Church membership

It is vitally important. Basically, church membership is being responsible for and account to others within the body of Christ. IMHO, one can be a Christian and not a member of a local assembly, but under normal circumstances I think this would be a mark of disobedience.

People want to maintain independence, but Christians are not independent form one another.

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I agree. Too often our faith is taken solely as an individual matter. We are saved individually, but we also belong to the “body” being saved. We are saved to function with in a greater body of believers, and I’d add that no one is saved simply for the sake of salvation itself (we are saved to God’s glory and to a purpose).

To answer your question, as Baptists it is dependent on the congregation to determine whose responsibility it is to baptize someone. If it is the pastor, then I would expect that he gives the “all clear,” and either does the baptism or another who has the approval of the church does the baptism. I’d imagine that churches differ here. I believe it is the congregation's (to include the pastor) responsibility to examine the candidate for baptism, with the ultimate responsibility residing on the pastor.

 

The more noncomformist Baptists rejected that special authority was required to baptize.

First London Baptist Confession: "The person designed by Christ to dispense baptism, the Scripture holds forth to be a disciple; it being no where tied to a particular church officer, or person extraordinarily sent the commission enjoining the administration, being given to them as considered disciples, being men able to preach the gospel."

The Second London Confession obfuscated the point.

 

I think you would be wrong that those Baptists believed "every believer is the church." They had a very high view of the church, often undergoing persecution for illegally assembling. They defended autonomy of the local church to the hilt, maintaining that God had endowed each congregation with all the gifts it needed to fulfill its mission. ("To each of these churches therefore gathered, according to his mind declared in his word, he has given all that power and authority, which is in any way needful for their carrying on that order in worship and discipline, which he has instituted for them to observe; with commands and rules for the due and right exerting, and executing of that power." Second London Confession)

Their beliefs sprang more from a belief in the priesthood of the believer and a distrust of sacerdotalism.

Those early Baptists also did not come down quite clearly on whether baptism and the Lord's Supper are ordinances of the church or of the New Testament. (The Second London Confesses edges toward the former on baptism, I admit.)

While you seem to draw very fine distinctions in the terminology used for the church, the early Baptists often were not quite that specific. And yes, the signers of the Second London Confession explicitly upheld the concept of the universal church. The First London Confession does not explicitly endorse the concept, but it holds that "And although the particular congregations be distinct, and several bodies, every one as a compact and knit city within itself; yet are they all to walk by one rule of truth; so also they (by all means convenient) are to have the counsel and help one of another, if necessity require it, as members of one body, in the common faith, under Christ their head."

You are certainly welcome to air your opinions, but this is, after all, a history forum, and I approach questions from that angle.

 

I think the issue many have is the idea of Landmarkism and the fact that "baptistic" doesn't mean Baptist. It's obvious we share a spiritual kinship with those pre-Reformation baptistic churches in terms of those doctrines we share. I've always been amazed that, given the influence of the more "radical" reformers, some seem to believe Reformed churches discovered biblical baptism and baptistic church government in a vacuum. I also find it amazing that others fail to recognize doctrinal distinctions between Baptists and those baptistic churches (that our distinctiveness is baptistic, but our doctrine as a whole is not).

But I wholeheartedly agree that our history (including both baptistic and Reformed influences and influencers) is very interesting. It is sad that we have people who minimize or ignore one part in favor of another. History is, itself, objective. Unfortunately often times (much too often) it becomes subjective in the telling. I think churches would benefit by studying and teaching not only Church history as a whole but also the histories associated with their paticular denomination.

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The good thing is the fact that the RCC believed those doctrines to be heresy. We can look through history at men who stood for many of our beliefs in the face of persecution because of the accuracy of the persecutors. They needed nothing more than a free Church or a believers baptism to justify to themselves their actions. Men like Jan Hus belong to our spiritual heritage.

Yet men like Luther also belong to our heritage. We have to remember that those baptistic churches also gave their voice to the Protestant movement. Luther actually referenced 1 Jn 2:19 towards this fact.

It would be interesting to list those doctrines we gained from those baptistic churches along with those we gained from the Reformation. I think most, if not all, of those doctrines that separate us from other churches of the Reformation can be traced back to these baptistic churches. Probably most, if not all, of our doctrines that separate us from those baptistic churches originated with the Reformation (or were carried forward by the Reformers).



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