Baptist church

“ In the early days of this Church there were certain persons, belonging to the Baptist denomination, very moral and no doubt as good people as you could find anywhere, who came, saying they believed in the Book of Mormon, and that they had been baptized into the Baptist Church, and they wished to come into our Church. ”

“ It is not bigotry to adhere to one’s convictions, provided the spirit of Christian love prevails.”
The Episcopal Recorder said: “The close communion of the Baptist churches is but the necessary sequence of the fundamental idea out of which their existence has grown. No Christian Church would willingly receive to its communion even the humblest and truest believer in Christ who had not been baptized. With Baptists, immersion only is baptism, and they therefore of necessity exclude from the Lord’s Table all who have not been immersed. ”

“ Some Christian denominations include all their congregations in one comprehensive society, or ecclesiastical system, under some central authority, which legislates for and controls the whole. This comprehensive society they call the church. Thus we speak of the Roman Catholic Church, the [p. 11] Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church—where the word “church” stands for the aggregate of all their local societies. With Baptists it is different. They speak of Baptist churches, but not of the Baptist Church, when the entire denomination is meant. ”

“ In this country there is a large religious community known as the Baptist Church. This group includes many fine people. Many of them are honest, intelligent, cultured, refined, and good citizens. They have taken their denominational title from their emphasis upon immersion as being the only scriptural baptism, in contrast to those who accept something else. ”

“ The reader who has followed me through this brief and imperfect sketch of the history of the Seventh-day Baptist Denomination, cannot fail to perceive that our churches have gradually and healthfully increased in numbers, notwithstanding the continual opposition which is manifested to the cause we advocate, and the continual discouragements that we have to encounter both in society and business. It is now about one hundred and seventy years since the first Seventh-day Baptist church was organized in America ”

“ The Baptists generally disclaim being "close communionists," but "close baptists." That is, they insist that no person is eligible to partake of the Lord's Supper until after baptism by immersion; and that by a regularly ordained Baptist minister, upon the authority of a Baptist church, expressed by a vote of its members. I do not know that I ever saw the ordinance celebrated in a Baptist church, that some explanation along this line was not made, by way of apology. ”

“ The young in the Baptist Church, not having been baptized in infancy, are brought up to feel that they are out of the Church, and that they have to be converted, or "to get religion," before they join the Church, instead of being brought up to feel that, having been baptized, they belong to the Church and must believe its doctrines, and live the life which they teach. ”

“ The authority of a Presbyterian church is limited to the bounds of its own denomination. It cannot ordain ministers for Baptist churches, any more than it can ordain them for Methodist churches or for Episcopal churches. When a Presbyterian minister becomes a Baptist, his motives for making the change and the conformity of his views to the New Testament standard need to be scrutinized by Baptists, before they can admit him to their Christian and church fellowship ”

“ J. A., pastor of the First Colored Baptist Church in North Birmingham, is a rising young man in the Mount Pilgrim Association. His church, though a new enterprise, is a success, and all plans for gospel aggression find in him a ready and substantial friend. His brethren love him because he is peaceable and benevolent in his dealings with them. ”

“ It is indeed a matter of wonder that a Presbyterian minister, but a short time identified with the Baptists, should exert such an influence over them as to induce a great multitude of churches and church members to resolve that when he was driven out of the Baptist Church they also would share his fortune, and accept loss of reputation and exclusion from their former brotherhood for the sake of the principles they had learned from him. ”

“ About forty miles farther, there is another little Baptist church, and after this, in that direction, they become rather plentiful; but they are then in the Upper province, and my information respecting them is but scanty. A Baptist minister, in the Newcastle district, writes me as follows, in consequence of some queries I had put to him: "In the Upper province there are four Baptist associations, about sixty churches, and forty ordained ministers. I am sorry to say we labour under great disadvantages. Our preachers are generally unlearned men, and destitute of useful books. ”

“ They may be true converts, and have the spiritual qualifications, but they are destitute of the ceremonial qualification—baptism. The “buried in baptism” comes before the “breaking of bread.”
2. They do not accept the invitation of Pedobaptist churches to eat at the Lord’s Table with them, for the same reason; they are not baptized Christians. And while the appreciate their Christian fellowship, they could not accept their church fellowship, and sit at the Lord’s Table with them, without accepting their sprinkling and indorsing their baptismal errors. ”

“ The division of the mother church was made with the utmost harmony and good feeling on the part of all, both pastor and people believing that the establishing of a separate church at the other end of the city would lead to a more general knowledge of Baptist doctrines and the consequent extension of the Master’s Kingdom. Subsequent history has proved this belief to be well founded. We quote from Dr. Bill’s sermon at the dedication of the new building erected here in 1866: “This movement—the division of the church—which we believe was of God, left us without pastor or deacons. ”

“ Why are any of us in an ole Baptist school? Horrible denomination—all these moldly barns of churches, and people coughing illiterate hymns, and long-winded preachers always springing a bright new idea like ‘All the world needs to solve its problems is to get back to the gospel of Jesus Christ.’ The only church is the Episcopal! ”

“ About seventy-five miles from Montreal, in the same direction, is another Baptist church, of about forty members: they have a good chapel, an excellent pastor, and, at this very moment, God is visiting them with a most refreshing shower; many are awakened to concern, and numbers have found peace, and are rejoicing in God our Saviour. I have just been sent for to come and help, and set off to-morrow morning. Again, twenty-five miles onward, in the same direction, is a Baptist church of thirty members: they have a pastor. We have sent a missionary about twenty miles farther ”

“ Roger Williams (Picturesque America, page 502) refused to continue as pastor over the oldest Baptist church in America on the ground that there was "no regularly constituted church on earth, nor any person qualified to administer any church ordinance; nor can there be until new apostles are sent by the great head of the church, for whose coming I am seeking."
5. Alexander Campbell, founder of the sect of the "Disciples," says: "The meaning of this institution [the kingdom of heaven] has been buried under the rubbish of human tradition for hundreds of years. ”

“ The Baptist holds that men receive salvation directly from Christ, and by virtue of an independent transaction with him; that a believer's salvation is secured by a personal union with Christ; and that he is divinely commanded, after being thus saved, to unite with the church for the sake of personal profit and of usefulness; and that the church so constituted is to be governed by the law of Christ. He makes doctrine and conversion come first. Out of doctrine and out of conversion proceeds the church. ”

“ A church, therefore, is not a system of congregations confederated under a general government, but a single local congregation of Christian disciples associated in covenant and meeting together for worship. In this sense the word is commonly, almost uniformly, used in the New Testament.
Churches are Divinely instituted to be “the light of the world” and “the salt of the earth.” They are ordained for the glory of God, as “the ground and pillar of the truth,” in the proclamation of His Gospel and the establishment of His kingdom [p. 12] in the world. ”

“ Roger Williams, who fled from the persecuting Puritans, became the founder of the first Baptist Church in America, which was instituted at Providence, 1644, and from which originated a church at Newport, in 1652, under the auspices of Rev. ”

“ How many, and what are the Scriptural officers of a Christian church? For a church, being a society, must have not only laws, but officers to execute them. How many orders are there in the ministry? These are questions which have at times greatly divided the Christian world.
Baptists assert that the officers of a church are two,—and of right, can be no more,—pastor and deacons. In this opinion agree some other denominations, while the various Episcopal sects insist that there should be three sets—deacons, priests, and bishops, to which the Church of England adds archbishops. ”

“ For myself (and I can without hesitation say the same of those with whom I am connected) , I have no wish to see the downfal of the venerable fabric of the church, though in its patronage, often improperly used, and in some of its formularies, particularly the baptismal service and others connected with it, I think I see much that calls for alteration. Many of its ministers and members I respect, and wish to consider them as fellow-Christians. ”

“ The Apostle that told us to "prove all things, and hold fast that which is good," gave us a definition of the exhortation of the Evangelist or the Baptist—"Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." A repenting and a proving people are necessary to make a Church of Christ. Repentance and enquiry are the pillars and foundations of that Church; without repentance and enquiry there can be no Church of Christ ”

“ In this way missions are the testing-places of Christian doctrine.
[219] In a similar way New Testament polity is showing its power in our foreign work. At home we are getting to be lax in our reception of members, and are taking in numbers of persons without proper evidence of their conversion. Baptist churches which used to examine carefully their candidates for admission now receive them without public and oral confession of their faith. Yet these new members may vote, and may determine the attitude of the church in important exigencies. ”

“ It is unnecessary to observe that, in a contest of this nature between an individual Baptist minister and the whole Catholic Church, the church, notwithstanding her rather formidable array of theologians and philosophers, gets decidedly the worst of the battle. ”

“ I believed firmly, that if there was a Christian people upon the earth who had kept the primitive faith from the days of the apostles, and had never symbolized with the errors of the church of Rome in her idolatrous and adulterous course, that people was the Baptist denomination. ”

“ Congregationalists have uniformly, until here and there an exception has arisen of late years, required baptism and church-membership as the prerequisite of a seat at the table of the Lord. It is a part of the false ‘liberality’ which now prevails in certain quarters, to welcome everybody ‘who thinks he loves Christ’ to commune in His body and blood. Such a course is the first step in breaking down that distinction between the church and the world, which our Saviour emphasized ”

“ Contrast the baptist conception of the Church with the wise sobriety of an Anglican divine, who wrote a few years before John Smith had called the English Baptists into being: "The Church is the multitude and number of those whom Almighty God severeth from the rest of the world by the work of His grace, and calleth to the participation of eternal happiness by the knowledge of such supernatural verities as concerning their everlasting good He hath revealed in Christ His Son, and such other precious and happy means as He hath appointed to further and set forward the work of their salvation. ”

“ It is the erroneous view that baptism is the act of the administrator which causes the anxiety of High Church Baptists to deduce their Baptist lineage from regularly baptized ministers all the way back to John the Baptist, and which induces many modern endeavors of pedobaptists to prove that the earliest Baptists of England and the Continent did not immerse. ”

“ Even if some details of dogma aren’t true—or even all of ’em—think what a consolation religion and the church are to weak humanity!”
“Are they? I wonder! Don’t cheerful agnostics, who know they’re going to die dead, worry much less than good Baptists, who worry lest their sons and cousins and sweethearts fail to get into the Baptist heaven—or what is even worse, who wonder if they may not have guessed wrong—if God may not be a Catholic, maybe, or a Mormon or a Seventh-day Adventist instead of a Baptist, and then they’ll go to hell themselves! Consolation? ”

“ In what it involves we find the true idea of the church, that is, the Baptist doctrine that we are regenerated in Christ by his death, and that baptism is, as it were, only a symbol, a sort of mark, by which we are known as belonging to the church, but not necessary for salvation, inasmuch as we are saved before we receive it. He alleges, with reference to the Greek version, that “should be saved” is wrong and “are saved” is right. And there the matter rests. Now, while on this very important point, whereon indeed rests his theory, he might as well have been a little more exact and explicit. ”