Who Belongs in a Church?
Anyone may walk through the doors of a Baptist church, and we hope they do. Sinners need the Gospel, and a church should be glad to see them. But who is the church? Who makes up the body itself, the people who come to the Lord's Table, decide its business, and are called its members? Baptists answer: those who have been born again and baptized.
The conviction that a local church is made up only of people who give a believable testimony of being born again, and who have been baptized as believers. Regenerate means given new life by the Holy Spirit (see Regeneration).
That may sound obvious. Yet for most of the last sixteen centuries it has been a minority view. In much of Christian history a person has entered the church as an infant, by baptism, and in many lands by being born in the right parish. The free churches suffered for saying otherwise, and Baptists have held to it as near the center of what makes a church a church. Our study of the local church shows what a church is. This one asks who it is made of.
Do you belong to a church because of the family you were born into, or because you were born again?
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For Deeper Study
- Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church DisciplineAmazon John S. Hammett and Benjamin L. Merkle, editorsBaptist scholars on the biblical case for membership and discipline. Several contributors are Reformed, and we differ on election.
- Biblical Foundations for Baptist ChurchesAmazon John S. HammettA Southern Baptist study of the church, with close attention to regenerate membership.
- Baptist Foundations: Church Government for an Anti-Institutional AgeAmazon Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman, editorsA case for congregational church life and regenerate membership, edited by Reformed Baptists. We differ on election and on how far to press a plurality of elders.
- Church Membership: How the World Knows Who Represents JesusAmazon Jonathan LeemanA short, practical book for church members, by a Reformed Baptist.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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What Makes a Baptist?
A Baptist is a Christian who holds the Bible as the only final authority for faith and practice, and who gathers with other saved and baptized believers in a self-governing local church under Christ.
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