This is a fictional account of a young lady, Michelle Peterson. The purpose of this story is to try and demonstrate some of the reasons why Baptists developed a formal church membership along the lines that they did.
Michelle Peterson was born in London, August 5th 1615. Her parents were traders. They had done quite well thanks to Queen Elizabeth’s rather vague religious position and brilliant foreign policy, which opened up many opportunities for eager traders like the young Mr. Peterson. At Michelle’s birth, under King James, they were still maintaining a healthy living.
While Michelle was quite young her mother died. Michelle had no other siblings. However she developed a very close relationship with her father. Michelle loved to spend time in the summer with her father, after his work, playing on the Clapham common.
Michelle was an inquisitive young girl. She loved to learn all she could from her father, who was a little reluctant to teach her. She learnt to add. She learnt to read. When she was reading well enough, her father encouraged her to read the Bible, which King James had recently made available to all in English. It kept her out of his hair and he thought would teach her some good morals.
The Petersons had always been good church going people. Their local rector was a nice enough man. He never was one to rock the boat and had reached as far as he had by being conservative and supporting whatever the local bishop had been supporting. This had meant subtle changes in his theology a number of times, but it had thus far worked for him.
Young Michelle had some questions about the way things were happening in their church. She had by now grown to eighteen and had read and loved the stories of Jesus. She had even ventured to get through the stories of Acts. She tried to talking to the rector a number of times raising issues she found in the Bible but found that he had not been all that keen in questioning the way things were done in church. He had said something about the new Archbishop and his severe restrictions and punishments for those bringing in their own variations on what was happening in church.
Michelle was a bit confused. She couldn’t understand how things in the Bible, which seemed clear enough to her, were being distorted by the preaching of her rector. She also couldn’t understand why church seemed to be so formal. There didn’t seem to be any of these things in the Bible. How could this be right? She kept asking her father.
Eventually her father shared his distressed about his daughter’s questions with one of the ladies in church who had continually tried to gain his attention. This lady knew a few people who were searching for similar answers to Michelle. Without Mr. Peterson’s knowledge this lady shared some names with Michelle of people who were asking similar questions. Michelle was delighted and sought these people as soon as she could.
She found that they met with others in another church not too far away in Battersea. It was not far from where she had grown up. She was told that they met on a Wednesday night and that the rector gave a variant service in support of those who were asking questions within his parish.
She went to one of their meetings on a Wednesday night and found support and encouragement amongst these people. They also were asking the same questions and their rector seemed to support their questions. She found they even had some who had not baptised their children. And some who had even received baptism as believers, seemingly forsaking their baptism as a child.
This, they said, was clearly the teaching of the Bible. Michelle tended to agree with them. Although she had some questions about their association with other strange religious groups on the continent that had seized cities and raped and killed. They reassured her that they had nothing to do with that sort of behaviour.
Michelle continued to meet with this group, and also on Sunday with her father, but was more and more drawn to the group. She felt a need to be baptised. In one of the groups baptismal services received baptism. The group was growing and Michelle was feeling more at home.
Eventually the bishop heard of the goings on at this church in Battersea. He invoked the Archbishops rules, removing the rector and placing his own favoured man, who quickly put a stop the Wednesday night meetings. This new man found the names of those going and publicly denounced these people as heretics. Michelle’s father was devastated.
The group was despondent. They gathered on Clapham common to discuss what they should do. How were they to respond to what had happened? What would Jesus, or Paul, teach them to do in such situations?
There were five options that they could see. The first option was that they drop their beliefs and return to the parish and do whatever the rector asked of them. This however they dismissed as something which they couldn’t do in good conscience.
A second option was to seek out other churches that had rectors who would be sympathetic to their situation and re-establish their Wednesday night groups. However Archbishop Laud was, from their perspective, destroying any hope of that being a viable option for them.
A third option involved joining the English groups that they had heard about in the Low Countries. There was a John Smyth who had led a group of people with similar beliefs to sneak over the channel and re-establish there. They had established a church over there and started to have some freedom in worship. There were some questions raised about this guy Smyth and whether or not he was joining yet another group which had distant links to that strange group who had seized the city of Muntzer all those years ago.
A fourth option was that they could join groups that they had heard about and set off to the new lands over far away to the West. A strange land where there is religious freedom and people set up their own colonies where they are free to follow the Bible in the way they see fit. It was going to be the land that will bring peace, prosperity and the American way to the entire world whether they liked it or not, they said. This sounded to some like an attractive option. However not many of them could afford the price to get all the way across to this strange land. Others told of rumours of the strange local people who had strange names like, running water – whoever heard of such a thing? – and cut the tops of the heads off of the people who lived there.
The final option involved starting their own church. Maybe they could find one of these rectors who had lost their jobs and ask him to be pastor over them. They already had a number of people who had been rectors up North and had fled down south pass through their group in the months before the crack down.
They decided to meet again next week. During this time people were free to decide what course of action they were to take. Two of the visiting pastors would be contacted to see what interest they had in taking part in the forming of a new church. This would be reported back to the group the next week, along with the decisions of others as to what they would be doing.
During the week Michelle agonised over what to do. Her father already had business contacts in Holland. She could easily enough go and set herself up there. Or she could afford to go and find this fantastical land over the seas to the West. But could she leave her father? He wanted nothing to do with this fanatical religious stuff. He was going to stay right where he was. God had gifted him a good business, a good house, a good life. He didn’t want his daughter leaving him. Michelle decided, if there was an option where she didn’t have to leave, she would take that one.
The next week the group gathered on the common on the Wednesday night. Some reported that they had sought out a passage to the new world. Others reported a business connection in Holland and that they would be leaving as soon as possible. Letters were written for these people to take with them on their journeys. The people prayed for these people and wished them well.
The others had decided that they would stay. They would try and start a new church, a New Testament church, one which in their view reflected the teaching of the Bible and not the heretical traditions that had been brought into the church through the hundreds of years of papal mismanagement.
They produced one of the past visiting ex-rectors from up North. He had agreed to take on the pastoral responsibility of the church. However there were many issues which they needed to sort out. It was well and good to decide to start a church – but what does that mean? Who would run the church? Who was a part of the church? How could you tell who was a part of the church? They needed a place to meet and they needed money to pay bills, including the wage of the pastor.
They decided to get a few people together to work on the immediate issues. Where they were to meet and how much it would cost them. Then others were asked to work with the pastor in deciding how people would know who was going to be a part of this new church. Then finally there was to be another group to work on proposing a method for how the new church would operate. Again the group decided to meet again in a week’s time to see how this new church would take shape.
The next week they come back together and it is reported that a suitable house has been found in which they can meet. One of the families will rent the house and live in it, but it has a room big enough for them to meet on Sundays. They decide that from now on they will meet Sundays in the house.
That Sunday the new church has its first worship service. The pastor leads the group in song then in a short sermon followed by the Lord’s Supper. After the service they attend to the business of the church.
The first question they ask is, ‘who is going to be a part of the church? How can we tell? What, if anything, does the New Testament say about this?’ The group that had been assigned to discuss the idea of membership started by relaying what they had learnt from their studies in the New Testament. They said that in the New Testament the ‘Christians’ were those who had chosen to be baptised and had received the Holy Spirit. They looked at their present environment and said that the way they could know who was a part of the church and who wasn’t a part was through baptism. Those who chose to be baptised (as opposed to those who were baptised as a baby) were part of the group and those who weren’t, if they wanted to be part of the church needed to be baptised, as the New Testament seemed to teach them.
The second item on the agenda had to deal with how the church was to be run. Who would make the important decisions? How would we define doctrine? The second group got up to start sharing their understanding of the New Testament. One man got up and shared how in Paul’s letter to Philemon, Paul didn’t tell Philemon what to do, but rather appealed for love’s sake and left things up to the conscience of Philemon and the conviction of the Holy Spirit. This he said was how things should be done in this church.
A second person got up and shared on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. He talked of where one person was carrying on in gross immorality of which not even those outside the church would approve. He noted that Paul said it was up to the people of the Corinthian church to impose discipline on this person. It wasn’t up to the Archbishop and it wasn’t up to the pastor. It wasn’t even up to a band of ‘elders’ to impose discipline, as those puritans and Scottish heretics were teaching. It was the responsibility of the church to run the affairs of the church.
A third person got up and talked about their history. How the local bishop had tried to force another minister over their group and what a disaster it was for them. They must be free to choose their own pastor. They must be free to choose a pastor who held their values, who would teach them the clear teaching of the Bible.
After much discussion it was decided by the church and the church had to take the responsibility for running its own affairs. It needed to find its own pastor, as it had done. It needed to be responsible for making decisions about money, about property and about the way they would worship. They decided that the church would be made up of those who were baptised and accepted by the rest of the group as members.
That day they made a list of all those who had been baptised. They made an offer for anyone there that had been a part of the process to receive baptism and therefore become a part of the church. There were some who accepted the offer.
The church had started. There was a long way to go. There was still much to be sorted out. But this little church had made its first steps towards becoming, as close as they could possibly become to being a New Testament church.
