Congregationalism

Congregationalism is a tradition of church government within Protestant Christianity holding that the local congregation, not a presbytery or bishop, is the church’s highest governing authority under Christ. It arose among English Puritans in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a form of “Independency,” distinct from the Church of England’s episcopal government and from Presbyterian church courts. Congregationalists share this congregational polity with Baptists, but unlike Baptists they retain infant baptism, aligning them with Presbyterians on that question while differing from Presbyterians on church government.

Historical Origin

Congregationalism grew out of the English Separatist and Puritan movements that rejected the Church of England’s episcopal government. By 1654, a Reformed writer could already classify “Independent” church government as a settled third option alongside Episcopacy and Presbyterianism, and date its practice to New England:

“There can be conceived but three forms of Government, Episcopal most conformable to Monarchy, Presbyterial to Aristocracy, and Independent, as they term it, to Democracy. Presbyterial is no elder than the Reformation in Geneva, and Independent than New-England.”¹

In 1658, Oliver Cromwell convened a national assembly of Independent churches at the Savoy Palace in London. Meeting for twelve days, the assembly produced the Savoy Declaration, drafted chiefly by John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, William Bridge, Joseph Caryl, and William Greenhill.² The Savoy Declaration followed the Westminster Confession’s doctrine so closely that, according to one historian, “the difference between these two Confessions is so very small, that the modern Independents have in a manner laid aside the use of it [the Savoy Declaration] in their families, and agreed with the Presbyterians in the use of the Assembly’s Catechisms.”³ Its real departure from Westminster was ecclesiology, not doctrine: the Savoy divines kept the congregational, non-binding view of church government they already held as Independents, in place of Westminster’s presbyterian courts.

Congregationalism took root in New England through the Puritan migration of the 1630s. Assemblies convened there to settle their churches’ doctrinal basis repeatedly endorsed the Westminster Confession’s theology while keeping congregational polity: the Cambridge Synod (1647-1648) produced the Cambridge Platform, the Boston Synod (1679-1680) produced the Boston Confession, and the Saybrook, Connecticut Synod (1708) produced the Saybrook Platform.³

Core Tenets

The local congregation holds final authority under Christ. No synod, presbytery, or bishop may overrule a congregation’s own decisions on doctrine, discipline, or membership. Jonathan Leeman, writing from the Baptist tradition rather than the Congregationalist one, makes the same essential biblical case for congregational authority that Congregationalists have long made for their own polity: that Christ gives the whole gathered church, not a subset of its leaders, the authority to bind and loose (Matt. 18:17-18), and that Paul addresses the discipline of an unrepentant member to the whole Corinthian congregation rather than to its leaders alone (1 Cor. 5:4-5, 12).⁴

Congregations may cooperate voluntarily without surrendering their own authority. The New England synods that produced the Cambridge Platform, Boston Confession, and Saybrook Platform show how this worked in practice: independent congregations convened jointly to state a common doctrinal and confessional basis, without those assemblies becoming a binding court over the churches that took part.

Congregationalists retain infant baptism. This is the point on which they differ from Baptists, who otherwise hold the same congregational polity, and agree instead with Presbyterians and the wider paedobaptist Reformed tradition; the Savoy Declaration’s baptism chapter follows the Westminster Confession’s on this point as closely as it does the rest of Westminster’s doctrine.³

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

The wider Reformed confessional family, including the Westminster Confession and the continental confessions, generally holds a presbyterian or synodical form of church government rather than a congregational one. Herman Bavinck, writing from within that tradition, describes the Congregationalist and Anabaptist objection to binding synods as a real position with real force, even while the Reformed churches themselves adopted synodical government:

“Those who considered every group of believers independent, and rejected every binding classical or synodical linkage (Anabaptists, Independents)… The objectors raise valid points. In the New Testament, congregations are independent under Christ.”⁵

The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 agrees with Congregationalism, against the wider Reformed confessional family, on congregational polity: Baptist churches, like Congregationalist churches, recognize no binding authority above the local congregation. Where the 1689 LBCF and the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration part ways is baptism, not government: the 1689 LBCF restricts baptism to professing believers, while Savoy, following Westminster, extends it to the children of believers.

Related Doctrines

References

Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London: A. M. for William Lee, 1654), bk. 6. ↩
Jared Heath Moore, “A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 120. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 126-127. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Jonathan Leeman, Don’t Fire Your Church Members: The Case for Congregationalism (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2016), 122. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩