A Display of God's Glory/Congregationalism

From Gospel Translations

 

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).