though their callmediatelycame from the people. Ministers preached, administered the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, catechized children, and provided moral and religious leadership and supervision in the community. Their flocks, the laymen of the Church, held a kind of power from Christ to call their leaders, though once in office ministers were to be obeyed, and at "liberty" to give their consent to major decisions taken by the eldersthe admission of new members and the discipline of strays among the faithful.
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This system, if it may be called that, proved more susceptible to amendment and change in practice than in theory. A strong pastor could render the liberty of the lay brethren almost meaningless if he chose; and in a few cases, the church expanded their liberty from consent to an authority to rule. Ministerial associations, and synods, special meetings of pastors and lay representatives, also presented a challenge to the autonomy of the individual church. The relationship of these bodies and of the competing authority of clergy and laymen preoccupied churches and their leaders throughout the seventeenth century. In a variety of forms, the same questions were asked in New England's churches: What authority did ministers have? Should not lay members participate in the governing of the church? And where could the associations of churches and ministers enter the ecclesiastical arrangement, if indeed they could at all?
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Richard Mather possessed the qualities which equipped him to make an important contribution toward the resolution of such questions. And his belief that the survival of Christ's Church was intimately tied to its fate in New England gave the task its importance. In his first years in America two kinds of questions were heard often in discussions of the Church. One, sounded in England and Scotland by Presbyterians, challenged the Congregational dedication to the autonomy of the particular church. News of New England's practices had reached nonconformist ears in England soon after the founding. To those still in the mother country, the news was disturbing and smacked of repressionand, at the same time, of anarchy as well. Two of the leading critics of the New England way were Charles Herle, a Presbyterian minister who preached before the Long Parliament, and Samuel Rutherford, a Scottish divine who had lost his pulpit for opposition to the extension of Episcopacy to Scotland and
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