Congregational church governance

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.

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.