Baptist Ideas: Baptists and the "Real" Church

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Martin Sutherland

Do Baptists care about the church? Sometimes it is suggested that the key thing is to love and follow Christ and that church can be a distraction. This sounds pious, but it is simplistic. The Baptist witness has been that because we follow Christ the church is very important indeed.

In the first article in this series on Baptist ideas, I suggested that, rather than an obvious set of doctrines, Baptists relate their thinking to a particular dynamic in Christian thought and life. Core principles must be worked out in real life, they must be seen to be working. So, the Anabaptist Dirk Willems, at the ultimate cost of his life, was compelled to help even the enemy who would bring him to the stake. The gospel is not about remote theories; it is to be lived out.

The same dynamic lies behind the Baptist approach to the church. I’m not talking about how to govern the church, nor its place in mission. We will look at those questions later. Rather I want to explore the Baptist vision of the nature of the church.

Invisible Church

Christians very early agreed that in one sense the church, the spiritual body of Christ, is invisible. It is made up of everyone who is saved, from all time. These are those who trust in Christ and will be vindicated on the judgment day. Now, the trouble with this ”invisible” church is just that – it’s invisible! Humans can’t see it exactly, it is known fully only to God. What we can see (sometimes all too well) is the flesh and blood church of our own time and experience. How important is this “visible” church? What role does it play? How is it related to the invisible church that God knows? It is in their answers to these questions that baptistic groups have made their contribution.

Augustine and much of medieval Catholicism, gave greatest attention to the visible church. It was, after all, the only one you could say definite things about. Christians were called to live their lives in terms of the visible church. This flesh and blood church on the ground, the church you could see and touch, with its structures and rituals, was the way you gained entry to the invisible church. It didn’t necessarily guarantee salvation, but there was no other show in town.

The Protestant reformation changed things. The emphasis of the reformers was on salvation through faith, rather than visible membership of the institutional church. Now, the thing about faith is that it is an invisible quality. Sure, there are lots of visible consequences, but faith was conceived in terms of the human soul engaged by God. You can’t see that, you can only imply it. This is important because, if you are going to build your approach to church life around faith, as Protestants did, then the result is a greater stress on inwardness and individuality.

In theory this tilts the balance towards the importance of the invisible church. The task shifts subtly, from bringing people into the church, to bringing them to faith. Nevertheless the visible church remained the crucial path to faith. After all, where else would you hear the word preached or receive the sacraments? As we shall see, discipleship is always corporate. It has no reality unless it involves love and covenant in flesh and blood, in the here and now.

So, for both Catholics and Protestants the expected sequence was that you would first enter the visible church. Once there, there you had the opportunity to gain personal faith. Obviously there would be some converts from outside Christendom altogether, but in most cases membership of the visible church would precede faith.

Baptists reversed this sequence. In a way more radical than most other Protestants they gave heightened priority to the invisible church. This is, after all, the “true” church, the only church which matters at the end. The thinking was different from the Catholic position or even that of most of Protestantism. In the Baptist view you didn’t join the visible church to be saved, you were in it because you were already saved. The visible church is not an entry point to the invisible church; it is a colony of it.

Visible Church

So why didn’t Baptists spin off into a purely mystic or individualistic spirituality? Well, remember that underlying dynamic of Baptist thought: core principles must be lived out; salvation and discipleship cannot be separated. Just because the true church is invisible, that does not mean that it doesn’t matter what happens in the visible world. Far from it! Baptists were very concerned about how the visible church should operate. Indeed some early Baptists regarded the question of how to be church in the visible here and now as the main focus of theology.

What mattered about the visible church was not its extent or its power but the quality of its life. If it was to be a demonstration of the Kingdom then it must reflect the nature of God’s reign. Baptists would covenant together to live a certain type of life - a life which reflected the ways of God. The characteristics of eternal life were to be demonstrated on earth. It was not enough to be a saint; you were called to be a visible saint. Core principles are to be lived out.

For Baptists this is true of our corporate as well as our private lives. We must put aside the fiction that for real Christians the church in its earthly form doesn’t matter. The opposite is true. Precisely because we are real Christians, then the flesh and blood church matters immensely. Baptists care a lot about the church - not for its own sake, but for the eternal reality it represents. Church is a big idea - not just as a demonstration of our discipleship but as a key element in the mission of God.