On Being Baptist…Biblical Congregationalism
This Sunday, Grace Church will begin a 4 week series on Church Polity called “CHURCH MATTERS.” Don’t get nervous, church polity is just theological nerd talk for church organization. For the past several weeks, I have been swimming knee deep in a sea of books studying this topic particularly from a Baptist perspective. My experience being Baptist is rather diverse and somewhat sorted to be honest. Frankly speaking, I was not always sure I wanted to remain a Baptist and admittedly at times prayed that God would allow me to reconcile my Biblical convictions concerning baptism with covenantal Presbyteriansim (true story!) Alas, the Holy Spirit, sometimes in the voice of my wife, would not allow me to make that leap (also a true story!). Thus, I have lived these many years as an adult in the tension of being at times a reluctant Baptist and at others, a convictional one.
So what exactly is a Baptist anyway? This question presents many challenges even from my own limited experience. As a child, I grew up, “got saved” and was baptized in an Independent Baptist Church. From my experience, the idea of being Baptist meant fighting over the King James Version and the sin of using all other versions, women only being allowed to wear skirts below the knee (or pants when it snows!), fascination with the pre-tribulational eschatology and the peculiar tension between legalistic living and “once saved always saved.” Southern Baptists, from this perspective were by and large liberal. But before entering college, I started attending and eventually became a member of a large Southern Baptist Church. It was at this point that I was introduced to the broader contours of historic Baptist polity.
In this blog post, I want to briefly unpack the most broad convictions of historic Baptist convictions. These convictions are as follows: believer’s only baptism, regenerate church membership, and autonomous congregationalism.
The most obvious conviction that Baptists hold to is the idea of Believer’s Baptism. Believer’s Baptism, or credobaptism as some call it, was recovered after the Protestant Reformation as further reforms that extended from the errors of Roman Catholicism and its practice of baptizing infants. Baptists felt then and most feel now that Luther, Calvin and Zwingli did not go far enough in their reforms. To be fair, Presbyterians, Lutherans and others do not see baptism as salvific like their predecessors in the Roman Catholic Church yet Baptists see padeobaptism as problematic. Sam Storms makes the case for believers baptism clear: “baptism is portrayed in the New Testament as a symbol of the beginning of spiritual life (Gal. 3:27; Rom. 6:3-4; Col. 2:12), as well as “an appeal to God for a good conscience” (1 Peter 3:21). Unless one is prepared to predicate salvation and spiritual life of unbelieving infants, or suggest that they are capable of making a conscious appeal to God for a good conscience, it would appear that baptism is restricted to those who consciously trust Christ…baptism is consistently portrayed as inextricably tied up with (conscious) faith and repentance (e.g., Acts 2:38,4).
By extension then, Baptists strongly believe that members of local churches should give credible evidence of conversion which is made visible in baptism. In other words, Baptist believe in regenerate church membership. The promise that we continually see through out the Old Testament is that the Holy Spirit will dwell in man once again in a new better way thus creating a new people of God. It is not convincing to Baptists (I being one of them) that God’s visible people includes both believing and non-believing parties like that of Israel who were marked by circumcision. The question that Baptists continue to ask is, “what is NEW about the NEW Covenant?” This, at least for this Baptist preacher, is the lynchpin question concerning what constitutes a New Testament church.
Another key foundational conviction for Baptists is the call to autonomous congregationalism. For Baptists, the strength in the church and its mission is the people NOT in the hierarchal structures the stand above or outside the church. To be autonomous simply means that each church is called and equipped to advance the mission of God for their specific context and that no ecclesial authority that stands above the church has any authority over that mission. There are many misunderstandings that have unfortunately distorted this idea. First, Congregationalism does not mean that each church is led by democratic practices or a committee of the whole. The church has been gifted with elders and deacons therefore a healthy local church understands the tensions that arise from scripture and seeks to live them out humbly. Second, being autonomous does not mean a complete lack of theological and missional networking or relationship outside the church. Denominations and networks can help keep theological and missiological guardrails in place so that local churches stay on course but they should have no true authority over the local church. In fact, Baptists have historically done a strong job of partnering together to plant churches and do missions. In the end, as Jonathan Leeman notes in Don’t Fire your Church Members, congregationalism is the attempt to strengthen another office in the church…the office of church member.”
There are other core convictions that have shaped Baptist life that I will refrain from elaborating on in this post. We could mention “the Priesthood of Believers” and “Religious Liberty.” Baptists have championed these ideas through out their history in one way or the other. But in the end, being convictional Baptist is far less about being morally or politically active as our most recent history seems to suggest. It is much more about being people of the Word and displaying the confession of the Gospel through the commitment we have to each other in covenant to walk in faith and repentance together as a believing family of faith.
