Independent Congregationalism?

I know “Independent” is largely how our English forefathers were known, but I’m more of a New England Congregationalist. I’ll appeal to one of our early documents, the Cambridge Platform, “the definitive statement of church order and discipline produced by the Congregationalists of colonial New England” (Historic Documents of Congregationalism 83). “The term independent, we approve not” (2.5). “One point the authors of the Cambridge Platform (1649) were concerned to make was that though they were Congregational, they did not support an extreme independency” (HDC 83-84). Checkout what the Cambridge had to say on Synods, the main point of difference between us and Presbyterians: “The Synod’s directions and determinations, so far as consonant to the Word of God, are to be received with reverence and submission; not only for their agreement therewith, (which is the principal ground thereof, and without which they bind not at all), but also, secondarily, for the power whereby they are made, as being an ordinance of God appointed thereunto in His Word” (16.5). As long as the final authority in the local Congregation is Christ mediated through the local elders, we are far from independent. “Indeed many of the statements in the deleted Westminster Chapter 30 are affirmed in the Saybrook Heads of Agreement (1708) and certainly by actual practice in early American colonies. . . . The Key issue for the Congregationalists was the freedom of the local church, as opposed to the synod as a collected body, to set its own ‘rules and directions’” (HDC 7). In the Heads of Agreement 4.1, drawn up in 1691 and accepted in Saybrook in 1708, we read “We agree, that particular churches ought not to walk so distinct and separate from each other, as not to have care and tenderness towards one another. But their pastors ought to have frequent meetings together, that by mutual advice, support, encouragement, and brotherly intercourse, they may strengthen the hearts and hands of each other in the ways of the Lord.” I’m sticking with the authors of the Cambridge Platform in not approving the term “independent.”