Congregational
- Grew from
- Reformed / Presbyterian
- From
- 1582 AD
- Origin
- England
- Confession
- Savoy Declaration 1658 AD
English separatists who held that a gathered congregation of believers is a complete church needing no wider authority over it, a position Robert Browne put in print in 1582. Congregationalists sailed on the Mayflower, shaped the churches of New England, and later merged into united churches in Britain, Canada and the United States.
What marks it out
Each congregation calls its own minister and settles its own affairs, associating with others by agreement rather than under them. The church covenant, a promise members make to one another, does the work that a hierarchy does elsewhere. This is the polity that gave New England the town meeting, and the tradition founded Harvard and Yale to keep a learned ministry.
Figures
- Jonathan Edwards
1703–1758
The theology of the Great Awakening
- David Livingstone
1813–1873
Exploration, and a campaign against the slave trade
Alongside it
Also from Reformed / Presbyterian.
This body appears in the history but does not carry recorded doctrinal positions here, so it is absent from the comparison panels.