page_title: Westminster Assembly
section_title: Debating church government
hierarchical_section_title: Westminster Assembly / Debating church government
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Thomas Goodwin
context_page_description: The Westminster Assembly of Divines was a council of divines and members of the English Parliament appointed from 1643 to 1653 to restructure the Church of England. Several Scots also attended, and the Assembly's work was adopted by the Church of Scotland. As many as 121 ministers were called to the Assembly, with nineteen others added later to replace those who did not attend or could no longer attend. It produced a new Form of Church Government, a Confession of Faith or statement of belief, two catechisms or manuals for religious instruction, and a liturgical manual, the Directory for Public Worship, for the Churches of England and Scotland. The Confession and catechisms were adopted as doctrinal standards in the Church of Scotland and other Presbyterian churches, where they remain normative. Amended versions of the Confession were also adopted in Congregational and Baptist churches in England and New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Confession became influential throughout the English-speaking world, but especially in American Protestant theology.
context_section_description: From the beginning of the First Civil War, the Long Parliament recognized that they would need assistance from the Scots. In return for a military alliance, the Scottish Parliament required the English to sign the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643, which stipulated that the English would bring their church into greater conformity with the Church of Scotland. The Scottish Parliament sent commissioners to London to represent Scotland's interests to the English Parliament. Eleven of these, four theologians and seven members of Parliament, were also invited to the Assembly. The commissioners were given the opportunity to become full voting members of the Assembly but declined, preferring to maintain their independence as commissioners of their own nation and church. Samuel Rutherford, George Gillespie, and Alexander Henderson were the most outspoken of the commissioners.
  On 12 October 1643, Parliament ordered the Assembly to cease work on the Thirty-Nine Articles and to begin to frame a common form of church government for the two nations. The Assembly would spend a quarter of its full sessions on the subject of church government. The majority of the Assembly members supported presbyterian polity, or church government by elected assemblies of lay and clerical representatives, though many were not dogmatically committed to it. Several members of this group, numbering about twenty and including William Twisse, favoured a "primitive" episcopacy, which would include elements of presbyterianism and a reduced role for bishops.
  There were also several congregationalists, who favoured autonomy for individual local churches. Their most influential divines were Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs, and William Bridge. They were often called the "dissenting brethren" in the Assembly. They have sometimes been labelled "Independents", but they rejected this term. The Assembly members for the most part reserved the label "Independent" for separatists who left the established church. The congregationalist divines cannot be equated with separatists and Brownists, as they had accepted episcopal ordination and remained in the Church of England. Their influence was assisted by the success of Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army in the ongoing civil war. Cromwell and many others in the army supported congregationalism.
  A third group of divines were known as Erastians, a term for those who believed that the state should have significant power over the church. The entire Assembly was Erastian in the sense that the body had been called by Parliament and was completely under state control. Those labelled "Erastian" at the Assembly believed the civil authority, rather than church officers, should hold the power of church discipline. This included the power to withhold communion from unrepentant sinners. They did not see any particular form of church government as divinely mandated, and because of this the dissenting brethren allied with them when it became clear that a presbyterian establishment would be much less tolerant of congregationalism than Parliament. There were only two divines at the Assembly who held the Erastian view, John Lightfoot and Thomas Coleman, but the presence of members of Parliament, especially John Selden, as well as the fact of parliamentary oversight of the Assembly, gave Erastian views disproportional influence.
  Several episcopalians, supporters of the existing system of bishops, were also included in the summoning ordinance, but Parliament may have nominated them to lend greater legitimacy to the Assembly and not have expected them to attend because Charles had not approved of the Assembly. Only one, Daniel Featley, participated, and he only until his arrest for treason in October 1643.
  Debate on church officers began on 19 October. The Assembly began with the issue of ordination, as many of the divines were concerned about the rise of various sectarian movements and the lack of any mechanism for ordination of ministers of the established church. While some members did not seem to think ordi
caption: Thomas Goodwin was one of the dissenting brethren.
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