Congregationalism
In England, the early Congregationalists were called Separatists or Independents to distinguish them from the similarly Calvinistic Presbyterians, whose churches embrace a polity based on the governance of elders; this commitment to self-governing congregations was codified in the Savoy Declaration.
[2] Congregationalism in the United States traces its origins to the Puritans of New England, who wrote the Cambridge Platform of 1648 to describe the autonomy of the church and its association with others.
[6] Within the United States, the model of Congregational churches was carried by migrating settlers from New England into New York, then into the Old Northwest, and further.
Congregationalism, as defined by the Pew Research Center, is estimated to represent 0.5 percent of the worldwide Protestant population.
According to Congregationalist minister Charles Edward Jefferson, this means that "Every believer is a priest and ... every seeking child of God is given directly wisdom, guidance, power".
[14] The Puritans were Calvinists who wanted to further reform the church by abolishing all remaining Catholic practices, such as clerical vestments, wedding rings, organ music in church, kneeling at Holy Communion, using the term priest for a minister, bowing at the name of Jesus, and making the sign of the cross in baptism and communion.
[24] In the early 1600s, a Separatist congregation in Scrooby was founded through the efforts of John Smyth (who later rejected infant baptism and became a founder of the Baptist movement).
In 1662, two years after the Restoration, two thousand Independent, Presbyterian, and congregational ministers were evicted from their parishes as dissenters and not being in Holy Orders conferred by bishops.
In 1658 (during the interregnum) the Congregationalists created their own version of the Westminster Confession, called the Savoy Declaration, which remains the principal subordinate standard of Congregationalism.
The work in South America began in 1921 when four Argentine churches urgently requested that denominational recognition be given to George Geier, serving them.
The Illinois Conference licensed Geier, who worked among Germans from Russia who were very similar to their kin in the United States and in Canada.
Information indicates that since 1923 there were activities in private homes and in 1928 the first pastoral house was inaugurated, in San Salvador from 1928, in Concordia, from 1929–1930, in Federal from 1934, in Paraná since the 1940's.
In the province of Chaco, immigrants from Germany, Russia and neighbouring areas settled in Colonia Palmar, between Charata and General Pinedo.
When they heard about the existence of the Evangelical Congregational Church, they contacted and invited the North American missionary Guillermo Strauch to visit them.
This took place on August 25, 1928, when the first service was held and as a result of the meeting they decided to join the I. E. C. The following year, their first church was inaugurated.
Due to a great drought, in 1945 this church had to close its doors, and the families emigrated to Villa Ángela, Coronel Du Graty or Santa Sylvina, in the province of Chaco, or to El Colorado, in Formosa.
In the province of Misiones, in Leandro N. Alem and the surrounding area, immigrants from Poland, Germany and Brazil began to arrive between 1929 and 1938.
In 1946 the missionary Otto Tiede organised the first board of directors in the Colegiales neighbourhood, when the congregation met in the church "El Buen Pastor", which was lent to them by the Disciples of Christ.
The Evangelical Congregational Church spread to Córdoba in 1972, with itinerant missionary work from Basavilbaso (Entre Ríos).
In the first 100 years, it has spread from Entre Ríos to several provinces: Misiones, Corrientes, Chaco, Formosa, Córdoba, Santa Fe, Buenos Aires and CABA.
With presence in formal and informal education, training and instructing people of all ages, in arts and crafts, in values and principles that make solidarity, human rights, and a better quality of life for all, according to the possibilities and opportunities.
Missionaries from the United States first arrived in 1857–58, sent to Istanbul by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).
In 1857, Cyrus Hamlin and Charles Morse established three missionary centres in southern Bulgaria – in Odrin (Edirne, former capital city of the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey), Plovdiv and Stara Zagora.
This effort was supported by Congregationalist missionary Albert Long, Konstantin Fotinov, Hristodul Sechan-Nikolov and Petko Slaveikov.
[31] The missionaries played a significant role in assisting the Bulgarians throw off "the Turkish Yoke", which included publishing the magazine Zornitsa (Зорница, "Dawn"), founded in 1864 by the initiative of Riggs and Long.
On 3 September 1901 Congregationalist missionaries came to world attention in the Miss Stone Affair when missionary Ellen Maria Stone,[34] of Roxbury, Massachusetts, and her pregnant fellow missionary friend Macedonian-Bulgarian Katerina Stefanova–Tsilka, wife of an Albanian Protestant minister, were kidnapped while traveling between Bansko and Gorna Dzhumaya (now Blagoevgrad), by an Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization detachment led by the voivoda Yane Sandanski and the sub-voivodas Hristo Chernopeev and Krǎstyo Asenov and ransomed to provide funds for revolutionary activities.
The Bulgarian royal house, of Catholic German extraction, was unsympathetic to the American inspired Protestants, and this mood became worse when Bulgaria sided with Germany in WWI and WWII.
In fifteen highly publicized mock show-trials between 8 February and 8 March 1949, all the accused pastors confessed to a range of charges against them, including treason, spying (for both the US and Yugoslavia), black marketing, and various immoral acts.
In 1988, a number of UCC congregations separated from the national church, which they felt was moving away theologically and in practice from Biblical Christianity.
In the United States, the Congregational tradition traces its origins mainly to Puritan settlers of colonial New England.
