Reformation
Congregationalist
The far end of the authority axis, and the position that produced more separations than any other on this chart.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
Reformed in doctrine and radical in polity: a church is the people gathered under covenant, and nothing above that gathering may bind it. Held consistently, this makes a division cheap — a congregation that disagrees does not appeal, it constitutes. That is why the right-hand end of the authority axis has produced the most bodies, and this is where the English-speaking part of it starts.
The corpus carries it as a body with a doctrinal position and no practice row. What a separatist congregation did when a member was believed to be afflicted is not something this project holds a text for, and the honest answer is that the polity is precisely what removes the office that would have decided it.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
Church of England · 1581Whether a gathered congregation is a whole church. The separatists held that it is, which made every layer above it — bishop, presbytery, crown — an addition without warrant.
Bodies that separated from it
- Baptist1609
Baptism. A separatist congregation in exile concluded that the baptism of infants is no baptism, and rebaptised itself.
- The restorationist impulse1830
Not one separation but a shared premise, worked out on the American frontier: that the church of the apostles was lost and must be restored rather than reformed. What each body restores, and on whose authority, is where they part company.
The same questions asked of every body
What it holds
Are the gifts still given?
Not established here. Not an exorcism question, and the one that decides the rest. A body holding the gifts ceased with the apostles has no room for a deliverance ministry; a body holding they continue has no reason to license one.
Who may act?
Not established here. The first thing a rite settles, usually in its opening rubric, and the sharpest divide between an office and a gift.
What counts as evidence?
Not established here. Where a tradition decides it is dealing with a spirit rather than an illness, a grief, or nothing at all.
Where is the spirit?
Not established here. All four inherit gospel scenes in which spirits are in people. What each adds beyond that is the largest difference between them.
Whom do the words address?
Not established here. A formal difference a reader can check by counting clauses rather than by weighing tone.
What restraint is written in?
Not established here. Every one of these traditions knows the practice can harm. What each does about that is what popular accounts leave out.
What closes the matter?
Not established here. Whether the encounter ends, and who declares it, separates a rite from an ongoing practice.
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.