Brethren in Christ Church / BIC U.S.

Brethren in Christ Church / BIC U.S. belongs to the Anabaptist family of churches.

Governance: congregational.

Brethren in Christ Church / BIC U.S. reports 235 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).

Anabaptist in origin, Wesleyan-Holiness in doctrine — one of the genuine two-family cases.

Born beside the Susquehanna as the River Brethren, this church carries Anabaptist peace, Pietist warmth, and Wesleyan holiness in a single body — one of the few genuine two-family churches in America.

Heritage

Around 1778, among German-speaking believers along the Susquehanna River near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a fellowship formed that neighbors called the River Brethren — Anabaptist in its view of the church, Pietist in its insistence on a heartfelt new birth. The body took the legal name Brethren in Christ in 1863. In the late nineteenth century it embraced the Wesleyan-holiness teaching of entire sanctification, and in the twentieth it engaged the wider evangelical world while keeping its peace position. RCMS 2020 counted 235 congregations; the U.S. body now uses the shorthand BIC U.S.

Theological family

A deliberate confluence: Anabaptist (believers' baptism, nonresistance, the visible disciplined community), Pietist (living faith over dead orthodoxy), and Wesleyan (holiness of heart and life as the Spirit's work). The church itself describes its identity as these three streams joined.

Who decides what

Congregations relate through regional conferences and a General Assembly, with bishops giving oversight — a light connectional structure over a congregationally rooted body.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor finds warm, unpretentious evangelical worship — contemporary in many congregations, traditional in some — with baptism of believers, communion, and in many places the historic practice of feetwashing. The plain dress of earlier generations is gone; the plainness of spirit is the ideal that remains.

What it has always cared about

Peace and nonresistance held alongside evangelism; holiness lived rather than argued; simplicity; and institutions like Messiah University in Grantham, Pennsylvania.

Its gift to the wider church

A working model of held-together inheritances: BIC showed that the Anabaptist peace witness and Wesleyan holiness could strengthen rather than dilute each other, and through voices like Ronald Sider — whose Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger unsettled the conscience of the whole evangelical world — it gave that combination a public voice.

Commonly confused with

With the Church of the Brethren and other "Brethren" bodies, which come from a separate 1708 German Baptist stream; with Mennonites, close Anabaptist kin but a distinct family of origin; and with generic evangelical churches, since many BIC congregations carry community-style names.

Range of views inside it

Congregations range from those cherishing the plain-rooted heritage to church plants indistinguishable in style from the broader evangelical world; emphasis on the peace position varies in practice from congregation to congregation.

A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation, including how visibly it carries any of the three streams. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Brethren in Christ congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.

Sources: BIC U.S. — our history and values (Brethren in Christ Church U.S.) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)

Where Brethren in Christ Church / BIC U.S. churches are on the map

16 Brethren in Christ Church / BIC U.S. congregations appear on The Church Map, across 3 states.

More of the Anabaptist story · Find these churches on the map