Where did my church go?

Where did my church go?

Where did my church go?

When we ask, “where did my So. Baptist church go?” We also have to ask historically, which one are we talking about? When we ask this question we typically have a specific time in mind and it’s usually skewed to a favorable memory or experience and it is often blocking out any challenges or negative experiences that may have been there, it just seems like there was a utopia.  However, “Baptist churches in 1800 and before were far from utopias. Racism in the culture was too fully present in the church. Too many Christians opposed organized efforts for evangelism and missions. And ministerial education was often lacking to the point that there were not enough trained pastors to rightly divide the word of God and handle church discipline. In Baptist life, conservative, nostalgic sentiment has acted in ways both good and bad. On the one hand, it has acted to preserve the gospel among us, and yet it has also acted to preserve unbiblical traditions.” Sentiment for the way we have done things defines and divides us in ways it should not and need not. And such practical sentimentality is dangerous because it is so hard to detect. Impulses are not good, simply because they are conservative. Honesty compels us to acknowledge that our past is well-supplied with both errors and accuracies,’ but when we reminisce for the church we want to remember, we do an injustice to the church and ourselves.

Without honesty we can convince ourselves that everything we have done, everything we have been taught shouldn’t change, mustn’t change. In the 1800’s, most of So. Baptist churches required you to be a white man to vote democratically and segregate worship between black and white. Up until the late 19^th century So. Baptist churches used real wine for communion quarterly, following a church wide meeting where members recommitted to their church covenant and church discipline took place so that communion the next day wouldn’t be compromised. Imagine if we went back to that?  “Baptists practiced church discipline on a large scale. Between 1781 and 1860 Baptists excluded more than 40,000 members in Georgia alone. in this church trials was yet greater. Only about half of the offenders received excommunication. Baptists on average disciplined between 3 and 4 percent of their members annually.”

These raise the question, is always doing what we’ve done is better than deviating into something we never have? If you take an honest look at the history of the church, particularly So. Baptists history. Maybe we remember what the church has been like for the last thirty years and forty years. Most of us are not aware of our church history stretching into the early 19^th and 18^th century. During a meeting of pastors in 1837 their two priorities in the congregation was preaching and enforcing Godly discipline. Try to do the latter in the western church today and a church will call for a vote of non-confidence or create enough disunity in the church to hope it will send the pastor packing. Dr. Al Mohler says about church discipline, “The decline of church discipline is perhaps the most visible failure of the contemporary church. No longer concerned with maintaining purity of confession or lifestyle, the contemporary church sees itself as a voluntary association of autonomous members, with minimal moral accountability to God, much less to each other.”

Then there is the challenge of just finding elders and pastors who meet the biblical requirements to do the former in today’s western circus. “Baptists held that there were only two offices in the church, elder and dea- con. This was the apostolic rule and remained in force. The New Testament had three names for the office of elder: elder, bishop, and pastor. The New Testament writers used the terms synonymously and so did the Baptists. They often called their pastors “elder” and sometimes called them “bishop.’” To have Elders in the Baptist church is not something new or unbiblical. It is actually very Baptist, dating back to our roots. You don’t see committees form until the late 1800’s. However, most pastors today don’t know of the “noble task” to which earlier generations of faithful pastors understood God to be calling them to and most church members don’t know to reconcile pastor with elder or deacon.  Is the church any more faithful or the pastors any more faithful because of the changes we’ve made or not made? or forgotten? No it requires grace, knowledge, and the willingness to test what we must do as a church with Scripture.

One of the ways the early So. Baptist churches kept their church body in oneness was through the use confessions of faith or creeds to give credence to their polity and theology. It gave the church a document that they would all agree on and be able to use for discipline and teaching among the Pastors, Elders, Deacons and church body. Without such a confession, the body is left to a free for all to believe whatever they want ore remember and this creates disunity. All parties need to agree on who the church must be today.  When the cleadership doesn’t draw the church in to a common orthodoxy it will end up with people serving and leading while disagreeing on theology. If you can’t agree on basic theology and the confession of your own church, you will struggle in everything else. Eventually this will take a toll on your church and make your ministry ineffective.

Early So. Baptist churches would ordain men as elders and pastors to uphold Scripture and the confessions of faith of that local congregation. “Some churches had plural eldership. It was sometimes a formal recognition of the ordained ministers, the elders, in their membership. These elders assisted the pastor as necessary in preaching and administering baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They were leaders of the congregation by their wisdom, piety, knowledge, and experience. Such churches recognized the gifts and calling of all elders among them. Other churches believed that Christ required them to have a plurality of elders. They held that all elders were equal in office but differed in duties; they were equal in rank but differed in service.” However, because the church was forced often to meet in homes in small groups many churches deemed plurality of elders to not be needed because of the size of the congregation and the contextual need. The context determined whether there was a plurality of elders. It wasn’t because Scripture said it was an unbiblical nor non-So. Baptist in doctrine.

Speaking of “what is So. Baptist?”, scripture points to worship being an integral part of church, but did you know that wasn’t always the case in Baptist churches. Did you know that So. Baptist churches haven’t always had choirs nor congregational singing? “Benjamin Keach (1640–1704) was one the most influential teachers in the history of English-speaking Baptists. He was pastor of the famous Horsleydown Baptist Church in Southwark, London for most of his adult life. He published fifty-four books. He suffered violence, imprisonment, the pillory, and fines for teaching the doctrine of believer’s baptism. In the 1700’s Keach influenced Baptist practices in several ways. He led the effort to adopt congregational singing in Baptist churches.” If we only look back 30 years we can say, Baptists have had congregational singing, but if you look back further you can’t say they’ve always had congregational singing. It becomes a point of perspective and history.  We need to keep two things in mind as a church moves forward to define who she is, She hasn’t always been what you think but she must be as His word describes her to be for the moment where she is to be. It is our responsibility using scripture, prayer, fasting, in unity with the Spirit to live out who God has described her (the church) to be, not how we want her (the church) to be or remember her to be.

The Quotes and sources, come from Mark Dever’s book Polity. http://www.9marks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Polity.pdf