Massachusetts Conference Edition
Return
to main page
Read
National Edition
Read the UC News Spotlight E-Newsletter
Return
to main page
Read
National Edition
Read the UC News Spotlight E-Newsletter
by Dr. Margaret Bendroth, Librarian/Executive Director of the American Congregational Association
December 2008/January 2009
What does the Congregational tradition have to say about discernment? Perhaps it is hard to imagine that church practices dating from the days of pointed hats and breech-loading muskets would have much relevance to twenty-first century congregations.
But the truth of the matter is that those long-dead ancestors organized enduring institutions; now more than 350 years later, churches all across New England witness to that legacy every Sunday. Ancient record books show that colonial congregations dealt with an astonishing array of human situations—and the vast majority of them still lived on.
That suggests that the long story of American Congregationalism contains unique wisdom. From its very beginning, the Congregational Way was a calculated risk. The Independents who broke with the established Church of England in the 1500 and 1600s rejected an entire authority structure inherited from Roman Catholicism.
Hardly the dour, witch-hunting killjoys of popular legend, those earliest Congregationalists – sometimes also known as Puritans – were people in pursuit of pure, authentic piety. They wanted their religion stripped bare, whittled down to its simplest essence, beginning and ending in a soul-searing encounter between a needy sinner and an all-encompassing God. In their view, any liturgy or ritual inevitably became a rote formula, deadening the spirit and providing false comfort to the wicked. They envisioned the “true” church as a group of believers gathered around the word of God, listening to it read and preached, and responding together with simple prayer and song.
This proved more difficult in practice than in theory. In fact, Congregationalism walked a fine line between freedom and responsibility, between the sanctity of an individual believer’s convictions and the spiritual well being of the larger Commonwealth. It provided many channels through which God’s voice might be heard, not just by the one but by the many.
The real bedrock of the Congregational Way was the covenant community, built on the assumption that God spoke most clearly to people gathered together under a long-term spiritual commitment. A Congregational church formed when a group of people met to fast and pray, determining whether or not God was calling them together for the long haul. They drew up written covenants in which they promised to “bind” themselves to “walke together” in all their ways, as Boston’s First Church declared.
Colonial church records also show that local congregations were not afraid of conflict. Despite the minister’s superior learning, laypeople and clergy were spiritual equals who often disagreed about God’s particular leading. Given their dislike of rote formulas, Congregational churches proceeded with few written rules until the early nineteenth century, and in the early days ministers and their people simply strove for unanimity.
The congregation was free to discuss any and all issues laid before them by their pastor, but any evidence of dissent immediately blocked further action. If the dissenters were relatively few, they had a duty to state their concerns publicly and then accept the “sense of the meeting” with appropriate grace. If disagreement was stronger, pastor and people set aside the matter and waited for what Samuel Mather described as “natural light and Christian prudence” to emerge – a process which could sometimes take a very long time.
Small wonder that later defenders of Congregationalism insisted that it was the most spiritually demanding of all forms of church government. George Punchard, writing in 1840, declared that Congregationalism worked best among “spiritual persons” who “have been taught and are now led by the Spirit. Its strength and permanence depend on the spirituality of those who adopt it.” In fact, Punchard said, “Of all denominations we are most entirely cast upon Providence. Without Christ we can do nothing.”
That is still a very tall order. Perhaps nothing would frustrate those original Congregationalists more than to find their descendents mining their records for new, more historically accurate rules to govern congregational meetings. They risked everything to found churches in which the Holy Spirit might speak openly and clearly, in new and challenging accents.
To be sure, the Congregational Way had boundaries – above all, careful, intelligent attention to the biblical word kept Congregationalism from becoming a new form of religious anarchy. But it was, at bottom, a joint commitment of all God’s people to stay spiritually lean and eager, keeping watch over each other’s souls and listening together for God’s voice – and always being ready for new surprises.
