“Congregational Clericalism: New England Ordinations before the Great Awakening”

by  J. William T. Youngs, Jr.

 in the William and Mary Quarterly

July, 1974, pp. 481-490

This article suggests that congregational ordination is hardly as pure as Unitarians like to pretend.

• What can we say about the source of ministerial power?

David Hall is a Professor of History recently relocated from Boston University to Harvard Divinity School.…

Again, Conrad Wright returns to the Cambridge Platform (1848) in this ordination sermon. His burden in this discourse is to point up the appropriate and necessary ways churches of congregational polity relate to one another.…

Conrad Wright, peerless student of Unitarian polity, leads off his book on the subject with a discussion of the key questions of church life – authority, the nature of the church, membership, leadership, ministers, the community of the churches (denominationalism), church/state, and church purposes.…

Henry Wilder Foote (who died in 1984) was ordained in 1902 and served a number of Unitarian churches.…

This version in modern English covers the points of the Platform, while leaving out parts mainly extraneous to the present day.…

James Gustafson is a long time professor at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He wrote as the Congregational Church was headed toward a merger with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to become the United Church of Christ.…

In 1843, a convocation of clergy was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts to discuss the inroads of Presbyterian polity in their midst.…

These brief documents indicate the tension between covenant and freedom, which from the earliest colonial days down to the present, proves an ongoing issue in churches with congregational polity.…

“The Mayflower Compact” (1620)

in Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents of American History, 3rd edition

(Crofts, 1943) pp. 15-16

The Compact is not a creed or even what today would be termed a religious document. Since the Mayflower landed beyond the boundaries of Virginia, all on, board, once off the boat, would be free (“none had the power to command them,” wrote Governor Bradford).…