Local Autonomy

Congregationalism is characteristic of Baptist and Anabaptist traditions and of the churches that bear the Congregational name, and it stands alongside two other main patterns of church order: the presbyterian, governed by elders in graded assemblies, and the episcopal, governed by bishops. Its emphasis on the autonomy of the local church and the priesthood of all believers fits naturally with the believers-church stress on a voluntary, regenerate membership. Cooperation among congregations is typically by free association rather than by binding authority.

In New England the polity took a paradoxical institutional turn: the Puritan congregationalism established there in the seventeenth century became, for generations, the tax-supported established religion of colonies such as Massachusetts, an arrangement in real tension with the polity's own founding insistence on gathered, voluntary church membership, until disestablishment finally came in the early nineteenth century. Much of that New England Congregationalist tradition eventually merged in 1957 with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ, one of several modern denominational lines that continue to hold to local church autonomy today.