Church Cousins

Pick two Christian bodies. See where their lines last ran together, what the argument was that parted them, and how close a relation that actually makes them — in the same terms you'd use for a family.

One church

The other

The whole tree

Where this diagram lies to you

Family trees split and never rejoin. Churches merge. The United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ each have several parents. A single-parent tree can only draw the largest one, so those entries say so rather than pretend.

Both sides of a split usually claim to be the original. Catholics and Orthodox each hold that theirs is the continuing church and the other departed. Neither is drawn as the parent of the other here. Where one body is shown branching off another, that is a claim about institutional continuity — not about who was right.

Some movements reject the tree entirely. Restorationists teach a recovery of the first-century church that bypasses every later body. Where that claim is central, this app declines to compute a relationship rather than invent one.

The dates are markers, not events. 1054 had been building for centuries and was not settled for centuries after. Sizes are rough, and the definitions behind them are argued over — "how many Pentecostals are there" has no agreed answer within a factor of two.