Word Finder - congregational

definition

Of or pertaining to a congregation

A Congregational society was founded in 1662, and its old church, dating from 1702, stood until 1906.

The government of the church is chiefly according to the congregational principle, and the women have an equal voice with the men; but annual meetings, attended by the bishops, teachers and other delegates from the several congregations are held, and at these sessions the larger questions involving church polity are considered and decided by a committee of five bishops.

These two movements coalesced in a single Congregational Union in 1897.

From New England, as has been seen, Puritan settlers established Presbyterian churches (or churches which immediately became Presbyterian) in Long Island, on New Jersey, and in South Carolina; but the Puritans who remained in New England usually established Congregational churches.

The foreign missionary work of the General Assembly had been carried on after 1812 through the (Congregational) American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (organized in 1810) until the separation of 1837, when the Old School Assembly established its own board of foreign missions; the New School continued to work through the American board; after the union of 1869 the separate board was perpetuated and the American board transferred to it, with the contributions made to the American board by the New School churches, the missions in Africa (1833), in Syria (1822), and in Persia (1835).

Dr Smith resigned his chair at Lane Seminary, and entered the Congregational ministry.

Her father (the Congregational minister of the town) and her mother were both descended from members of the company that, under John Davenport, founded New Haven in 1638; and the community in which she spent her childhood was one of the most intellectual in New England.

Dr Park's sermon, "The Theology of the Intellect and that of the Feelings," delivered in 1850 before the convention of the Congregational ministers of Massachusetts, and published in the Bibliotheca sacra of July 1850, was the cause of a long and bitter controversy, metaphysical rather than doctrinal, with Charles Hodge.

In Wichita are Fairmount College (Congregational; co-educational; organized as a preparatory school in 1892 and as a college in 1895); Friends' University (Society of Friends; co-educational; 1898); and Mount Carmel Academy and the Pro-Cathedral School (both Roman Catholic).

It has a fine Federal building, one of the best high-school buildings in Wisconsin, the Vaughn public library (1895), a Roman Catholic hospital, and the Rinehart hospital, and is the seat of the Northland College and Academy (Congregational).

It contains a monument to William Cowper, who came to live here in 1796, and the Congregational chapel stands on the site of the house where the poet spent his last days.

Close to this church is the City Temple (Congregational).

In 1764 Adams had married Miss Abigail Smith (1744-1818), the daughter of a Congregational minister at Weymouth, Massachusetts.

After having been apprenticed to a linendraper, and for three years a clerk in a Dundee business house, he entered the Hoxton (Congregational) Theological College, and in 1804 was appointed to a Congregational chapel in Aberdeen.

Unitarian tendencies away from the Calvinism of the old Congregational churches were plainly evident about 1750, and it is said by Andrew P. Peabody (1811-1893) that by 1780 nearly all the Congregational pulpits around Boston were filled by Unitarians.

Among the public buildings and places of interest are the three churches on the Green, built in 5854; Center Church (Congregational), in the rear of which is the grave of John Dixwell (1608-1689), one of the regicides; United (formerly known as North) Church (Congregational), and Trinity Church, which belongs to one of the oldest Protestant Episcopal congregations in Connecticut.

Few are found to observe the law concerning the Five Hours of Prayer, and many fail to put in an appearance at the Friday congregational services in the mosques.

Oberlin is primarily an educational centre, the seat of Oberlin College, named in honour of Jean Frederic Oberlin, and open to both sexes; it embraces a college of arts and sciences, an academy, a Theological Seminary (Congregational), which has a Slavic department for the training of clergy for Slavic immigrants, and a conservatory of music. In 1909 it had twenty buildings, and a Memorial Arch of Indiana buff limestone, dedicated in 1903, in honour of Congregational missionaries, many of them Oberlin graduates, killed in China in 1900.

The Baptists, Congregationalists and Calvinistic Methodists have each a chapel in the town, and there is also a Congregational church at Tredwestan, founded in 1662.

In some of the catacombs, however, there are larger halls and connected suites of chapels which may possibly have been constructed for the purpose of congregational worship during the dark periods when the public exercise of the Christian religion was made penal.

The arrangements are certainly such as indicate a congregational purpose, but the extreme narrowness of the suite, and still more of the passage which connects the two divisions, must have rendered it difficult for any but a small number to take any intelligent part in the services at the same time.

The city has, besides, numerous fine office buildings, including that of the Society for Savings (an institution in which each depositor is virtually a stockholder), the Citizens', Rose, Williamson, Rockefeller, New England and Garfield buildings; and several beautiful churches, notably the Roman Catholic and Trinity cathedrals, the First Presbyterian ("Old Stone"), the Second Presbyterian, the First Methodist and Plymouth (Congregational) churches.

He graduated at Western Reserve College in 1864 and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1869; preached in Edinburg, Ohio, in 1869-1871, and in the Spring Street Congregational Church of Milwaukee in 5875-5879; and was professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College in 58 791881, and Clark professor of metaphysics and moral philosophy at Yale from 1881 till 5905, when he took charge of the graduate department of philosophy and psychology; he became professor emeritus in 1905.

The principal buildings are the parish church of St Thomas (restored 1874), the church of St David (r866), a Roman Catholic church, and Baptist, Calvinistic, Methodist, Congregational and Wesleyan chapels; the intermediate and technical schools (1895), Davies's endowed (elementary) school (1789), the Gwyn Hall (1888), the town hall, with corn exchange in the basement storey, and the market-house.

He graduated at Harvard in 1796, and in 1798 was ordained pastor of the Congregational Church at West Newbury.

The Jethro Coffin House was built in 1686, according to tradition; the Old North Vestry, the first Congregational meeting-house, built in r 7 r r, was moved in 1767, and again in 1834 to its present site on Beacon Hill.

He preached in the Presbyterian church at East Hampton, Long Island (1798-1810, being ordained in 1 799); in the Congregational church at Litchfield, Connecticut (1810-1826), in the Hanover Street church of Boston (1826-1832), and in the Second Presbyterian church of Cincinnati, Ohio (1833-1843); was president of the newly established Lane Theological Seminary at Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, and was professor of didactic and polemic theology there (1832-1850), being professor emeritus until his death.

Thrice married, he had a large family, his seven sons becoming Congregational clergymen, and his daughters, Harriet Beecher Stowe (q.v.) and Catherine Esther Beecher, attaining literary distinction.

From 1830 to 1844 he was president of Illinois College, Jacksonville, Illinois, and subsequently filled pastorates at the Salem Street church, Boston (1844-1855), and the Congregational church at Galesburg, Illinois (1855-1871).

From 1859 to 1869 he was pastor of the Independent Congregational (Unitarian) church at Bangor, Maine.

His greatgrandfather, Ebenezer Parkman, a graduate of Harvard in 1721, was for nearly sixty years minister of the Congregational Church in Westborough, and was noted for his devotion to the study of history.

In 1833 the Congregational Union published a Declaration or Confession of Faith, Church Order and Discipline.

Their form of church government is Congregational; they take the Bible as the sole rule of faith and practice, and while adopting immersion as the proper mode of baptism, freely welcome Christians of every sect to their communion.

In 1842-1855 he was pastor of the South Congregational Church of Boston, and in 1855-1860 was preacher to the university and Plummer professor of Christian Morals at Harvard; he then left the Unitarian Church, with which his father had been connected as a clergyman at Hadley, resigned his professorship and became pastor of the newly established Emmanuel Church of Boston.

There are schools, of theology at Cambridge (Protestant Episcopal), Newton (Baptist) and Waltham (New Church), as well as in connexion with Boston University (Methodist), Tufts College (Universalist) and Harvard (non-sectarian, and the affiliated Congregational Andover Theological Seminary at Cambridge).

The Boston public library, exceeded in size in the United States by the library of Congress at Washington - and probably first, because of the large number of duplicates in the library of Congress - and the largest free municipal library in the world; the library of Harvard, extremely well chosen and valuable for research; the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1791); the Boston Athenaeum (1807); the State Library (1826); the New England Historic Genealogical Society (1845); the Congregational Library; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780); and the Boston Society of Natural History (1830), all in Boston, leave it easily unrivalled, unless by Washington, as the best research centre of the country.

These movements issued in the congregational system which is the present polity among Benedictines.

In 1854 he entered Hackney College to prepare for the Congregational ministry, and in 1857 he graduated B.A.

After holding pastorates at Burton-on-Trent (1856-1861), Surbiton (1862-1870), Leicester (1870-1876), he finally accepted the pastorate of the Congregational Church at Bowdon, Cheshire, in 1877, in which he remained till his death.

In 1886 he was chairman of the Congregational Union, which he represented in 1889 at the triannual national council of the American Congregational churches.

He returned to America in 1840, was a tutor for a few months (1840-1841) at Bowdoin, and in 1842, shut out from any better place by distrust of his German training and by his frank opposition to Unitarianism, he became pastor of the Congregational Church of West Amesbury (now Merrimac), Massachusetts.

This, the negative aspect of the congregational idea, has emerged at certain stages of its history as Independency.

But catholicity of feeling is inherent in the congregational idea of the church, inasmuch as it knows no valid use of the term intermediate between the local unit of habitual Christian fellowship and the church universal.

But whatever its exact attributes, as he conceived it, it was still strictly a congregational office.

Indeed the development of the whole hierarchy above the congregational bishop was largely influenced by the imperial system, especially after Church and State came into alliance under Constantine.

It is also implied in the congregational form and spirit of the earliest liturgies; but most of all in the discipline of the church before Constantine.

Their local church life, as moulded by this idea (found even in the church constitution adopted by Hesse in 1526), was congregational in type.

But these " private assemblies of the professors in these hard times," as Strype calls them, were congregational simply by accident.

Still, the development of congregational churches proper was gradual, the result of constant study of " the Word of God " in the light of experience.

As it may be called the primary classic of congregational theory, its leading principles must here be summarized.