In all my years of working as a minister in the Methodist church the word "congregationalism" was used in a pejorative way to describe a tendency latent in all congregations to see their own little church community as the centre of the world and stuff the rest. Thus in my mind I always associated the word congregationalist with the words bloody minded, selfish and individualist.
As I now am minister of a URC church which was previously a congregationalist church I am having to revise my opinions. My views were most forcefully challenged last week when I heard a talk by an academic from the British congregational federation who extolled the virtues of a Church being behoven to no-one; flexible and adaptive to changing circumstances in a changing world, able to respond quickly and effectively to the situations in its locality and become church as appropriate for this present time. Maybe I have not been looking in the right places but this sort of flexible, postmodern, dynamic church is not what I usually see when I look at congregational churches.
Where a church is large and financially self sufficient then I guess that the congregational model of ecclesiology works well. I am not sure that it works as well with the present state of many churches who have shrunk in terms of membership and who have only grown in terms of average age of the congregation. My long experience of working in a church that is set up to work collaboratively (connexionally) tells me that co-operation between different congregations of the same denomination is always fighting against the mentality of "pulling up the drawbridge to protect what we have left" .
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