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Perspective profile · Baptist

Independent Fundamental Baptists

Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) churches are self-governing congregations that hold historic Baptist convictions and choose not to join a denominational convention. They are fundamentalist in heritage: they stress the inerrant Word of God, personal soul winning, separation from doctrinal error and worldliness, and missions sent out from the local church. Like Baptists before them, they hold that their churches did not come out of Rome and are not Protestant. Theologica is not part of this movement and does not align with it. We are non-denominational Baptists, independent under Christ alone. Where we hold the same doctrines, it is because Scripture teaches them.

How Theologica classifies this tradition

A Baptist tradition. We share believer's baptism by immersion and the autonomy of the local church. Where we differ, Scripture's whole counsel settles the question; we receive those who believe the Gospel as brethren while we answer what we believe is error.

Historical origins

Where It Came From

Independent Fundamental Baptists hold, as Theologica does, that Baptist history does not begin in the seventeenth century. Christ promised to build His church and that it would never be overcome (Matthew 16:18; Ephesians 3:21), and churches of saved and baptized believers have continued from the New Testament to the present. They have usually been small and often persecuted, and they have always been distinct from the state church that became the Roman Catholic Church. Baptists therefore did not come out of Rome and are not Protestants: the Reformers reformed doctrine within Roman Catholic Europe, while these churches had never belonged to Rome. Through the centuries, churches that stood apart from Rome were known by many names, most of them given by their opponents. Baptist historians point to the Novatianists, who kept churches separate from the catholic church from the third century and called themselves the pure; the Petrobrusians of the early twelfth century, who rejected infant baptism; the Waldenses, from the late twelfth century, some of whom also questioned it; and the Anabaptists, who began baptizing believers on confession of faith in Zurich in 1525 (the first Anabaptist baptisms). Most of what is known about these groups comes from their persecutors, and not every group that stood apart from Rome held sound doctrine. The conviction rests on Christ's promise, not on a documented chain. English Baptist churches enter the documentary record in 1609, when John Smyth baptized believers in Amsterdam, and in 1612, when Thomas Helwys led a church home to Spitalfields near London (the first English Baptist church). Calvinistic Baptist churches formed in London in the 1630s and 1640s, and in America a church of baptized believers gathered at Providence in 1638 or 1639 (the first Baptist church in America). As a distinct fellowship, the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement took shape in the twentieth century, when churches left the Northern and Southern Baptist conventions over theological liberalism, denominational control, and cooperation with those who denied the fundamentals of the faith. Voluntary fellowships now connect churches without governing them.

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Primary sources

In Their Own Words

This profile describes the tradition from its own official documents and standard teaching:

  • New Hampshire Confession of Faith (1833), used or adapted by many churches
  • Local church articles of faith and church covenants (there is no central body)
  • Statements of faith of voluntary fellowships, such as the Baptist Bible Fellowship International