The Congregational Church in America Quiz

Answer:

The Pilgrims and Puritans were 17th-century English Protestants who migrated to America primarily due to religious persecution and a desire to establish communities where they could worship according to their own strict Calvinist beliefs.

The Pilgrims were a more radical faction of Puritans who believed that the Church of England was too corrupt to be reformed from within. They were known as Separatists because they sought a complete break from the Anglican Church at that time. In 1620, around 100 passengers set sail on the "Mayflower" and established the Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts.

The larger group of Puritans agreed with the Pilgrims on the need to "purify" the Church of England of its remaining Catholic practices but initially believed they could achieve this change while remaining within the church. However, persecution under the current king forced thousands of them to migrate to the New World where they established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with Boston as its center.

Both of these groups believed in an autonomous local church, a core tenet of what became known as Congregationalism. They felt each congregation should be self-governing and not ruled by bishops and archbishops. In 1648, Puritan ministers and lay representatives in Massachusetts drafted the "Cambridge Platform", which laid out the standards for their self-governing church structure and became regarded as the "religious constitution" of New England Congregationalism. This established Congregationalism as the dominant, state-supported church in most of New England.

However, several factors in the 1700s affected the Congregationalist members. First, the Great Awakening, a series of Protestant Christian revivals, swept through the colonies in the early to mid 1700s. This brought many new members to the church, but those who embraced more radical revivalism often left to become Baptists or Methodists. Secondly, the American Revolution brought with it a push for separation of church and state, rooted in principles of religious liberty and individual rights. This meant the church was no longer the official, tax-supported state church in most of New England. Thirdly, the Enlightenment and its Age of Reason encouraged people to question traditional religious dogma.

In the 1800s, with the loss of state monetary support, the church's members embraced a system of voluntary associations (often called the "Benevolent Empire") to organize and fund social reform and missionary work. This included sending missionaries around the globe, aiding people on the frontier with new congregations, and focusing on prison reform and the temperance movement. Congregationalists had a belief that slavery was a "national sin" that could incur divine judgment, so they were heavily involved in the abolitionist movement around the Civil War. At the same time, they were busy founding several of America's most prestigious and elite universities, particularly within the Ivy League. The primary motivation for this was to train educated clergy and civil servants.

By the mid-1900s, the Congregationalist church tradition had fragmented into three main, separate bodies in the United States. The largest of these was the United Church of Christ formed in 1957. It tended to be a more liberal denomination. The others were the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches and the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. Many churches also stayed autonomous.

Throughout the centuries, the Congregationalist church has had some core beliefs. Members see Jesus, and not an earthly person like a pope, to be the head of the church and to have ultimate authority. Every believer is seen as having direct access to God through Christ. Congregationalists view the Bible as the inspired Word of God. They trust that the individual person, guided by the Holy Spirit, will interpret the Scriptures for themselves and the local church. Congregationalists, in keeping with most Protestant traditions, recognize and practice two sacraments: Baptism and the Lord's Supper (also known as Holy Communion or Eucharist). They see Baptism as an entry into the universal church and Holy Communion to commemorate Christ's sacrifice and celebrate His continuing presence with His people. Across all modern expressions of the movement, the belief that the local congregation is the primary unit of the church, accountable only to Jesus Christ, remains central to the Congregationalist identity.