3 Minutes in Baptist History (08.08.2024)

Four good reasons to leave a dead church in 1745.

In August of 1745, a Congregationalist minister named Benjamin Lord summoned 13 absentee members of his church to explain their persistent absence from the Sunday gatherings. Lord was head of the established church in Norwich, the Congregationalist church which was the only church in town. Townsfolk were taxed to fund the church and its minister, and membership with this particular church was an obligation of good citizenship.

Among those church members who had been absent for a while was a young man named Isaac Backus. Backus had been baptized as an infant (the Congregationalist practice), and he had voluntarily joined Lord’s church after his evangelical conversion.

Backus would later become a Baptist pastor in Middleborough, Massachusetts. He, like many eighteenth-century American colonists, embodied the evangelical inclination toward a democratic and personally convictional exercise of religion. This was far different from the socially stratified and politically established religion which dominated previously in the New World (or anywhere else for that matter).

Backus's evangelicalism was indeed the main rationale for his absence from the established church of Norwich. Backus and the others did appear in answer to their summons, and they gave several reasons to justify their non-attendance. In fact, they made their case that there can be truly good reasons for a member to leave a church.

Four of those they listed were:

1. If unbelievers were able to become church members and maintain their membership, then one might be justified in leaving.

2. If corrupt or unbiblical doctrine was being preached, then one might be justified in leaving.

3. If the true gospel and those who preached it were shut out of the church, then one might be justified in leaving.

4. If the church admits members who profess faith in Christ but do not live accordingly, then one might be justified in leaving.

In the case of the Congregationalist or Standing church of Norwich (at least according to Backus and those like him), all four of these features of a dead or false church were apparent.

Backus and his fellow absentees withdrew from the established church and became Separates. Nearly all Separates were fundamentally the same in doctrine and polity as the Congregationalist churches they left behind. However, they formed new churches with an evangelical spirit of pietism or personal spirituality.

Over time, many of the Separates of colonial America became Baptists, which seems to be the inevitable conclusion or destination of the convictions listed above. Baptists believe that only those with a credible profession of faith should become church members. And Baptists believe that the true gospel ought to be preached by those who are qualified according to the biblical standards (1 Timothy 3; Titus 1), even if they have little or no formal education or credentials.

Baptist churches today would do well to recover the sort of convictions that led them to embrace Baptist beliefs and practices at the first.