A Display of God's Glory/Congregationalism

From Gospel Translations

Revision as of 16:17, 15 July 2008

Do you consider church to exist merely for your own spiritual growth? When you gather on Sunday morning with your congregational family, you are not simply having your personal devotionals with lots of other people. No, you are participating in the life of a particular church. And when Christians gather as a congregation, it is not merely as individual consumers who happen, by temporarily shared tastes, to be in the same room. We are actually assembling as a living institution, a viable organism, one body. I wonder why YOU go to church.

Let me ask you a question that might help to get to the nub of the matter: What’s the use of the church? Take a moment and try to answer that question. When you understand something more of the church and what it’s about, then the Christian life becomes a lot more than a simple sustained moral effort to cultivate a list of private virtues and avoid a list of private vices. You begin to understand the church as the manifestation of the living God in this world.

Congregationalism—What it Means

Mistaken conceptions of Congregationalism

People have often misunderstood congregationalism. Its detractors have presented it as a kind of lone-rangerish independency. “Separatism,” it’s been called. One writer has defined it as “the claim of individual congregations to act as if they were alone in the world, independently of all other Christians,” (Roland Allen, Missionary Methods, p. 85n1). On the other hand, some of its champions have presented it as straight and simple democracy, tying it up with the inalienable rights of man. Charles Finney presented congregationalism this way:

Episcopacy is well-suited to a state of general ignorace among the people. Presbyterianism, or Church Republicanism is better suited to a more advanced state of intelligence and the prevalence of Christian principle. While Congregationalism, or spiritual Democracy, is best suited and only suited to a state of general intelligence, and the prevalence of Christian principle. (Charles Finney in his Lectures on Theology)

Correct Conception of Congregationalism

None of these are good understandings of the picture of church life that the New Testament leaves us. Congregationalism in no way inhibits cooperation with other congregations in missions, education, evangelism, disaster relief, and so many other things. It does mean, though, that no body from outside can mandate something for a particular congregation, whether in a matter of discipline or of doctrine. Relying on the clarity of Scripture perhaps more than in any other polity, we congregationalists assume that God will lead His people as a whole to understand who should be recognized as members and leaders, what should be believed, and in what should be done.

Some may dismiss congregationalism as just a reflection of enlightenment political theory. But that is simply not the case. In Clement of Rome’s first letter to the church at Corinth, written around AD96, we read of elders being commissioned “with the full consent of the church,” (trans. Staniforth, p. 46). Other examples abound. Certainly Christians in the past have understood this to be taught by Scripture.

Congregationalism is simply the understanding that the last and final court of appeal in a matter of the life of the local church is not the bishop of Rome or Constantinople or Washington. It is not some international body, or some national Assembly, Conference or Convention. It is not the president of a denomination or the chairman of a board of