Baptist Churches
Baptist churches enter the documentary record in England and America, confess their faith, and carry the Gospel to the nations through the modern missions movement. They did not come out of Rome, and they are not Protestants in that sense.
Read in Order
Oldest first. Each entry opens its page on the church-history timeline.
1609 · Free churches · In Amsterdam, English Separatist exiles led by John Smyth and Thomas Helwys concluded that the New Testament gives baptism only to believers, and the congregation was baptized on profession of faith. This is when an English Baptist church enters the documentary record, not when Baptists began: Novatianists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses, and Anabaptists had stood apart from Rome and baptized believers, or rebaptized converts, long before. In 1612 Helwys led a remnant home and gathered a church at Spitalfields near London, the earliest Baptist church on English soil that the records show.
1638 or 1639 · Free churches · In Providence, the colony Roger Williams founded on liberty of conscience, Ezekiel Holliman baptized Williams, who then baptized Holliman and about ten others, forming a church of baptized believers. It is the earliest Baptist church in the American record, not the beginning of believer-baptizing churches. Williams left the church within months, but it continues today as the First Baptist Church in America. The church John Clarke gathered at Newport also traces its founding to those years.
1644 · Free churches · Seven Particular Baptist churches in London published a confession of faith, putting on the public record what these churches believed. Its title protested that they were falsely called Anabaptists, a name their enemies tied to the violence at Münster. Its articles affirmed the Trinity, salvation by grace through Christ's work, the gathered church of believers, and baptism by dipping the whole body under water.
1792 · Free churches · William Carey, an English Baptist shoemaker and pastor, argued in his Enquiry that Christ's commission still binds His churches. That year Baptist ministers at Kettering formed a society to send missionaries, and in 1793 Carey sailed for India, where he labored for forty years and helped translate the Scriptures into many languages. His example helped launch a century of missions by Baptist and Protestant bodies alike.
People and Errors of This Era
Biographies of those who shaped it, and the false teachings Christ's churches withstood.