The Gathered Church That Rejected the Parish

A congregation defines membership by voluntary attendance rather than by residence, and that distinction was not incidental but the entire argument of the movement that built the model. Continental and English Protestants who rejected an established, territorial church, including early Baptists and the Congregationalists who took their name from the principle, held that a true church could only be a company of believers who had gathered themselves by choice, not everyone who happened to live inside a parish boundary and had been baptized there as an infant.

New England Congregationalists gave the model its clearest written form in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, which described each local congregation as fully complete in itself, able to call and dismiss its own minister and answerable to no bishop or synod with binding power over it, only to fellowship and mutual advice among sister congregations. This is the opposite structural choice from a parish, which exists because a territory needs a church, not because a group of people chose one another. The congregational model spread through later movements built on the same logic, including much of American evangelicalism, where a congregation's independence from denominational hierarchy remains a point of principle rather than a mere administrative convenience.