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.
Because no Congregational body can bind a congregation, every Congregational division is voluntary and permanent. The Unitarian split, formalised around 1825, took much of eastern Massachusetts including the First Church in Boston. The Congregational Christian Churches — themselves the product of a 1931 merger with the Christian Connection — voted to merge with the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and the United Church of Christ came into being on 25 June 1957. Churches that would not go formed or joined the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, organised in Detroit in 1955 in anticipation of the merger, and the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, formed in 1948 on theological grounds. In England the tradition went the other way: most Congregational churches joined the Presbyterians to form the United Reformed Church in 1972, and those that declined formed the Congregational Federation. The polity is intact in all of them and so is the pattern.
The same ground, other faiths
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