The Baptists: Autonomy of the Local Congregation
The Old Order
From about the year AD 150 to 1500 the Church was uniformly organized along geographic lines. Generally speaking a number of local congregations were clustered together into what is called a diocese under the authority of a bishop. Additionally, individual dioceses were often further grouped around archdioceses under the authority of archbishops. And at times these archdioceses were likewise under the authority of a patriarchate.
The question of whether this policy (or some simplified version of it) was practiced in the New Testament period (AD 30 to 90) is a difficult one. On the one hand, some sort of regional authority does seem to have been exercised by the Apostles (e.g. James in Jerusalem) and this role was even exercised by men who were not Apostles themselves (e.g. Titus 1:5). In the Book of Revelation (written circa AD 90), Jesus commends the church at Smyrna (2:8-11) for its rich spirituality; Ignatius of Antioch (died AD 117) would also write to this region and addressed his letter to the bishop, Polycarp.
On the other hand, there is evidence that especially large cities with multiple Christian communities did not always have a single bishop running the show: there is some confusion as to who succeeded Peter as the leader of the Christians in Rome and this may be explained by the presence of numerous cooperating but not consolidated church bodies in the city. Also, when Ignatius wrote a letter to the Roman Christians, he interestingly didn’t mention a bishop. It may be that the Church in the New Testament era was home to a number of different organizational models and that only over time did the hierarchical model become normative.
The Revolution
In any event, the Protestant Reformation disrupted the organizational unity of the Western Church and the classical episcopal system found itself rubbing shoulders (once again?) with other systems. Those Protestant groups which had de facto control over a geographical area generally maintained some form of regional inter-congregational control: Calvinist synods in Scotland, Lutheran dioceses in Sweden, etc. But other groups which were less numerous and thus less dominant (such as Baptists) were compelled to adopt congregational polity in which individual congregation, often separated by great distances, functioned independent of any overarching control.
The Baptist Mainstream
Most Baptist churches continue to maintain congregational autonomy, allowing each church to govern itself. Despite this, though, many churches choose to freely cooperate with other likeminded churches to advance causes beyond the reach of a single congregation including missions work, seminary and university education, and publishing. These cooperating churches often organize themselves into loose, non-binding confederations to aid in this work.
Minority Reports
Two distinct trends away from the aforementioned mainstream are apparent in modern Baptist life: one discouraging cooperation altogether and the other advocating a far more aggressive form of interconnectedness.
The former trend is represented by so-called “hard shell” or anti-missionary Baptist churches and strident Independent Baptist churches that refuse to cooperate with other congregations either for matters of doctrine (hyper-Calvinism) or polity.
The later trend takes two forms: episcopal Baptists and local churches employing a satellite campus model. Episcopal Baptists are Baptist groups which have embraced the hierarchical model described above. Major expressions of this tradition exist in Congo, Latvia, Georgia, and India. The satellite campus model is largely an American experiment pursued by mega-churches in which a sermon is recorded at a central location and rebroadcast to a variety of satellite congregations under the central church’s control.