“What makes a Baptist Church…Baptist?” These beliefs have historically identified baptists and distinguished them from other denominations:
- Bible as the only rule for faith and practice
- Regenerate and immersed church membership
- Autonomy of the local church
- Priesthood of the believer
- Soul liberty
- Immersion and the Lord’s supper are the only two ordinances
- Separation, both ecclesiastical and ethical
Today, I’d like to consider the 2nd statement which concerns the requirements for church membership.
When you get right down to it, every church is a voluntary association of individuals, even in places where the state and church are closely intertwined. Throughout church history, men of conscience have objected to the idea that all of the people in any given locale can be compelled to be a part of the church. And in more modern times where state churches do not have the authority to compel membership or attendance, the voluntary nature of church membership is more easily seen.
That being said, the question of who may be a member of the church is an important one. Churches that practice infant baptism must justify the inclusion of non-believers in their membership. This is done through various means. One way is to claim that baptism is itself a means of salvation or cleansing from sin, and therefore the infants are saved at their baptism. Other churches reject this teaching, because they rightly understand that baptism cannot be meritorious for salvation or else we are saved by our works rather than by the grace of God through Christ. These churches still baptize infants, however, and so they will argue that although these children are technically inside the church, they are nevertheless still outsiders to the faith until they confess faith themselves and are confirmed at a later time.
The practice of instructing children in the faith and holding them accountable for their own testimony as they come of age would, if practiced consistently, guard the church from being filled with unregenerate members. But in historical practice, this has never been the norm outside of some local congregations, and it is very difficult to maintain beyond the first generation of believers.
Membership is exclusively the right of those persons who are truly born again.
Baptist churches, on the other hand, maintain that membership is exclusively the right of those persons who are truly born again. They must give testimony of their having been regenerated by the Holy Spirit through hearing and understanding the gospel, confess their faith in Jesus as revealed in God’s word, and publicly display their obedience to Christ through baptism.
The Baptist doctrine of regenerate, immersed membership seeks to produce local churches which are pure, spiritual bodies of Christ. We require a verbal profession of faith (Rom. 10:10), expressed by the individual seeking membership and not by another, since each one must give account of himself to God (Rom. 14:12). And we require immersion in water as a demonstration of faith and a commitment to obey Christ as his disciple (Matt. 28:19-20), because genuine faith demands conscious action. These two principles preclude infant baptism, since infants can neither affirm faith verbally nor consciously choose to demonstrate faith by baptism.
Some will no doubt object that this system does not prevent an unbeliever from becoming a member of a Baptist church. This is true. However, to do so he must first give a verbal profession of faith and be baptized, and so enter on a false pretense of faith. Churches that receive children as members by baptism intend to have unconverted persons as a part of the church body. Later, they may attempt to exclude them through some other means not explicit in Scripture such as confirmation, or allow the church to be a mixed body of the saved and unsaved.
The church is a spiritual body, and we should not be satisfied with a mixed membership.
This leads us to consider whether the church as a pure, spiritual body of Christ ought to be our goal. As Baptists, we contend that this is so, but others disagree and will often cite Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13:24-30 as proof. There, the enemy sows weeds in the field during the night and instead of pulling them up in the daytime, the master tells his servants to simply let them grow side by side until the harvest, when they will be separated without harming the crop of wheat.
But this parable is being misinterpreted when it is applied to the church, since Jesus very plainly states that the field is the entire world (v.38). Instead of trying to justify unregenerate church membership by looking at the Gospels, we should instead consider the history of the church in Acts and the mission of the church in the epistles. There we see that the church is a spiritual body, and we should not be satisfied with a mixed membership.
Consider, for example, the church in Acts 2 at the day of Pentecost. When Peter preached the gospel to the crowd, it was those who “gladly received his words” who were baptized, and only those baptized who were added to the church. Luke further states that these men and women “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.” These ongoing actions were the external evidence of true faith. The same thing is true in Acts 11 when Saul and Barnabas preached at Antioch. Those who “believed and turned to the Lord” were added to the church. This was not the action of infants, nor of unbelievers, but of true disciples of Christ.
And what of the church’s mission? Paul says to a local church in 2 Cor. 5:20 that “we are ambassadors for Christ,” but how can they be Christ’s ambassadors unless they belong to him by faith? And in 1 Cor. 12, he says that a church is the body of Christ made up of individual members (v.27), and that each member has “been made to drink into one Spirit” (v.13). But how can this be, if not all members have yet been born again by the Spirit? And consider Peter’s command in 1 Peter 3:15 for each of us to set apart Christ as Lord in our hearts and be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks us why we have hope in Jesus. Who can do this unless he first knows the Scriptural truths about Jesus and has believed them for himself? Because of these biblical principles, Baptists maintain that only born-again persons may rightly be members of the church.