Some Protestants affirm congregational church government, that authority under Christ rests with the local congregation of believers, which governs its own affairs, calls its own ministers, and is not subject to bishops or regional assemblies. Each local church is held to be a complete expression of the church, competent to order its life and discipline by the consent of its members, often gathered in a church meeting. The polity flows from the conviction that Christ rules his people directly and that the gathered congregation, guided by scripture, is the proper seat of governance.
Congregationalism traces to the English Separatist movement of the late sixteenth century, associated with Robert Browne, whose followers, dismissively called Brownists, argued that true churches must be gathered voluntarily by covenant among believers rather than established by state authority, a position that brought them into direct conflict with the state-established Church of England and drove many into exile. Separatist congregationalists were prominent among the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620, and their principle of a church governed by its own gathered members' covenant, formalized in documents such as the Cambridge Platform of 1648 in New England, became foundational to the wider Congregationalist tradition in both England and America.