To outsiders, Unitarian Universalism often looks like a religion that is very contemporary, alert to the issues and ideas of the moment, even too much so, perhaps a little faddish, the sort of place where, you turn your back for a few years and when you look again, in every church there are people lighting chalices and candles and telling their joys and concerns and sorrows, or groups that celebrate the solstices, the sort of place where you might have come because you were looking forward to some up-to-the-minute sermon, say, on impeachment, where the minister might share his views, might explain how annoying he finds the whole business, how ludicrously far short the President’s misbehaviors fall from justifying any thought of impeachment (if that happened to be the minister’s point of view).

 But instead, on this Sunday at this place, this minister is going to talk about the Cambridge Platform, which is not a contemporary stage across the river from Boston, but an ecclesiastical document drafted in 1648 and adopted by vote of the legislature three years later (although the deputy from our town voted against).

 This being the 350th anniversary of the Cambridge Platform, events have been scheduled in its honor, including a two-day conference in Cambridge later this month. My original plan, if fact, was to attend the conference so I would have something to say in a sermon next month. But next month, we’ll be broadcasting our sermons on the radio, and the subject didn’t seem like one I could easily make interesting to the average person listening at home.

 Whereas, I actually entertain the hope that those of us who are UUs already, or at least already interested enough to have made it here to services, might be coaxed into caring about the Cambridge Platform and its issues and attitudes. So instead of a report back on the conference – which I do still plan to attend --  this is an encouragement to consider attending yourself; flyers are on the big table downstairs.

 The idea that a 1648 ecclesiastical declaration might still have something to say to us today is less farfetched than it might seem. It gets cited all the time in the never-ending discussion in Unitarian Universalism over the question, what does it mean to be congregational – not congregational with a capital C, as in the name of the Sudbury Congregational Church, for example – but congregational with a small c, to describe how some churches are organized and governed, to describe what is called their church polity.

 My guess is, church polity is not something you pondered during this past week, and you probably would have gotten through today, too, without giving it a thought if I hadn’t brought it up, and maybe not even then. But for much church history, it has been the source of considerable friction and division. It still stirs dispute in our own little movement. The other week, a group of almost a hundred people met for the second annual convention of a group formed to preserve a certain vision of congregationalism, one they see threatened by creeping Presbyterianism, which is to say, by the effort to strengthen the denomination itself, with some feared loss of the independence of the local congregations.

 And when the argument gets going, there are sure to be references on both sides to the Cambridge Platform. Not that anyone today would turn back to the Platform for its advice on any other matter, church-state relations in particular, which were assumed back then to be much cosier than we would accept today. But when it comes to how we organize ourselves, everyone invokes the Cambridge Platform, at least in passing, one side to remind the movement of its deep roots in congregationalism, the other side to recall how the Platform defined that congregationalism in ways that expected a high level of inter-church collaboration.

 Every fall I give a sermon on the basics of our movement, sometimes trying to speak broadly about our mission, as I will on November 1; but sometimes focusing on one aspect of who we are, and congregationalism is one of the biggest, or at least it has seemed so to many people at many times. I think these days people who come to church are much more concerned with finding a workable faith for themselves, a service with beautiful music, religious education for their children, and community.

 But even for us, there are times when it makes a difference who’s in charge, who gets to decide whether a minister stays or goes, who gets to choose the next one, who defines what membership means, who decides when worship will be. In most other denominations, those decisions are in the hands of a hierarchy, of a headquarters somewhere, of a bishop, of a synod. Whereas for us, power rests in the membership, which elects its own leaders.

 We are not the only small-c congregationalists. The big-C Congregationalists are, too, as are Baptists, Reform Jews, and probably a few others. They face the same built-in tension between the autonomy of the local congregations and the common interest in their acting together on certain matters, as in certifying clergy, producing hymnals, and having national or global impact, whether through evangelism or social action.

As UUs, we had our own little brouhaha of this sort just last year, when the continental Board of Trustees was forced to back down on a plan to deny representation at General Assembly to any congregation that did not make at least a certain pretty nominal donation to the UUA, our continental association. A large church threatened to cut it own funding to zero, arguing that any such requirement was an infringement on their congregational polity, classically defined in the Cambridge Platform.

Needless to say, some people just don’t give a hoot, including some who recall that this congregational polity business is something the Universalists gave up on early in their history, as an impediment to effective the growth of their movement. Unitarians were never as interested in such growth, however, certainly not so much that they were willing to compromise their commitment to local independence very far. After all, unlike those of the Universalists, the Unitarian churches were descended from those people who committed themselves to congregationalism, in particular, in the Cambridge Platform.

There are a couple funny things about the importance the Platform took on in our history. I mean, not so funny you’re going to fall out of your pew laughing, or even smile, but the large group of church delegates who assembled in Cambridge from all over the combined colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, came in answer to a legislative request for advice of two different ecclesiastical matters, membership and baptism.

Those were the matters which were causing a lot of fuss in the early 1640s, which is the say, in the first years of the life of this congregation of ours. Because in the Puritan way of doing things, only the regenerate were allowed church membership or could receive communion. It took more than clean living or even right belief. You had to have had a conversion experience you could describe convincingly. This is what most set them apart from the other members of the Church of England, those back home, and from the Presbyterians who dominated in Scotland.

But Anglicans and Presbyterians who came to Massachusetts, some of having been members of their churches back home, were not pleased to be denied church membership, communion, the right to have their children baptized, and the vote. Petitions and lawsuits followed, as well as the possibility that the decision could end up being made in England, seriously compromising the authority of the colonial government, especially since Parliament had already enforced Presbyterian polity in England, after it linked up with Scotland in its battle against the king. Something had to be done, and representatives of churches from the four colonies met in Cambridge, first in 1646, and then again, famously, in 1648, at the invitation of the government, to offer it advice.

As it happens, by then the situation in England had changed again, and power rested with the army, which was sympathetic to the New England Puritan cause. So the writers basically ducked the issues both of membership and baptism, continuing the practices which would become ever more impossible to defend until, within a decade, they started to be changed, as the Puritans were forced to give up their hope of a church made up of only those they termed the "militant visible saints."

After all, what could you do about the grandchildren problem? As regenerate, visible saints, church members could baptize their children, who could then become full church members once they, too, had experienced a work of God’s grace in their souls. But many of those children did not experience such a work by the time they became parents themselves. Could their children be baptized, and then those children’s children?

So a second funny thing about the Cambridge Platform of which some speak so reverentially, is that it was followed by a succession of other platforms, which undid much of what was accomplished in 1648. But if the delegates did not find solutions to the problems created by Puritan rules of church membership, they did take the time in seventeen chapters to codify broadly the Puritan way of understanding church, including the fundamental doctrine of congregationalism.

Although the Puritans would say that it is an idea that follows directly from the Bible, historically it can be traced to Robert Browne, a sixteenth-century Englishmen. It holds that a church is not some large collection of congregations – it is a congregation, a single group of people who covenant together as equals to walk together in the ways of their common faith, which for that time was a faith in Christ as lord. Officers of the church, including the minister, were to be chosen by the membership, and subject to their removal.

As I mentioned earlier, in congregationally-based traditions like our own, there can be a tension between two competing points of view, one of which holds that we need strong denominational institutions and affiliation. At its most extreme, at least one proponent has been heard (by me) to wonder why we can’t have all the other things about our movement, but drop the congregational polity and adopt a more effective structure like the Methodists or Lutherans have. Such people tend not to speak up much, since congregational polity is a commitment many UUs take as just this side of sacred.

Indeed, the competing point of view is one that wary of any compromises of that polity. At its most extreme, many proponents have been heard to suggest, and on many more than one occasion, that each congregation is absolutely independent. Proponents will sometimes use the phrase "congregational polity" or make reference to the Cambridge Platform as if they supported their viewpoint.

And there is much in Browne’s treatises and in the Cambridge Platform that emphasize a high degree of congregational autonomy. The latter declares that "The state the members of the Militant visible church [is] … since the comming of Christ, only congregational…. A Congregational-church [consists] … of a company of Saints by calling, united into one body, by a holy covenant, for the publick worship of God, & the mutuall edification one of another, in the Fellowship of  the Lord Iesus…. There is no greater Church then [sic] a Congregation…." [Walker 205, 207]

But Browne himself "saw that … local churches as separate bodies had duties one to another…. He recognized clearly "the propriety of … ‘meetings of sundrie churches: which when the weaker churches seeke helpe of the stronger, for deciding or redressing of matters or else the stronger looke to them for redresse.’" [Walker 14]

 And the Cambridge Platform has a whole, long chapter (15) on "the comunion of Churches one with another," which begins, "Although Churches be distinct, & therfore may not be confounded one with another: & equall, & therefore have not dominion one over another: yet all the churches ought to preserve Church-communion one with another…." [Walker 229-230]

 It sets of six ways of doing so, and then adds two more. First, "By way of mutuall care in taking thought for one anothers wellfare."
 Second, "By way of Consultation one with another, when wee have occasion to require the judgment & counsell of other churches, touching any person, or cause wherwith they may be better acquainted than ourselves."
 Third, "by way of admonition, to witt, in case any publick offence be found in a church, which they either discern not, or are slow in proceeding to use the means of the removing & healing thereof." They take a long time defending that one.
 Fourth, "by way of participation," such as admitting members of other churches to partake in communion, or baptizing their infants if their minister is absent, A church with more than one minister might loan one to a church whose minister was ill.
 Fifth, "by way of recomendation" of a member to a new church when the member moves.
 "A sixt way of Church-communion, is in the case of Need, to minister reliefe & succor one unto another: either of able members to furnish them with officers; or of outward support to the necessities of poorer churches…."

 The Platform goes on to cite the need for new churches to notify their neighbor churches, and ask for their "presence, & help, & the right hand of fellowship", which should be given unless there be any reason why not. And finally it cites as a way of church communion, the "way of propagation of churches," spinning off a new church when one’s own grows too large. [Walker 230-232]

 Recalling this very list, the historian Conrad Wright concluded, "So congregationalism meant, as it should still mean, not the autonomy of the local church, but the community of autonomous churches." [Wright 21]

 This is much in keeping with Robert Browne’s original vision, which imagined "that the local independence of the individual congregation is consistent with a real and efficient unity with other churches." In the words of Williston Walker, Robert Browne’s new polity "steered a safe course between the sacrifice of self-government of the local church for the sake of a strong central authority…, and the abandonment of real mutual accountability between churches…." [Walker 17]

 It is that middle course, autonomy and community both, that is expressed in the earliest version of congregational polity, which was Browne’s, and in its most famous rendering, the Cambridge Platform. We can have our congregational polity and vigorous denominational efforts as well, whether on the continental level at General Assembly and at UUA headquarters in Boston, or in regional events like the second annual New England Gathering of UUs to take place next month in Providence, or in District meetings, or when we participate in big events in our neighboring congregations. Sudbury and Framingham churches are both about to install new ministers; folks could go.

 Of course, one could go too far and end up with just that strong central authority that Walker though was an evil, and which is at least not our way.

But currently, the concern is on the other side, that we need to value our independence less, our interdependence more.

 This follows on the heels of a denominational report titled, "interdependence: renewing congregational polity." It argued for a view of congregational polity based on collaboration as much as freedom in the relationships between our churches.  It said, "We need to affirm congregational polity as a covenant, a mutual agreement and a commitment to walk together and support one another; it is an expression of our spiritual vision." [CoA 11]

 That report led to a four-year denominational effort called "Fulfilling the Promise," to try to renew a sense of covenant between our congregations, and also within our congregations, and finally, between our movement and the larger interfaith community. On all three levels – inter-church, intra-church, and intra-denominational – the goal is "to strengthen a sense of connectedness, interdependence, and community, partly to counterbalance a perceived excessive emphasis on individualism." [Robert Bellah in Aler-Maida 8]

 Opponents of the initiative cite the Cambridge Platform’s affirmation of congregational autonomy. Supporters cite the Cambridge Platform’s affirmation of "Church-comunion." Three hundred-fifty years later, while so much of its theology, its definition of church membership, its intertwining of church and state, are generally forgotten and gladly by most, the Puritan’s balanced sense of congregational polity remains informative and powerful, calling us away from extremes of local independence and of central control alike, calling us at every level into a richer "community of the autonomous," both interconnected and free.

Bibliography
Aler-Maida, Kay, et al., Fulfilling the Promise, 1998
Commission on Appraisal, The, "Interdependence: renewing congregational polity" (Boston: UUA, 1997)
Miller, Perry, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts 1630-1650 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959)
Morgan, Edmund S., Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1963)
Walker, Williston, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969)
Wright, Conrad, Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian and Universalist Churches (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1989)
 
 

  Back to the beginning of the First Parish homepage