Baptists acknowledge the lordship of Christ as the ‘sole and absolute authority’ in all matters of faith and practice, and believe that the principal way in which God makes himself known is through the Bible. A striking feature of the Baptist story has been the way that separate groups, studying the Bible for themselves, have come to a Baptist understanding of the church and of believers’ baptism. These groups, arising in different places at different times, have not always held all other beliefs in common.
Baptists today are heirs to several, varied traditions.
The stress on the authority of Christ, revealed in the Bible and by the Holy Spirit, has meant that Baptists have resisted setting individuals up in positions of authority over the church. They have maintained that each church has liberty, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to study the Bible, to interpret the mind of Christ for its situation and to act upon this. The church meeting - the gathering of believers to seek guidance together - is the place where decisions are taken. The local church is the important unit for Baptists.
Because of their understanding of the priesthood of all believers, Baptists ordain ministers rather than priests. They value those trained and set apart as full-time leaders but do not see them as fundamentally different from other members of the church who all have their part to play in the ministry of the whole people of God.
Such local churches cherish their independence, yet most
Baptists have also fostered interdependence between churches.
Membership of wider groupings is voluntary, but many churches have joined to form regional associations and national unions.
Thus Bloomsbury belongs to the London Baptist Association and to the Baptist Union of Great Britain. Similarly, many Baptist churches, Bloomsbury among them, gladly work with Christians of other denominations, although even the most ecumenically minded Baptists tend to be rather an awkward squad on the inter-church scene because of their particular understandings.

Baptists practise Believers’ Baptism. They do not baptize babies but wait for ‘years of discretion’ when candidates can take the decision for themselves - so only believers are baptized. Baptism is normally by total immersion, which is dramatic and memorable, but the mode is secondary to the believing state of those baptized.

First Baptists
English Baptists first emerged in 1609 - in Amsterdam! They were refugees who had gone abroad to escape persecution for separating from the Church of England. As John Smyth and his fellows studied their Bibles, they came to Baptists beliefs. Some returned to England in 1612 and their leader, Thomas Helwys, was responsible for the first published plea in English for freedom of conscience - the right to choose one’s own religion. In his book, The Mystery of Iniquity, addressed to King James I, the plea was remarkable in claiming this right for Jews and Moslems, as well as for Christians who did not conform to the Church of England.
These early Baptists were a late product of the Reformation. By then Bible translations had made it possible for more people to read the scriptures for themselves and this, coupled with new thinking about Christianity in general, led to a new emphasis on personal faith.Bloomsbury was one of the first, new, evangelical Baptist churches in London, the site and facade making its own proud statement about Baptists’ improving status in society.
Bloomsbury was soon eclipsed by the fame of Charles Haddon Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
The ‘Met Tab’ still presents an imposing, pillared frontage on the Elephant and Castle roundabout, but the building behind is postwar, after bomb damage, and the church there no longer belongs to the Baptist Union, cherishing that right to the independence of the local church which Baptists defend even though many deplore the resultant scope for isolation.
Many reacted against the wealth, ornate style and superstitious practices of the late medieval church. They wanted simpler meeting-houses and patterns of worship. Presbyterians, Congregationalists and the Society of Friends all emerged at this time. Baptists gathered their communities of baptized believers and expected them to lead godly lives, with strict discipline for those who ‘walked unruly’, whether the lapse was a matter of church attendance, of private or business morality, or of theological deviance.

Persecution
In Stuart England the leaders of the Church of England
persecuted those who dissented from or failed to conform to the Established Church (hence the terms dissenters and
nonconformists). It was made illegal for them to gather for
worship: meetings were broken up, preachers were imprisoned, and the people were fined. There are records of Baptists worshipping in woods and fields, the congregation sometimes having to move site several times in one service to avoid discovery. Even so, the churches survived and grew. Many new churches were formed during the Civil War and Commonwealth period but they met in unobtrusive premises and left few purpose-built meeting-houses for posterity.

Toleration
When the Glorious Revolution of 1688 brought William and Mary to the throne, limited toleration was granted to those protestant nonconformists, Baptists included, who maintained orthodox trinitarian beliefs. Baptists might now build chapels in towns, provided they obtained a licence from the local diocesan bishop.
They remained, however, second-class citizens, with restricted access to education and the learned professions, were not eligible for commissions in the forces, and could not be elected to local or national government. The slow process of winning full civil rights took much of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile many diverted their abilities towards the commercial world (‘trade’, not held in high esteem by the English establishment, was open to dissenters), and became successful and wealthy businessmen.
Morton Peto, who built Bloomsbury, was just such a man,
apprenticed in youth to his builder uncle and subsequently
becoming one of the great railway contractors. Bloomsbury’s first minister, William Brock, had served his apprenticeship as a clock and watchmaker. Peto’s firm sadly crashed amid widespread economic collapse in 1866 and he was bankrupted, which was a matter for careful church investigation and rebuke.

An Evangelical Revolution
Personal faith has always been important to Baptists. From the early days some were eager to share that faith with others, but this was not a dominant feature of all Baptist groupings through the eighteenth century. The Evangelical Revival was led by the Wesleys and George Whitefield from the 1740s, but by the 1770s and 1780s the majority of Baptists were embracing Evangelical doctrines. This movement was particularly strong around Bristol and in the East Midlands, while London churches remained closed and inward-looking.
In 1784 the Northamptonshire Association issued a Prayer Call for revival and that led to the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society at Kettering in 1792. Support for missionary work at home and overseas had the effect of drawing Baptists closer together, leading in turn to the formation of the Baptist Union in 1813. At the same time Evangelicals from different denominations found they could work together in developing Sunday Schools, in Bible translation, in the campaigns against slavery and child labour, and in a variety of other philanthropic concerns.
Some high-Calvinist Baptists were unable to join this evangelical Baptist Union and formed separate Strict Baptist organizations.

Bloomsbury was one of the first, new, evangelical Baptist
churches in London, the site and facade making its own proud statement about Baptists’ improving status in society.
Bloomsbury was soon eclipsed by the fame of Charles Haddon Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
The ‘Met Tab’ still presents an imposing, pillared frontage on the Elephant and Castle roundabout, but the building behind is postwar, after bomb damage, and the church there no longer belongs to the Baptist Union, cherishing that right to the independence of the local church which Baptists defend even though many deplore the resultant scope for isolation.

Baptists Today
It is easy to be a Baptist in England now, free to worship as we choose without penalty. Sadly, many people do not choose to be Baptists - or, indeed, any type of Christian. There are other countries where Baptists still suffer for what they believe, and for their repeated emphasis on the human right to liberty of conscience.
Because Baptist statistics depend on baptized church members, comparison with paedobaptist membership figures can be misleading. Most Baptist congregations are much larger than the actual church membership.

The Baptist Union of Great Britain joined in founding the Free Church Federal Council, and the British and World Councils of Churches, and is now active in Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (CTBI) and Churches Together in England (CTE). Wales and Scotland have separate Baptist Unions, but some churches across the border belong to the ‘English’ Union, hence the broader, if somewhat misleading, title. These Unions all belong to the European Baptist Federation and to the Baptist World Alliance, founded in 1905, which now comprises 35 million baptized believers in a worshipping community of 100 million in 214 Baptist unions and conventions worldwide.

Whatever our reasons for joining a Baptist church, as Baptists we are heirs to a tradition that embraces:
• the evangelical Christian faith, stressing personal commitment, dependence on the Bible, and the right to be free to respond to the gospel
• the concept of the church as the fellowship of believers,
a gathered and gathering community bound to Christ and
to one another
• the missionary spirit which seeks to share the Good
News of Christ in deed and word
• the practice of fellowship giving as the chief means of
financing church work
• the stress on freedom: the human right to freedom from
slavery and oppression, from ignorance and poverty, and
especially freedom of conscience, the right to religious liberty for all, including the right to be a ‘Free Church’
• the sense of interdependence which draws Baptists with
differing emphases and in different places to work together
for the common cause
• the need for godly lives, demanding high standards in all
we think or speak or do.

Faith Bowers

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