the Protestant Reformation.

Other Christians too, in particular Anglicans, Lutherans and some Protestant and other Christian communities use a rite of anointing the sick, without necessarily classifying it as a sacrament.

Lutheran communities in particular have the practice of anointing the sick, or have always offered the rite since the Protestant Reformation with varying degrees of frequency.

The word Eucharist may refer not only to the rite but also to the consecrated bread ( leavened or unleavened ) and wine ( or unfermented grape juice in some Protestant denominations, water in the LDS Church's sacrament ), used in the rite.

In Protestant England, the word communism was too culturally and aurally close to the Roman Catholic communion rite, hence English atheists denoted themselves socialists.

Roman Catholic and some Protestant Christians consume unleavened bread during the Christian liturgy when they celebrate the Eucharist, a rite derived from the narrative of the Last Supper when Jesus broke bread with his disciples, perhaps during a Passover Seder.

The various Eucharistic liturgies used by national churches of the Anglican Communion have continuously evolved from the 1549 and 1552 editions of the Book of Common Prayer which both owed their form and contents chiefly to the work of Thomas Cranmer, who had rejected the medieval theology of the Mass in about 1547 Although the 1549 rite retained the traditional sequence of the mass, its underlying theology was Protestant.

Some Protestant churches call confirmation a rite, not a sacrament, and see it as merely symbolic, not an effective means of conferring divine grace.

In addition, they usually believe that the Mass of Paul VI and holy orders in the official Church since 1968 are invalid ( i. e., like orders in the Church of England and other Protestant denominations ) and prefer to receive sacraments from priests ordained in the old pre-1968 rite who use the liturgy from the early 1950s.

Some Protestant denominations, especially Lutherans, have similar beliefs regarding the Eucharist and the Real Presence, though they differ about the rite and reject the concept of transubstantiation which Catholics and Orthodox Eastern Christians hold to.

Following the lead of the liturgical reforms of the Roman rite, many Protestant churches also adopted the concept of Ordinary Time alongside the Revised Common Lectionary.

The Byzantine Rite, sometimes called the Rite of Constantinople or Constantinopolitan Rite is the liturgical rite used currently ( in various languages, with various uses ) by all the Eastern Orthodox Churches, by the Greek Catholic Churches ( Eastern Catholic Churches which use the Byzantine Rite ), and in a substantially modified form by the Protestant Ukrainian Lutheran Church.

Sheppard ’ s music for the new Protestant rite, which has suffered seriously from the loss of manuscript sources, was presumably composed during the reign of Edward VI which saw the publication of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and thus created a need for liturgical music for English texts.

This structure is still valid, with some significant variations typical of each rite, for the Catholic Church, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Church, while it was modified, both in the pattern and in the underlying theology, during the Protestant Reformation.

This implied a recovery of early Protestant liturgies and a renewed emphasis upon the rite of Holy Communion, somewhat akin to the Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic movement in Anglicanism but within a Reformation vein.

Probably most similar in ethos ( among English-speaking Protestant groups ) to the Methodists, pastors emphasized pietist preaching and catechizing young people for the rite of confirmation, a rite still cherished highly to this day by congregations deriving from ESNA roots.

However, Sacred Harp songs are quite different from " mainstream " Protestant hymns in their musical style: they are often polyphonic in texture, and the harmony tends to deemphasize the interval of the third in favor of fourths and fifths.

Though influential on a generation of young pastors, the movement has had a hard time finding grass-roots support within mainline Protestant denominations, many of which faces vicious liberal-conservative pressures and rifts, something the movement tends to dismiss as a sign of cultural accommodation.

He says: `` beside the Protestant philosophy of Progress, as expressed in radical or conservative millenarianism, should be placed the doctrine of the democratic faith which affirmed it to be the duty of the destiny of the United States to assist in the creation of a better world by keeping lighted the beacon of democracy ''.

As for the author of the Englishman, Mrs. Manley sarcastically deplores that the sole defense of the Protestant cause should be left to `` Ridpath, Dick Steele, and their Associates, with the Apostles of Young Man's Coffee-House ''.

In a few months the Duke was to be the center of a controversy of some significance on the touchy question of the Protestant Succession.

The fall of Rome, the discovery of precious metals, and the Protestant Reformation were all links and could only be explained and understood by comprehending the links that preceded and those that followed.

Since then, many Protestant denominations have made separate pronouncements, in which they not only approved birth control, but declared it at times to be a religious duty.

consequently, the vulnerability to social difference should not be attributed to the stress on personal community in Protestant congregations ; ;

The extreme of Calvinism is hyper-Calvinism, which insists that signs of election must be sought before evangelization of the unregenerate takes place and that the eternally damned have no obligation to repent and believe, and on the extreme of Arminianism is Pelagianism, which rejects the doctrine of original sin on grounds of moral accountability ; but the overwhelming majority of Protestant, evangelical pastors and theologians hold to one of these two systems or somewhere in between.

One of the terms of the marriage contract agreed to by Alexei was that while any forthcoming children were to be raised in the Orthodox faith, Charlotte herself was allowed to retain her Protestant faith ( an agreement that did not sit well at all with Alexei's followers ).

Many Protestants, especially Calvinists, consider him to be one of the theological fathers of the Protestant Reformation due to his teaching on salvation and divine grace.

" He points to the fact that the Pope claims universal jurisdiction and he therefore argues that " it would be intolerable to have, as the sovereign of a Protestant and free country, one who owes any allegiance to the head of any other state " and contends that if such situation came about " we will have undone centuries of common law.

) Hilton also claims a Roman Catholic monarch would therefore be unable to be crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and points to the examples of European states that have similar religious provisions for their monarchs: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, whose constitutions compel their monarchs to be Lutherans, the Netherlands, the constitution of which insists its monarchs be members of the Protestant House of Orange, and Belgium, which has a constitution that provides for the succession to be through Roman Catholic houses.

Most Protestant denominations deny the need of maintaining episcopal continuity with the early Church, holding that the role of the apostles was that, having been chosen directly by Jesus as witnesses of his resurrection, they were to be the " special instruments of the Holy Spirit in founding and building up the Church ".

Anabaptists ( Greek ἀνά " again, twice " + βαπτίζω " baptize ," thus " re-baptizers ") are Protestant Christians of the Radical Reformation of 16th-century Europe, although some consider Anabaptism to be a distinct movement from Protestantism.

Published in 1544, it borrowed greatly from Martin Luther's Litany and Myles Coverdale's New Testament and was the only service that might be considered to be " Protestant " to be finished within the lifetime of King Henry VIII.