Wait a minute, preacher, part 1

First Baptist Church of Haddonfield
Haddonfield, New Jersey
June 3, 2007

Baptists confuse me. There seem to be so many different types of them, and I’m not always sure which Baptist is which. I know that the one doctrine that all Baptists have in common is believer’s baptism – the idea that baptism is something that should occur after a person accepts Jesus Christ as his or her savior, not something that is done to or for an infant. Also, Baptists believe that baptism should be accomplished via immersion, not via sprinkling or ladling a relatively small amount of water onto someone’s head.

Neil and I were both baptized twice, as babies and then again as adults. The Walnut Street Baptist Church in Carbondale, Illinois had a very kind and longsuffering pastor in the early seventies, who allowed a group of enthusiastic young Jesus people to set up a coffeehouse in the church basement and use its baptistery to immerse converts.

My most vivid memory of my second baptism, unfortunately, is my realization, upon seeing one of the sisters come up out of the water, that we should have put more thought into what to wear. I had a blinding flash of insight, not into spiritual things, but rather into the rationale behind wet tee-shirt contests.

Well, you live and learn. What else do I know about Baptists? I know that Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was a Baptist, and that Baptists have congregational-style, rather than hierarchical, church government. But beyond that I’m hazy. I needed to do some studying.
Back to Wikipedia, where I learned that Baptists are the largest group of Protestants, with a world population of about 90 million (47 million in the United States). (Since Baptists count only baptized members in their totals, the numbers would be higher if you included children, as lots of other churches do. The varying ways churches count up membership makes it a little difficult to compare numbers with precision. If you included children and other unbaptized attendees, Baptist churches might have something closer to 120 million members worldwide.)

Wikipedia also gets right to the point about why a person might have trouble distinguishing one Baptist from another: “Baptist churches do not have a central governing authority. Therefore, beliefs are not totally consistent from one Baptist church to another.” Of course, you can say that about lots of other churches, even the kind that seem to have fairly strict hierarchical governance, but it seems to be more true of Baptists.

Next, I discover something I’ve never heard of – Landmarkism. It seems a few Baptists have a doctrine known as “the perpetuity viewpoint,” the central idea of which is that Baptists (not all of them, just a certain type) represent the oldest church, predating Catholicism. According to Landmarkism, Baptist churches have existed since the days of Christ and the apostles (John the Baptist being the first Baptist, of course), and there has been direct succession from one legitimate Baptist church to the next since those days. There is a variant type of perpetuity doctrine, which claims that Baptist churches have existed since the days of the early church, but have sprung up more or less independently of each other.

Interesting. A natural corollary of this doctrine (and in this they are like all church groups who think they have a hold on the only true and valid expression of the faith) is that all other churches are illegitimate. Landmarkers call other churches religious societies, which is similar to the way Roman Catholics call non-RC churches ecclesial bodies. Neither group will say that the other one is, technically, a real church. And some Landmark Baptist churches won’t allow members of other churches, even other Baptist churches, to take communion with them.

I couldn’t figure out how many Landmark Baptist churches are in the country, partly because they don’t have a centralized form of government that might keep track of membership numbers. There’s no such thing as a Landmark Baptist Church denomination, just Baptist churches that hold to Landmarkism.

Well, that was an interesting bypath in my attempt to learn more about Baptists. There are certainly other points of view, though. One is that Baptists arose among the sixteenth-century reformers. Some people think that Baptists are related to the sixteenth-century radicals known as Anabaptists. Some claim the Baptists arose among the seventeenth-century English Separatists, who broke from the Church of England.

I learned that some groups of Baptists are Arminian, and some are Calvinists. Baptists who side with Calvin on the free will question are sometimes known as Particular Baptists, and Particular Baptists are further subdivided into Strict Baptists and Reformed Baptists (and the two terms are not mutually exclusive).

Also, some Baptists do not want to be called Baptists. They prefer to be known as Christians who attend Baptist churches. (Lots of people in lots of denominations say something along the same lines, actually.) Some do not want to be known as Protestants because, as explained earlier, they believe that their church predates those Roman Catholic newcomers, and thus they never had anything to protest against. Some object to being known as a denomination, because they think that the word denomination implies that they belong to some sort of hierarchical system, whereas they believe in local church governance with only very loose ties to any kind of larger church body. Some do not want to be known as evangelical, because they think evangelicals are too liberal.

All denominations have a convoluted history, so I don’t mean to be picking on the Baptists here, but I think this brief overview does give an indication of why I sometimes feel confused by Baptists.

Looking at the Wikipedia list of famous Baptists, there’s quite an interesting group, including Billy Graham; Moishe Rosen (the founder of Jews for Jesus); Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Newt Gingrich; John D. Rockefeller and JC Penney; Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, and Buddy Holly; John Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress), Rick Warren (The Purpose-Driven Church) and Tim LaHaye (the Left Behind books); and Frank and Jesse James (their father was a Baptist minister; this seems to be one of the more extreme examples of preachers’ kids going bad).

I see one of my personal favorites, Adoniram Judson. He’s not as famous as some of the others, but I have fond memories of reading a biography of him, To the Golden Shore. He was the first Protestant missionary to Burma from North America, and he labored and suffered (and I do mean suffered) there for more than 40 years, in the early to mid-1800s. I’ve been an Adoniram Judson fan for years.

Well, now I need to find out which kind of Baptists the folks at First Baptist of Haddonfield are.
I study their website, and learn that they are affiliated with the American Baptist Churches of New Jersey. The senior pastor has a master’s degree in literature and a doctorate in Communication, in addition to his Master of Divinity, and has been a Peace Corps volunteer. So when I read that I’m thinking the church might be one of the more liberal Baptist churches.

But then I read about the Minister of Christian Education and Youth. She’s a recent graduate of Oral Roberts University, and is enrolled in a Master of Divinity program at Liberty University (affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s church) – whoa, that says fundamentalist to me, but in a confusing way, because many fundamentalists do not believe in the ordination of women.
Well, I’ll just show up and worship with them.