Mainline Protestant (PCUSA / ELCA / UMC)

The Table is the clearest mark. All three teach that God actually gives something in the sacraments rather than merely reminding you of something, and all three baptize infants, which is why this sketch sits so far towards the sacramental end.

On grace the map names nothing, and that is honest rather than evasive. Three inheritances share one band: Lutherans who say conversion is God’s work alone, Presbyterians who confess election, Methodists who say grace reaches everyone and can be refused. Nobody here is made to choose.

Authority picks no side either. Scripture comes first in all three governing books, but so does reading it with the creeds, with scholarship and with the church’s experience, which Methodists shorten to Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Neither “the Bible alone” nor “the Bible plus a teaching office” fits.

Worship leans liturgical without being fixed: service books and a church year, followed closely in one congregation and lightly in the next. None of the three has ever taught that the gifts of the Spirit ceased, though tongues are not expected either, so that reading sits open.

One more thing ties the three together on a Sunday morning. All three commend the Revised Common Lectionary, the three-year cycle of set readings published in 1992 and built on the Roman Catholic lectionary of 1969, so a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, a Methodist and a Catholic can hear much the same Scripture on the same day. All three ordain women, which is one of the plainest lines between this family and the conservative evangelical bodies.