American Congregationalism: A Brief Historical Primer
- Origins
- The Puritan Heritage
- Denominational Growth and Westward Expansion
- Theological Change
- Mergers and Divisions
- Contribution
The American Congregational tradition has taken on different meanings over time, but it has always rested on one fundamental principle, that God's voice is most clearly heard when ordinary individual Christians join together under mutual covenant.
Origins
Congregationalism originated in sixteenth-century England,
within the Calvinist wing of the Protestant Reformation. The commitment
of these Puritan believers to simple worship in local "gathered"
assemblies put them both politically and theologically at odds with England's
hierarchical, state-sponsored Anglican Church, and, in the face of persecution,
led to their departure to North America in the early seventeenth century.
Leaving was complicated. The Pilgrims who first arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts,
in 1620 were a small group of radical Separatists who had fled England
for the Netherlands in 1608. Their settlement was small, economically
beleaguered, and did not prosper in the long term. A much larger group
of Puritans came to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s and 1640s. Like their
predecessors in Plymouth, they had also insisted on local church government,
unadorned worship, and covenants between "visible saints."
But they strongly resisted the logic of separation from the Anglican Church,
believing that they could purify it from within. Under Archbishop William
Laud, however, prospects for change grew dim and, also in the face of
growing economic duress, thousands of nonseparating Puritans departed
to North America. Despite the change of geographic scene, they did not
abandon their goal of reforming the English church. New England was to
be a "city on a hill,"a thoroughly Christian commonwealth
and a godly example to all the world.
The Puritan Heritage
New England's Puritans were not the
dour, witch-hunting kill-joys that have often populated American myth
and legend. They were in many ways typical Elizabethan English men and
women who enjoyed good ale and good company, and who also held their religious
beliefs with deep personal conviction. Early on they flourished in New
England, buoyed by the conviction that they were God's chosen people,
with a central role in the unfolding of divine history. Indeed, when smallpox
epidemics decimated the local Native American population, Puritan settlers
accepted the tragedy as an affirmation of God's providential care
for their fledgling communities.
Contrary to the popular notion that these settlements were theocratic—that
is ruled by the clergy—the original Puritans set aside separate
realms of activity for church and state, though insisting that the two
always worked cooperatively. Following the model set by Calvin's
Geneva, the Massachusetts General Court enforced uniformity of belief
and the obligations of church membership on all the colony's inhabitants,
regardless whether or not they personally held to Puritan doctrines. Religious
dissent was, in effect, illegal. The other popular conception, that Puritan
New England was an early experiment in democracy, is not strictly true
either. Though all church members were automatically voting members of
their congregations and in the larger commonwealth, the privilege did
not extend to women or to religious dissenters, who were still required
to pay taxes for church support. Put simply, New England Puritans were
not interested in providing religious liberty for all; their primary goal
was to establish and maintain close-knit covenanted communities of believers.
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Puritan leaders
also clarified the meaning of congregational government. The original
immigrants had been careful to distinguish themselves from other English
Protestants who followed a more presbyterian form of church government—that
is, who believed that independent congregations needed some form of institutional
oversight by groups of ruling elders, or presbyteries. Once in North America,
however, congregationalists, especially in newer settlements like Connecticut,
began to discover the need for more institutional structure. The Cambridge
Platform of 1648 was a major step in this direction, affirming the Westminster
Confession as the standard of belief for all New England churches, clarifying
leadership roles in individual churches, and establishing a rationale
for meetings of synods, or representatives from each local church body.
Over time, churches in Connecticut tended to be less leery of cooperative
forms than their coreligionists in Massachusetts; Connecticut's
Saybrook Platform of 1708 set up governing bodies, referred to as consociations
and associations, with the power to make legally binding decisions for
all of the individual churches within their geographic oversight.
By the mid-eighteenth century, questions of church government were increasingly
overshadowed by much knottier issues of piety and zeal. In order to succeed,
the congregational way required high levels of personal commitment and
in most of the original Puritan churches, potential members had had to
testify to a religious conversion experience in order to join. Already
in 1662, however, Puritan leaders had formulated a "Half-Way Covenant,"
allowing parents who had not experienced conversion to baptize their children
in their local churches. Not surprisingly perhaps, this innovation caused
as many problems as it solved.
The transatlantic religious revival known as the Great Awakening was both
bane and blessing in New England. During the 1740s, under the fiery preaching
of itinerating evangelists like George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and
James Davenport, thousands of laypeople experienced dramatic conversions—and
became increasingly critical of the spiritual laxity of the established
Congregational clergy. All across New England Congregational churches
split into factions, the New Lights supporting the revival and the Old
Lights wary of its emotional excesses. Yet revival enthusiasm also generated
a variety of intellectually sophisticated responses, particularly the
penetratingly analytical yet warmly pastoral writings of Congregational
minister Jonathan Edwards. Pastor at Northampton, Massachusetts, during
the height of the Great Awakening, Edwards' defense of "religious
affections"is a classic melding of "head"and "heart"
in American Protestant thought.
Denominational Growth and Westward Expansion
American independence presented Congregationalists with obstacles as
well as opportunities. By the late 1700s, the New England clergy, sometimes
referred to as the Standing Order, had become thoroughly used to the privileges
of social leadership and tax-supported church budgets. Constitutionally-mandated
separation of church and state, a process not complete until Massachusetts
changed its laws in 1833, meant that all churches would stand on equal
footing and compete for financial support through the voluntary gifts
of their membership.
Churches with the smallest investments in money and property—at
that time primarily Methodists and Baptists—found the transition
easiest to negotiate, and they expanded rapidly into the western frontier.
Congregationalists, already two centuries old and loosely organized, proceeded
more slowly. In 1801 they signed a Plan of Union with the Presbyterian
church, which was designed to pool the resources of both denominations
as they moved westward. In the early nineteenth century Congregationalists
also overcame some of their organizational reluctance and sponsored an
impressive array of voluntary societies, including some of the earliest
on behalf of foreign missions. The American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions (1810), the American Home Missionary Society (1826),
the American Education Society, and other similar outreach groups were
open to participation by all evangelical Protestants, but spearheaded
primarily by Congregationalists. The American Missionary Association,
formed in 1846, joined the denomination's antislavery zeal with
its commitments to education and evangelism, and in the post-Civil War
years established many schools across the South for newly-freed slaves.
But for all these successes, Congregationalists also endured disunity.
The nineteenth century opened with a series of bruising theological controversies
over the divinity of Christ that created a split between Trinitarian and
Unitarian churches, and eventuated in the formation of the Unitarian Association
in 1825. The Dedham Decision of 1820, a court case which awarded ownership
of a Congregational church to the Unitarian-leaning members of the local
parish, dealt a further blow to the established Standing Order. But by
then, most Congregational churches were far from comfortable with orthodox
Calvinist theology; though a strong minority still affirmed the conservative
stance of the Burial Hill Declaration (1865), an increasing number were
influenced by new strains of liberal theological thought.
Theological Change
Many of the nineteenth century's most innovative and influential theologians were Congregationalists. During the antebellum period, the heirs of Jonathan Edwards, led by New Divinity theologians Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, Nathaniel Emmons, and Nathaniel William Taylor worked through labyrinthine questions of human freedom and divine sovereignty. In mid-century New Haven pastor Horace Bushnell laid the groundwork for the development of liberal thought, emphasizing the poetic, intuitive nature of religious truth, and the immanence of God in human experience. Bushnell's insistence that God lived within the most minute human interactions powered Protestant investment in Sunday schools and devotional literature for the home; it also legitimated broader concerns for justice in the Social Gospel movement. During the late-nineteenth century, many Congregationalists, most notably pastor and writer Washington Gladden, led national efforts to establish the "kingdom of God on earth" by campaigning for the rights of labor unions, and aid to the urban poor. Other Congregational theologians, led by the faculty of Andover Seminary in Massachusetts, followed Bushnell along more controversial paths. Their so-called New Theology rejected the formal categories of Calvinist thought, emphasizing instead a more optimistic, ethical creed centering on Christ's role as a moral exemplar, affirming human efforts to bring about a just and peaceful social order. By the early twentieth century, however, these views were no longer those of the radical view, as liberal theology dominated the curriculum of most Congregational seminaries, and spread rapidly into church pulpits across the country.
Mergers and Divisions
Early-twentieth century Congregationalists both merged and divided. With
the formation of the National Council of Congregational Churches in 1871
previously independent churches finally came together under a permanent
denominational structure. Almost immediately, however, Congregational
leaders began to look for ways to overcome institutional barriers that
separated Christian believers. That same year the National Council issued
a "Declaration on the Unity of the Church,"decrying the divided
state of American Protestantism and calling for new ecumenical conversations
among church leaders. These finally found fruit in the 1931 merger of
Congregational churches with the Christian Connection, a group formed
in the early nineteenth century by believers who, following the first
century pattern, rejected all denominational labels. In 1957 the General
Council of Congregational and Christian Churches merged with the Evangelical
and Reformed Church, a denomination created by another ecumenical venture,
to form the United Church of Christ.
Not all Congregationalists followed this route, however. The Conservative
Congregational Christian Conference (CCCC), formed in 1948, brought together
evangelical churches who had opted against joining the United Church of
Christ because of theological disagreements. The National Association
of Congregational Christian Churches (NACCC) provided a home for congregations and individuals
who opposed the 1957 merger for polity reasons. Thus the NACCC created
a "referendum council,"through which individual churches
reserved the right to modify any act by a national body.
Contribution
In many ways, historical Congregationalism stands at the heart of the American Protestant tradition. The creative tension between individual experience and social witness has been deeply characteristic of the grassroots piety that has undergirded religion in the United States. Congregational wariness toward institutional structures has also been, for good or ill, a prevailing feature of American church life, though it has also allowed room for theological innovation and creative responses to social evils. In American culture, Congregationalists have been among the first to articulate a working relationship between church and state, to promote an educated, engaged citizenship, and Christian mission—in all of the forms this might take—to the wider world.