Community
who belongs, how you join, how it is organized
The polity that could not hold a denomination together.
A body whose churches cannot be bound has no mechanism to stay whole. Congregationalists split off the Unitarians in 1825, merged into the United Church of Christ in 1957, and lost the churches that would not merge into two other associations — each division carried out entirely legally, because there was never anything to secede from.
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