Unexpected unity part 3: Being Baptist
“All revivals are preceded by three features. Extraordinary prayer, unexpected unity... and heightened expectation.” Dr. Stuart Piggin, Australian Christian Historian.
In the spirit of unity, CATCH has reached out to several denominational leaders around Aotearoa to share with us what’s special about the place they call ‘home’. After beginning with Dr. Rev Malcolm Gordon and Anglican Assistant Bishop Ana Fletcher, this week we hear from Elliot Rice from Central Baptist Church, Wellington.
I first found a home among the Baptists when I joined the local youth group and attended the BYM Easter Camp. Since then, the Baptists have become my people to have and to hold, for better, for worse. I was baptised as a believer in my church’s pool, and, since training for pastoral ministry at Carey Baptist College, have had the privilege of baptising other believers in other church pools. And I’ve lost count of the number of Easter Camps I’ve attended across the motu over the years.
I start here because Easter Camps and Carey Baptist College are surely two of the best tangible gifts our “team of 40,000” Baptists have offered the church in Aotearoa. Easter Camps have seen thousands of teenagers over many generations encounter and respond to Jesus, usually in the context of local faith communities who help sustain their journey of discipleship. Baptists care deeply about the discipleship of young people, and stewarding these camps has been important to us. For many people across the denominations, those discipleship journeys continued to Carey, where we were formed by world-class and church-facing academics to grow in our love for Jesus, the Bible, the Gospel, the church, and mission. Carey has for nearly 100 years been a Baptist gift for the church in Aotearoa.
And yet the New Zealand Baptists are sharing in the current experience of decline in the Western church. The 2023 Census will surely tell us our team of Baptists have grown smaller. In this season of relative marginalisation, I think of the whakataukī, “Naku te rourou nau te rourou ka ora ai te iwi” (With your basket and my basket the people will live). What’s in our Baptist rourou? What contribution does Jesus enable us to bring to his kingdom banquet? A brief look into our history suggests two key offerings that Baptists would do well to begin reclaiming, let alone sharing with the church catholic.
All in
Most obviously (because it’s in our name), Baptists offer believer’s baptism by immersion (“the only scriptural form of baptism” as my more confident forebears would claim!). Have you seen our baptism? It’s strange: one person is voluntarily drowned in front of everyone else, then brought back up, soaked, to a joyful eruption of noise! Our baptism declares we are all-in, dunked entirely (not sprinkled), soaked from head to toe, sold out for Jesus. And this is done to us not as infants, but freely as believers converted to share in the faith of Christ, with the church as our witness.
We’ve been doing this since 1609 when John Smyth baptised himself, then baptised a congregation, creating the earliest Baptist church among the exiled Separatists from England. I think believers’ baptism by immersion is the clearest mark of their single-minded, all-in desire to forsake all others in faithfulness to God. For early Baptists, this meant becoming non-conformists on the outside of state-sanctioned religion. That’s not our issue today, but in this secular age, “belief in God . . . is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”[1] We’re all non-conformists now, and Christianity is once again becoming strange. Perhaps this strange, all-in expression of faith in Jesus is just the rite of passage needed to sustain God’s people for such a time as this.
All-together
Paired with believers’ baptism, Baptists offer congregational governance as a way of being the church together, and this too is a gift. Our union with Christ in baptism at the same time binds us with one another as members of his body, the local church. Specifically, we believe two things here: first, each congregation is sufficient of itself to be a church, and second, “every member of the congregation shares properly in the task of discerning the calling of Christ on the church.”[2]
At its best, congregational governance means we value all people, not just the ones up the front. The early Baptists valued all people by giving them the vote. In 19th-century England, new laws had given the vote to the less than one-in-seven men who owned property with an annual value of £10. The Baptists took this idea of voting and gave it to everyone. Men, women, rich, poor—didn’t matter! Same with preaching: Baptists developed communal forms of reading and interpreting Scripture. Men and women, mechanics and shoemakers, tailors, weavers, and peddlers all preached and interjected, developing forms of “talk-back sermons.” In those early days, Baptists were radicals, subversive, counter-cultural, giving dignity to all people.
Now we recognise the practical realities of congregational governance are fraught with people-related frustrations—difficult people, busy people, quiet people, and simply too many people! From a modern perspective where efficiency rules all, congregational governance doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But despite this, or perhaps even because of it, we believe that membership and congregational governance is a prophetic way to embody the kingdom of heaven in our world. Becoming a member is a way of choosing patience over efficiency, the hard road over the easy road, the kingdom over the empire. Membership says we’re committed to each other no matter what, that we’re better together that deep individual and communal growth happens when we intentionally choose to hang in there with each other and allow Jesus to grow our character and deepen our relationships.
Baptists offer believers’ baptism and congregational governance, inviting the church to be an all-in, all-together people.
References
[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 3.
[2] Stephen R. Holmes, “Knowing Together the Mind of Christ: Congregational Government and the Church Meeting,” 172.
Elliot Rice
Elliot serves as a Co-Lead Pastor at Wellington Central Baptist Church, and an adjunct lecturer at Pathways and Carey Baptist College. He loves being with people, studying Scripture and theology, and the challenge of walking together in the ways of God known and to be made known. Elliot takes great joy in being Sarah’s husband and Charlotte and Phoebe’s dad.