History & overview · every faith gets one
The local church answers to Christ and to nobody in between.
The English Puritan settlement that made the gathered congregation the complete church — able to call and ordain its own minister, admit and expel its own members, and take instruction from no synod, bishop or presbytery. It built New England, wrote the Cambridge Platform in 1648, ran the Salem trials, produced the First Great Awakening and most of the American college system, and then dispersed: most of its churches went into the United Church of Christ in 1957 and the rest into associations that exist mainly to be voluntary.
Why it is filed this way
Congregationalism is a polity before it is a denomination, and that is why it fragments: Baptists, the Churches of Christ, the Plymouth Brethren and many Pentecostal bodies are congregational in government without being Congregationalist. As a named body in the United States it now exists in three associations plus the churches that merged into the United Church of Christ in 1957.
The Congregational Christian Churches as a single body ended in 1957, when most of them merged into the United Church of Christ. The name continues in the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, and the Congregational Federation in England.
The founding
Robert Browne published A Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie in 1582, arguing that a congregation of believers need not wait for the magistrate to reform the church and could covenant together immediately. His followers were called Brownists; the Scrooby congregation that sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 was one. In 1648 the ministers of Massachusetts and Connecticut met at Cambridge and adopted a platform of church discipline that set out the whole polity: each congregation complete in itself, synods advisory only, and the covenant rather than the bishop making the church.
Its founding is bound to Robert Browne, then the New England divines — 1582 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A church made by a covenant that people enter with their eyes open, not by a parish boundary.
The divine. The Trinity, held in a broadly Calvinist frame in the seventeenth century and progressively loosened after; congregational polity has proved compatible with a very wide range of theology, which is the whole argument against it and for it..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment, held with decreasing specificity over four centuries.