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Local Church Autonomy Makes Cooperation Stronger, Say Southern Baptist Leaders
Siani Null is baptized by Pastor Rob Maine. Image Courtesy of Renaissance Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Southern Baptist College, Seminary Professors Reiterate Church’s Role in Baptism
BY TOBIN PERRY
Siani Null thought she could earn God’s favor. If she got the right grades, spent time with the right people, and gave her best as a competitive swimmer, the young college student would be the right version of herself. Not only would other people be pleased with her, but God would be pleased, too.
But when her world stopped being perfect, Null’s life became dismantled and broken.
That’s when she turned her life over to Jesus.
So last month, Null got up in front of her church family at Renaissance Church, a sevenyear-old Southern Baptist church plant in Pittsburgh, to tell the world about that decision.
“Siani, what is your sacred confession?” Pastor Rob Maine asked.
“Jesus is Lord,” Null responded.
“By your sacred confession and evidence of a changed life, we baptize you . . . ”
At those words, hands flew up throughout the audience. Church members then said: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Then Maine immersed her in the baptismal pool, saying “You’ve been buried with Christ and raised to walk in newness of life.”
With that confession, the church erupted in applause.
“At that point we clap, we cry, and we shout,” Maine said as he described the church’s baptismal practices. “Because it is symbolizing a family member has come home. It doesn’t save them. But it’s a symbol of their salvation.”
For Renaissance Church, the local church is at the heart of the baptism.
“It purposely goes against the westernized idea of Christianity where I get to choose when I’m baptized without the accountability of a local church community,” Maine said. “It’s a communal identity in Christ. When you’re baptized, you are not only baptized in Christ, but you are also welcomed into this new family that you didn’t choose. We love the communal aspect, the member responsibility aspect, affirming that the Spirit is alive and well within this brand-new brother or sister.”
If someone outside of the fold knows nothing else about Baptists, they likely know this: Baptism is central to Baptist identity. In Barry Hankins and Thomas Kidd’s book Baptists in America: A History, they include baptism among the three features that mark Baptists throughout history.
“[Baptism] is really central [to the Baptist identity],” said Kidd, a professor of history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “It’s one of the few things that united all Baptist groups. I can’t imagine why anyone would consider themselves Baptist and not practice believer’s baptism. People naming themselves Baptists disagree on all kinds of theological and ecclesiastical issues, but one ritual that has always been there for Baptists and distinguished them from other Protestants is the ritual of believer’s baptism.”
THE ROLE OF THE LOCAL CHURCH IN BAPTISMS Recent news has brought baptism back to the forefront of the national conversation. Earlier this month, Andres Arango, a longtime Roman Catholic priest in Phoenix, resigned after it came to light that he had used the wrong wording when performing baptisms. Instead of saying, “I baptize you” as Roman Catholic church law says. Other Protestants, he adds, largely saw baptism in the same way as circumcision in the Old Testament, bringing children into the covenant community of the church.
“The Baptists, starting in the late 1500s and early 1600s in England in particular, believe that kind of use of baptism as a sign of the covenant is confusing what baptism is in New Testament times,” Kidd said. “In Acts, it’s a sign of the internal transformation of regeneration and faith that only people who can understand what’s happening could possibly go through.”
Nathan Finn, a Baptist historian and the dean of faculty at North Greenville University in Tigerville, South Carolina, says this focus on believer’s baptism often made early Baptists take more time than we do to assess a baptismal candidate’s conversion. He calls that the most significant change in how Baptists have done baptisms throughout history.
Thomas Kidd, professor of history
Baylor University
prescribes during a baptism, Arango would say, “We baptize you.” Soon after this was discovered, the local bishop announced that all the baptisms from the priest’s twenty-five-year ministry were invalid, potentially throwing out decades of marriages and ordinations that were based upon these baptisms.
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, the Phoenix bishop who issued the ruling in collaboration with the Vatican, noted that the Catholic church believes that “it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes.”
Southern Baptists have historically seen the ordinance of baptism differently. Malcolm Yarnell, a research professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, notes the command to baptize in the Great Commission wasn’t just given to the apostles or to ministers, it was given to the church.
“We understand that we, as a church, are baptizing because of the commandment of Jesus Christ,” Yarnell said. “For Roman Catholics, they believe the priest stands in the place of Christ. The priest acts as Christ. So they don’t want to speak of the local church being engaged in baptism. Baptists are just so different from that. We do believe that baptism is done by the church, as an act of obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ in the Great Commission.”
BAPTISM FOR EARLY BAPTISTS The distinctiveness of baptisms in the Baptist tradition goes all the way back to the decades after the Reformation and the first Baptists. Kidd notes that the name Baptist itself comes from Anabaptist, which means “re-baptize.” Early Baptists taught that those who were baptized as infants needed to be re-baptized as believing adults.
Kidd says this focus on believer’s baptism made Baptists unique among Christians of their era. The overwhelming practice of Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox was infant baptism, Kidd
Baptism at Rolling Hills Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee. Image Courtesy of Rolling Hills Community Church
Mode of baptism has been a consistent Baptist distinctive throughout history, although Finn notes that the first generation of Baptists struggled to settle on immersion. While every generation of Baptists has consistently practiced believer’s baptism, many early Baptists still poured water over candidates instead of dipping new believers into the water. But for most of Baptist history, immersion has been the settled mode of baptism.
“We’re not going to baptize someone unless we think they’re a Christian,” Finn said. “We might be wrong about that, but we won’t baptize them if we don’t think they’re a Christian. And when we baptize them, it’s going to be in the water and we’re going to get all of them wet.”
WHAT MAKES A BAPTISM LEGITIMATE Yarnell says the issue of the legitimacy of baptisms is different for Baptists who don’t hold to anything like canonical law.
“We don’t have any legal format we follow,” Yarnell said. “We follow more Christian principles that we find in Scripture. I wouldn’t want to present it in the same terms as Catholic or Lutheran or Anglican or even Reformed church law. We just don’t think in those terms.”
But, Yarnell says, without the Gospel—and both an internal and an external representation of it—a baptism isn’t proper.
“We believe that the baptism in water ought to happen alongside or after the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” Yarnell said. “To have the baptism of the Holy Spirit means to be born again, faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We want a real confession of faith. That’s the external. What’s the external? It’s that external confession of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and that God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. If you don’t have the external and the internal saying the same thing, you’ve got a problem.”
Finn notes that historically there have been disagreements by Baptists about baptism, they’ve generally been united around three issues regarding legitimacy—the right mode (immersion), the right meaning (a symbol of the Gospel in a person’s life), and the right subject of baptism (a fully converted believer).
The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 addresses all three topics, calling baptism “the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus.”
Because Southern Baptists have historically tied baptism to both conversions and church membership, it has often been used as an important metric in the evangelistic health of local churches, state Baptist conventions, and the Southern Baptist Convention. A decline in baptisms across the Convention has been a common concern expressed in recent decades.
“We have to go preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ for us to see people baptized,” Yarnell said. “Baptism is something that happens after evangelism, after mission. So let’s put the priority on mission and on evangelism. Then let’s watch and see what God does through the number of baptisms.”
Kidd urges Southern Baptists to reflect upon the historic significance of baptism for Baptists— and to remember the price paid by those early Baptists for practicing it in what was a unique manner.
“I think that Baptists and Southern Baptists have probably lost some of the sense of how special and unusual the Baptist ritual of baptism was,” Kidd said. “For even centuries after the beginning of the new Baptist movement, in the early 1600s, Baptists went through a lot of persecution, because of how their baptism ritual was held in derision, even by a lot of other Protestants. I think that that’s something to be respected and understood. A lot of Baptists suffered at least harassment and ridicule, if not imprisonment and fines for upholding what we consider to be the biblical view of baptism.”
TOBIN PERRY is a writer and member of Center of Hope Church in Evansville, Indiana.
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Photo Illustration by Andy Beachum
Southern Baptists Champion Religious Liberty
BY TOBIN PERRY
Growing up Baptist, Bob Roberts Jr., understood the importance of religious freedom. He’d heard the stories about Baptists who had played seminal roles in the development of religious freedom in America.
But it wasn’t until his church partnered with a country in Southeast Asia with a long history of struggles with religious freedom, that he truly understood its importance.
Invited by the country’s leadership to visit both Christian churches and religious services of other religions, Roberts saw firsthand the impact on people when they don’t have religious freedom.
“I began to meet many of the leading pastors in [the country]. This was in the early 2000s,” said Roberts, the global senior pastor of Northwood Church in Keller, Texas. “Many that I heard about had been in and out of jail. But sitting at a table with them, hearing their stories had a profound impact on me, how they were persecuted, went to prison. Some of them knew people who even died for the Gospel.”
Roberts was so moved by what he saw that, at one point, he went to another room and wept.
“We didn’t just visit the churches,” Roberts added. “We visited with other non-Christian religions as well, and they were facing similar
persecution that impacted me. It’s one thing to intellectually know those things. It’s quite another thing to see people who’ve really paid a price. And it had a radical impact on me.”
The profound impact of that trip led to numerous opportunities for Roberts to advocate religious freedom for all.
“Both politically and philosophically, there has to be religious freedom for all, or it’s religious freedom for none,” Roberts said. “Missiologically, if I don’t provide for religious freedom of people of other religions here in America, it directly impacts how those people are treated in the countries where Christians are a minority.”
WHAT BAPTISTS BELIEVE ABOUT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY For Southern Baptists like Roberts, religious liberty isn’t just about a trip to a civics class but grounded in more than four hundred years of history and shaped by the blood and tears of pastors, missionaries, and lay people on the front lines of the Great Commission.
“It’s one of our core Baptist distinctives,” said Jason Thacker, chair of research in technology ethics and leads the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) Research Institute. “Baptists had been involved in various degrees and forms over many generations, advocating for religious freedom, because we see it as central—not only to our Baptist faith, but really to the Christian faith—that faith cannot be coerced. Faith cannot be forced upon someone. There’s a freedom of conscience. There’s a freedom of will—and that salvation comes through personal belief.”
The Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the Southern Baptist statement of faith, defines the Convention’s convictions regarding religious liberty in Article XVII: “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it.”
The article affirms the belief in a separation of church and state and the duty of Christians to obey the state “in all things not contrary to the revealed will of God.”
Article XVII concludes with: “A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal, and this implies the right of free and unhindered access to God on the part of all men, and the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power.”
The biblical texts that undergird those statements, particularly a commitment to the Great Commission, have fueled 175 years of Southern Baptist efforts to speak up for the religious liberty of Christians and non-Christians alike.
“Religious liberty is probably the main theological contribution that Baptists have brought to church history,” said Rodrick Durst, chair of history and theological studies at Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BAPTIST VIEWS ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTY Baptist religious liberty convictions extend back to the beginning of the Baptist movement and even back to the first stirrings of religious liberty in Europe. Early Baptists entered a world dominated by state churches, where the modern concept of religious freedom would have been nearly inconceivable.
Nathan Finn, dean of the university faculty and a professor of Christian studies and history at North Greenville University in Tigerville, South Carolina, says the Baptist vision of religious liberty extends back to the radical Puritans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who didn’t want to be a part of the Church of England.
“For those of us now who are part of the Baptist movement, the roots of the way we talk about religious liberty actually predate the Baptists,” Finn said. “It was our forefathers, if you will, and radical English puritanism who broke away from the Church of England. One of the reasons was they wanted to have religious freedom.”
Radical English Puritans, Finn added, wanted to be free to obey the Scriptures. In the early seventeenth century, some of these Puritans broke away from the rest over the issue of infant baptism.
“Before we believed in believer’s baptism, we believed in religious liberty,” Finn said. “Then one of the first ways that we exercised our religious freedom was by rejecting infant baptism and embracing the baptism of [believers] alone.”
Baptists were involved in many of the key events that helped define the development of religious freedom within the American context. Some of those events include:
In 1611–12, Thomas Helwys, who started the first Baptist church in England, published the first book-length defense of religious liberty in English. In A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, Helwys calls for complete liberty of conscience for all people.
After conflict with the Puritan leaders of New England over, among other issues, the relationship of the church to the government, Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He founded the colony of Rhode Island as a “shelter for persons distressed of conscience.” Williams founded the first Baptist church in America in 1638.
Baptist preacher John Leland, a friend to both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, helped ensure the inclusion of the First Amendment in the US Constitution, guaranteeing religious liberty. The addition came as a compromise between Madison and Leland whereas Madison agreed to fight for the amendment’s passage in exchange for the preacher’s promise to drop out of a contested congressional race against Madison.
In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802, President Thomas Jefferson first described a “wall of separation between church and state.” Though at times controversial in its application, Jefferson’s description of that wall would be recounted countless times in later religious liberty debates.
George W. Truett (right) and SBC President James B. Gambrell on the steps of the US Capitol building in 1920. Image Courtesy of Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives
George W. Truett’s famous 1920 speech on religious liberty from the steps of the US Capitol became an influential event for many 20th century political and religious leaders. The First Baptist Church of Dallas pastor spoke to 15,000 people—many of whom were Southern Baptists in town for the SBC annual meeting, along with members of Congress, cabinet officials, and Supreme Court justices.
Truett told those assembled, “It is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship, or to pay taxes for the support of a religious organization to which they do not believe. God wants free worshipers and no other kind.”
Southern Baptists have supported a number of institutions dedicated to addressing religious liberty issues. In 1947, Southern Baptists voted to provide Cooperative Program funding to the Social Service Commission (SSC). In 1997, the SSC was renamed the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. In recent years, the ERLC has advocated on behalf of Southern Baptists on a number of significant religious freedom cases.
For example, the ERLC joined an amicus brief in a case heard earlier this year in the US Supreme Court regarding the city of Boston’s decision not to allow a Christian flag to be flown as one of three in front of its city hall. According to an ERLC explainer on the case, it’s seen as an opportunity for the court to clarify its understanding of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law “respecting the establishment of religion.”
The ERLC was involved in a number of cases related to government restrictions of churches during the COVID-19 pandemic. The entity advocated on behalf of equal treatment of churches as local, state, and federal governments mandated shutdowns and gathering size limitations.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND THE GREAT COMMISSION The ERLC hasn’t just advocated on behalf of religious freedom for Christians. In 2021–22, by resolution of SBC messengers to the 2021 SBC Annual Meeting, the ERLC has advocated on behalf of Uyghur Muslims who are the subject of intense persecution in the Xinjiang region of China. The Uyghurs are Chinese citizens whose religious convictions moves them to stand against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The ERLC worked to gain passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Act in Washington in December 2021 to push against the slave labor and population control efforts Uyghurs are being subjected to by the CCP.
“That’s one of the key tension points, especially in recent years,” Thacker said. “Whether it be the ERLC or other organizations who uphold religious freedom and partnering with those who we fundamentally disagree on very important issues, especially issues of understanding of who God is and Scripture and the Gospel and things like that,” Thacker said. “Because religious freedom is the freedom for all to believe, as they see fit in that sense, and to be able to live out their deeply held religious beliefs.”
Thacker noted two important reasons why the religious liberty of all is important to Southern Baptists. First, he recognized that government restrictions allowed to stand against non-Baptists may eventually inhibit the religious freedom of Baptists to worship freely.
Most important, Thacker notes, the issue goes back to the concept of “soul freedom.” Spiritual decisions belong between the person and God and should not be in the sphere of governmental authority.
Andrew Walker, a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, points to missiology, noting that to advance the Gospel, people must have an opportunity to respond to it. While God works in many places around the world where religious freedom isn’t available, Walker says, “any hurdle or obstacle that’s standing in the way, is an impediment to religious liberty, we should fight against.”
In fact, every Southern Baptist interviewed for this article related, in one way or another, the need for religious freedom to a commitment to the Great Commission.
“[Early] Baptists believed that as long as the state was staying out of the business of dictating religion, and Jews and Muslims and infidels, and atheists had the right to be wrong, that also meant that Baptists and other Bible-believing Christians had the right to proclaim the truth of the Gospel over them,” said Finn, describing the missional convictions of early Baptists related to religious liberty. “For Baptists, it’s always been more than just defending their own right of worship, but defending true religious freedom for all people, for the sake of human flourishing and the advance of the Gospel.”
Durst referenced Romans 13 and the Christian’s identity as a kingdom representative.
“We are citizens without borders, kingdom citizens, and our Great Commission is to cross borders for the Gospel,” Durst said. “We live in the ‘already, but not yet kingdom come.’ Religious liberty is a witness. It’s a part of Christian discipleship, because we must be willing to go into the public place and live for Christ.”
TOBIN PERRY is a writer and member of Center of Hope Church in Evansville, Indiana.
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