A Brief Guide to Baptists

In this series of articles I am sharing parts of an article written by Trevin Wax on the Gospel Coalition website. In that article he gives a brief introduction to the various branches of the Christian Church. The original article can be accessed here.

Baptists

Name: “Baptist” comes from the Greek term baptizō, meaning “to baptize.”

History: Baptists originally started in the early 1600s as a separatist movement from the Church of England. Two streams of Baptists appeared early on in England: the General Baptists, who leaned more Arminian in their views of grace, sin, and salvation, and the Particular Baptists, who were more Calvinistic in their understanding of these doctrines. Due to increasing persecution by the Church of England, Baptists began to flee England for the American colonies where they also were persecuted. Baptist churches continued to grow as the U.S. enshrined religious liberty into its newly formed constitution and has branched out into many American denominations. Here is a brief essay on Baptist theology.

What Church Is Like: Baptists can have a variety of worship practices, but most commonly, Baptists will worship through singing, prayer, receiving tithes and offerings, listening to the Word preached, and giving a time for response. New believers may be baptized during or at the end of the service, while the Lord’s Supper may be celebrated as well. Baptist churches differ on how frequently they should observe the Lord’s Supper.

Polity: Baptist churches believe that Christ is the head of the church and that Christ guides every local church through the Spirit living within the members of each church. While Baptists may voluntarily join associations, each individual church is autonomous. Most Baptist churches are congregation-ruled, but some are led by single pastors while others are led by a plurality of elders, selected by church members.

Distinctives:

• Baptists in general teach the autonomy of the local church, that each local church should govern its own affairs.
• Baptists reject infant baptism and believe a person must make a profession of faith before being baptized (believer’s baptism).
• Relatedly, Baptists stress the importance of regenerate church membership, that someone must not be included into membership of a local church without professing to be a Christian.
• Early American Baptists emphasized the importance of religious liberty for all faiths based on their belief that genuine decisions to follow Christ cannot be coerced.

Famous Figures: Thomas Helwys, John Leland, John Gill, Andrew Fuller, John Bunyan, William Carey, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lottie Moon, Martin Luther King Jr., Carl F. H. Henry, Billy Graham, David Dockery, Timothy George, Millard Erickson.

Related Groups:

• Converge is a Baptist denomination, once known as the Baptist General Conference (until 2008) and then Converge Worldwide (until 2015). Its heritage traces back to Swedish Baptists in the 19th century.
• The Southern Baptist Convention split from northern Baptists (now American Baptists) in 1845 and is one of the largest religious groups in America. It is conservative theologically and socially.
• The National Baptist Convention is an African American Baptist denomination that merged in 1895 from three separate conventions.
• The American Baptist Convention is the new name (est. in 1950) for the Northern Baptist Convention (formally created in 1907), which traces its heritage most directly to the split between Northern and Southern Baptists in 1845.
• Cooperative Baptist Fellowship split from the more conservative Southern Baptist Convention in 1991. It tends to be more moderate to liberal theologically and socially than the SBC.
• Free Will Baptists are a more Arminian strand of Baptists that trace their heritage back to Baptist churches started in the colonies in New Durham, New Hampshire, and Chowan, North Carolina.

In Christ,

Bret