Where Do Baptists Come From And What Are Their Practices?
I presently serve as the pastor of New Covenant Baptist Church, prior to serving at New Covenant I served as pastor of St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church both in Louisville, Ky. I have attended Baptist churches all my life. My father was a Baptist preacher/pastor, I also have two brothers that are Baptist preachers. I have only attended a Catholic church only a few times in my life and that was at funerals. The fact that Baptist churches is all I know and we have been looking at the Baptist faith the last few class periods has put it on my heart to look further into, where Baptist come from.
Baptists are individuals who make up a group of Evangelical Christian denominations and churches that believe baptism should be performed only for professing believers and are opposed to infant baptism, and that it must be done by complete immersion and are opposed to sprinkling. There are other beliefs of Baptist churches which include soul competency (liberty), salvation through faith alone, Scripture alone as the rule of faith and practice, and the autonomy of the local congregation. Baptists recognize two ministerial offices, pastors and deacons. Baptist churches are widely considered to be Protestant churches, though some Baptists don’t identify with Protestants.
There are roughly about 33 million Baptist in the United States and this makes Baptist second only to the Roman Catholics, which is the largest religious group in the United States with about 79 million. The Southern Baptist Convention have about 16 million Baptist affiliated with their convention which makes them the largest confederation of Baptists. Among African Americans the National Baptist Convention has 7.5 million and the Progressive National Baptist Convention has a total membership of 2.5 million members. More than 40% of all Baptists worldwide reside in the United States. Where did Baptists come from, who started the first Baptist church, where was it started? All these questions I am hoping to answer with this paper.
I did some research on the Baptist faith, to see if I could find out just what it is I have been doing all my life as a Baptist. The first identifiable Baptist group began in 1608-1609 and was led by John Smyth (1570-1612) and Thomas Helwys (1550-1615). They were puritan separatists and believed that Christ died for the entire world, not simply for an elect chosen before the worlds foundation. This was called atonement, which means that all people were potentially elected toward salvation and needed only to implement repentance and faith to realize it. Using your individual free will cooperating with divine grace is what makes salvation possible, but if you have free will to gain salvation you also have free will to reject salvation, which would lead to a falling away or denial of your from salvation. Because of their belief in a general atonement these believers were known as General Baptists.
A second group of Baptists got their start during the 1600’s also, about 1630. They were known as the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church, named for its first three pastors: Henry Jacob (1563-1624), John Lathrop (1584–1653), and Henry Jessey (1601-1663). They were known as Particular Baptists because of their belief that Christ died for a particular group of people, this group was chosen out of God’s mercy before the foundation of the world was formed. They also believed that all people were born in total immorality, worthy only of complete damnation by a just and righteous God. Yet God, in His mercy, had chosen some individuals to salvation unconditionally, a result of Gods sovereign choice, not because of any merit in the individual believer. All the elect would be saved through God’s irresistible grace and would persevere in Christian discipleship until the end. Which means that Christ’s death on the cross was particularly for God’s chosen elect and did not apply to the entire human race. By the 1640s there were two distinguishable and diverse groups of Baptists in England. Each group were using a common set of practices but presenting totally different theological ideals.
By the 1650s another group of Baptists had appeared in England. These Baptists were known as Seventh Day Baptists because they insisted that Saturday was the divinely ordained Sabbath and should be observed by Christians everywhere. Seventh Day Baptists retained basic practices, and many remained members of the General Baptist congregation until their own churches took shape.
In 1641 Baptists began the practice of immersion baptism, as required of all members following a profession of their faith in Christ. Immersion involved the dipping of the entire body in water, the mode of baptism that they believed Jesus received from John the Baptizer in the Jordan river, and before long full immersion became the normative mode of baptism in Baptist churches. It remains the baptismal method used in Baptist churches worldwide.