of Church Membership

B Y DAVID ROACH

Joining a Baptist church could be an extraordinary step of faith in the early years of the Baptist movement. It was for a certain Capt. Langdon of the British army around the year 1650.

Despite Langdon’s severe case of tuberculosis, he became convicted he needed to follow the Lord in believer’s baptism, joining the local Baptist church in his region of Cornwall. He also believed God might heal his disease following the baptism to show His approval of Baptist ecclesiology—a despised way to conceive of the church at that time.

The local Baptist pastor, Abraham Cheare, had his doubts. Baptism likely would kill Langdon, Cheare thought. Plus, trying it seemed like tempting God. But on the appointed frigid January day, the ailing Langdon was carried to the water on horseback, propped up by a man riding behind him. Because Cheare “had not faith,” according to his account, another man in the church baptized Langdon before hundreds of curious onlookers.

Upon coming out of the water, Langdon stood on his own strength and ran up a 50-foot hill. He ate a beef dinner, slept all night, and his health continued to improve in the coming weeks. “Hitherto God hath helped us,” the once-skeptical Cheare concluded.

Nothing like that occurred in England’s state churches. Even when it wasn’t accompanied by healing, joining a Baptist church was an amazing spectacle. So was the Baptist notion that a church is a body of baptized believers voluntarily covenanting to serve God together. In the prevailing Anglican culture, everyone baptized as an infant was considered a Christian and a member of the local parish church.

The world wondered, “What are these people doing? Why are they doing it?” said Michael Haykin, professor of church history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Baptists did it because “this is the New Testament model. This is the apostolic model, and they were following Jesus in the waters of baptism.” Joining a Baptist church involved “a public witness” and “took a certain amount of courage.”

That wasn’t only true in 17th-century England. For most of the past 400 years, Baptist doctrine of the church has represented a departure from the majority view.

The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 explains the church like this: “A New Testament church of the Lord Jesus Christ is an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel; observing the two ordinances of Christ, governed by His laws, exercising the gifts, rights, and privileges invested in them by His Word, and seeking to extend the gospel to the ends of the earth” (Article VI).

That’s how Baptists have defined a church since their origin in the early 1600s. Baptists’ First London Confession stated in 1646 that a church is “a company of visible saints, called and separated from the world by the word and Spirit of God, to the visible profession of faith of the gospel, being baptized into that faith, and joined to the Lord, and each other, by mutual agreement.”

By the 1800s, the Baptist vision of the church still was considered remarkable. Some Baptist churches had hundreds more attendees than

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Louisville, Kentucky

members because many people liked Baptist preaching but couldn’t bring themselves to embrace the demands of covenanting with a local body of baptized believers. Baptist missions pioneer Andrew Fuller preached to 1,000 people in Kettering, England, each Sunday before his death in 1815, but the church he pastored had only 150 members.

Baptists’ doctrine of the church remains remarkable in parts of the world dominated by other religions and other Christian denominations. Jacob Boss, the International Mission Board’s affinity leader for European peoples, said an autonomous local church of baptized believers seems foreign in nations of Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Anglicans, and Lutherans.

Other denominations “have very strong centralized authority within their church polity,” Boss said. “What we’re trying to do as the International Mission Board would be a distinctive.” Sometimes it results in ridicule for Baptist believers.

In war-torn Ukraine, reestablishing Baptist churches is among the IMB’s priorities. Many churches have been disbanded (at least temporarily) by the military conflict with Russia, yet Baptistic churches are essential to undergird missions and evangelism, IMB workers have found.

“The church is the place where disciples grow in health and maturity,” Boss said. “The church should be the place where all believers are being equipped to go out and share the Gospel.” Without a healthy church, “your evangelism is definitely going to suffer.”

In the Muslim world, Baptists sometimes risk their lives to live out their vision of the church. Fifteen years ago, Haykin received word from the Kurds of northern Iraq—his father’s people group—that a local woman had become a Christian. When she decided to be baptized, her brother threatened to kill her with a machine gun.

“She took the machine gun and pulled it right up to her face,” Haykin said. “She said, ‘You might as well pull the trigger now because I’m going through with baptism.’”

Does the contrast between Baptist ecclesiology and other groups’ view of the church persist in modern America? Maybe. Lifeway Research’s 2022 State of Theology Study found that Baptists in the United States feel greater obligation than other Christians to join a local church. Half of Baptists (50 percent) agree that every Christian has an obligation to join a local church. Just 42 percent of other Christians agree.

More Baptists (36 percent) than Christians from other groups (28 percent) disagree that “worshiping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church.”

Still, Baptists in the modern West don’t stand out at much as they used to. Haykin believes there are at least two reasons why: (1) Other denominations have started behaving in a more “baptistic” manner, granting local congregations a measure of autonomy. (2) More significantly, Baptists have stopped stressing the extraordinary nature of believer’s baptism and covenanting with a local church.

Reemphasizing those realities, Boss said, is essential for Baptist churches across the world to make an impact.

“The church is the sustainable piece of the Kingdom in any location,” Boss said. If “we just go in with evangelism and we never follow up with discipleship or church formation, evangelism is going to end up dying out very quickly.”

THE WORLD’S GREATEST PROBLEM IS

Today, over 3,000 people groups have no missionary presence and likely have no gospel access.

Together, Southern Baptists must bring the gospel to every nation and all people.

WILL YOU JOIN US?

Learn more at imb.org/GreatPursuit