A man asked me this at a graduation party last spring, holding a paper plate, and he wasn't being difficult. He'd read the website. He said, "You baptize by immersion. You do the Lord's Supper as a memorial. The church runs itself and calls its own pastor. That's a Baptist church. So why don't you just say Baptist?"
Fair question. And the honest answer is that he's mostly right.
Every other post in this series is about a tradition TheWay differs from. This one is different in kind, because it's mostly about a tradition we don't. Our practice is Baptist. Our sign isn't. So let me start with everything we hold in common, because it's most of it, and then get to the four places where somebody who grew up Baptist would notice a difference.
The Baptist distinctives we hold
Baptists have an old way of teaching their own distinctives with the letters of the name. Here they are, and here's where TheWay lands on each one.
Biblical authority. Scripture is the final word. Not tradition, not a convention, not a confession, not a pastor. 2 Timothy 3:16-17. Every other item on this list is downstream of that one.
Autonomy of the local church. No body upstream of the congregation gets a vote. In Acts 13:1-3 the church at Antioch sent Paul and Barnabas out; nobody in Jerusalem assigned them a pastor or held their deed.
Priesthood of the believer. You don't need a middleman to get to God. 1 Peter 2:9, a royal priesthood. Hebrews 4:16, come boldly. 1 Timothy 2:5, one mediator between God and men.
Two ordinances. Baptism and the Lord's Supper. Given by Christ, practiced by the church, and neither of them does the saving.
Individual soul liberty. A person answers to God for what he believes, and no man can be forced into faith. Romans 14:12, every one of us shall give account of himself to God.
Saved and baptized church membership. Acts 2:41 has the order in one verse: they gladly received his word, then they were baptized, then they were added.
Two offices. Elders and deacons. Philippians 1:1, addressed to the saints with the bishops and deacons. 1 Timothy 3 gives the qualifications for both and no others.
Separation of church and state. Baptists were getting fined and jailed over this long before it was in anybody's founding document, and they were right.
All eight. We hold all eight, without an asterisk. If you read that list and nodded eight times, you and I are going to agree about a great deal more than we disagree about.
So what's actually different?
Four things.
1. We're unaffiliated, and here's what that does and doesn't mean
TheWay isn't Southern Baptist. It isn't GARBC. It isn't American Baptist or Converge. No convention, no association, no fellowship agreement.
That is not a shot at any of them. Cooperative missions is one of the best things Baptists ever built. A church of eighty people in a small town can help support a family on the other side of the world because a thousand other churches of eighty people pooled what they had. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that isn't good.
What unaffiliated does mean: no annual meeting somewhere else sets our doctrine, no resolution passed in another state becomes our position, no shared entity holds our property, and nobody outside this congregation votes on who our pastor is.
What it doesn't mean: it doesn't mean we think denominations are sinful. It doesn't mean we won't work alongside the Baptist church down the road. And it certainly doesn't mean we've invented something. Nearly everything we believe was believed by somebody's grandmother in a Baptist pew, and she'd have said it better than I do.
If you tell somebody around here what kind of truck you drive, you've told them something true and useful. If you tell them you're a "truck guy," you've told them something bigger, and now they've got a picture in their head of your whole weekend. Denominational names work the same way. We're describing convictions, not signing up for a picture.
2. A plurality of elders, not one pastor and a deacon board
This is the real one, and it's a genuine difference from a lot of Baptist practice.
The common Baptist arrangement is one pastor, a board of deacons, and a congregational vote. That's workable and the Lord has used it for a long time. But when I go looking in the New Testament for the pattern, I don't find one man over one church.
Acts 14:23 — Paul and Barnabas walk back through the towns they'd just evangelized and ordain elders, plural, in every church, singular. Titus 1:5 — Titus is left in Crete to set in order the things that are wanting and ordain elders, plural, in every city. Acts 20:17 — Paul sends to Ephesus and calls for the elders of the church, and a group of men comes. Philippians 1:1 again, bishops and deacons, both plural.
Then 1 Peter 5:1-4, which is the passage that settles it for me. Peter writes to elders and identifies himself as a fellow elder. Feed the flock of God which is among you. Take the oversight willingly, not by constraint. Not for filthy lucre. Not as lords over God's heritage, but being examples to the flock. Notice what an apostle does not call himself, and notice what he warns elders against becoming.
And deacons are not a board of directors. Acts 6 is where the office comes from, and the men are appointed so the widows get fed and the men who preach can keep preaching. That's serving, not governing. Making a deacon board the governing authority of a church is one of those arrangements everybody knows and nobody can locate in the text.
I'll say the charitable thing here because it's true: a lot of conservative Baptist churches have already moved this direction, and the elder-led model has spread widely. So this isn't a difference from every Baptist. It's a difference from a great many of them.
And the reason it matters isn't organizational tidiness. A plurality of elders protects the church from me. That's the point of it.
3. We believe the gifts of the Spirit didn't expire
Handle this one gently, because good men land on the other side.
Many Baptists are cessationist. The position is that the sign gifts — tongues, prophecy, miraculous healing — authenticated the apostles and their message while the New Testament was being written, and ceased when the canon closed. The main text is 1 Corinthians 13:8-10, where prophecies fail and tongues cease when that which is perfect is come, with "that which is perfect" read as the completed Scripture. That is not laziness and it is not fear of the Spirit. That is careful men reading carefully, and plenty of them love the Bible more than I do.
Here's why we land differently. I can't find the expiration date in the text. Paul closes that same argument in 1 Corinthians 14:39-40 with two instructions held together: covet to prophesy, forbid not to speak with tongues — and let all things be done decently and in order. Both halves. And 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21 tells the church to quench not the Spirit, despise not prophesyings, prove all things, hold fast that which is good. That's a standing command to test something, which is a strange command to issue about something that's about to stop happening.
What it looks like at TheWay is probably less dramatic than either side pictures. We're not building a service around it. Nobody gets a microphone to have an experience in front of a room. A Sunday is singing, Scripture read, preaching, the ordinances, and prayer. But we're not going to tell the Holy Spirit which drawer He's allowed to open.
The main thing we mean by it is this, and it's the thing I'd want a Baptist to hear: the mature believer is a Spirit-filled believer. Walking in the Spirit is the key to the whole Christian life. Anything you do in the flesh is sin, even the good things, even the church things.
4. The culture, and the extra rules
Careful here too, because I've got no interest in being clever at anybody's expense.
The independent fundamental Baptist world has produced faithful people. Some of the best soul-winners I have ever known came out of it, and they went places most of us wouldn't go. I'm not going to stand on the shoulders of men who preached the gospel in hard rooms and then make fun of them.
But somewhere along the line, in parts of that world, a set of standards got added on top of the gospel and then quietly promoted to a test of fellowship. Hair. Hemlines. Which translation. Whether a man can have a beard. Whether a certain kind of music is allowed in the building. And these were usually people trying hard to be holy, not people trying to be mean, which is exactly why it's worth naming instead of laughing at.
Colossians 2:20-23 is in there for a reason. Touch not, taste not, handle not — commandments and doctrines of men, which have a show of wisdom in will worship and humility, and are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh. They look like holiness. They don't produce it. And in Mark 7 Jesus is blunt about the whole machinery: teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
Our own site puts the label problem this way, and I'll say it again here. Put "independent" and "Baptist" next to "fundamental" and people don't hear three words describing convictions. They hear a movement, with a culture attached and a whole set of assumptions about what we'll be like on a Tuesday. That's fair of them, because the movement is real and people have real experience with it. We're describing convictions. We're not joining a movement.
So are we a Baptist church?
Our practice is Baptist. Our doctrine would fit inside most conservative Baptist statements without a word changed. If you grew up Baptist, you'd recognize almost everything about a Sunday morning here — the singing, the preaching, the water, the table.
What you'd notice is more than one man carrying the load up front and answerable for it, no denominational name on the sign, a church that isn't nervous about the Holy Spirit, and nobody handing you a list of extra rules at the door.
Not better. Different. And on this one, mostly the same.
The one thing on that list that isn't about a church
Go back to the eight. Seven of them describe how a church runs. One of them is about you — saved, then baptized, in that order, because the second one has never once accomplished the first. If you've sat in a Baptist church your whole life and you got wet before you ever got saved, then you have a lot of vocabulary and no Savior. That isn't an insult. It's an invitation. Jesus took your sin to a cross and died with it, they buried Him, and He came up out of that grave alive. He saves everybody who quits arguing and calls on Him, and He'll do it for you sitting right where you are.
And if you already belong to Him, you've probably got a rule in your head that isn't in the Book. Everybody does. This week, find one. One thing you've been treating as a mark of holiness that the Lord never asked you for. Name it, out loud, and then ask Him what He actually wants that hour or that money or that energy spent on instead.
Don't guard the fence. Feed the sheep.