Tag: #reformed

In last week’s post, I shared a couple of threads of thought regarding what it means to be a Reformed Baptist Church. Hopefully those were helpful for individuals to think the issue through. But what about when we are talking to people who are not part of our tribe? What about when someone who is not a believer asks what a Reformed Baptist church is? What about when a person who does not enjoy theological thought poses the question?

Three Types of Answers

A one-size-fits-all approach to answering a question about a church’s identity, theology, and practice is not a good idea. Different people ask from different perspectives and with different levels of interest. Thus, I believe answering the question, “What is a Reformed Baptist,” might require three different kinds of answers:

• Single Sentence
• Short Presentation
• Coffee Table Discussion

Single Sentence –It may be that a single sentence answer is all that a situation allows for or is necessary. The person asking may not be in a place to unpack any of the doctrinal differences demarking denominations. You may be speaking with a nonbeliever who could not begin to follow the discussion. You may be speaking with your sweet aunt who just wonders if you’ve joined a cult.

Short Presentation – A second kind of answer may be one you need to have at the ready for when you have a minute or two with a curious person. Salespeople call this an elevator pitch. This allows you to unpack who you are in a simple summary. It is designed to open the door for a follow-up conversation, but it does not force the issue.

Coffee Table Discussion – The third kind of answer goes deep and seeks to lay out distinctives over a longer period of time. The points that I outlined and briefly explained in my previous post could serve as a helpful guide for such a discussion about Reformed Baptists. This might take a few hours or a few meetings.

Single Sentence Response

Say you are inviting a non- Christian friend to your church that has “Reformed” as part of the name. They ask you what a reformed church is. They are not likely wanting you to tell them about the Canons of Dort or the difference in English and European mainland Reformation confessions. For the curious person needing a single sentence, perhaps you might say the following:

A Reformed Baptist church is a church that loves God, loves the Bible, loves the gospel, and loves God’s church.

That statement covers several of the points I shared in last week’s post. But it does not unpack any of them. It should leave the door open for questions if the person wants to think them through. At the same time, it will not bog you down in conversations about topics the person has never heard of.

If you are talking with someone who is a Christian and who is trying to figure out if a Reformed church is some sort of weird denomination, or if you are not sure where their question is coming from, you might say something like this:

A Reformed Baptist church is a Baptist church that is committed to the Bible, in line with historic Christianity, and informed by important doctrines that the church recovered during the Protestant Reformation.

Again, this is short and simple. It will allow you to begin a conversation about doctrine if the person wants to ask. It ties your church to historic doctrine, faithful beliefs people have held from the New Testament age and recovered—not created—during the Reformation. But it does not take you down a road of debating election when a person just wants to know if you are involved in some sort of crazy new movement.

Short Presentation

What if the person you are talking to is up for a bit more of an explanation. What can a Reformed Baptist say that will summarize things somewhat quickly without chasing rabbits? When you do not have time to go deep, but when your interlocutor is up for something more than a single sentence answer, the short presentation might work. Perhaps the following would be a good example:

A Reformed Baptist church, like other Baptist or Presbyterian churches, is a Protestant church. We believe that the Bible is our highest authority. Like other churches, we believe in 1 God who is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as revealed in the Bible. And we believe in the good news that anybody can be forgiven by God because of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Reformed Baptists try to follow Scripture and do in our worship services what God has commanded. We believe that God is the Almighty and is sovereign over everything, including our salvation. We believe that all of the Bible, even the Old Testament, is God’s word and is helpful to us to know God and love him well. We believe that Jesus really is the fulfillment of all of God’s promises in the Scripture.

If this all sounds unfamiliar or new, you can read about what we believe in something old. The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 is a great place to look to read a summary of the doctrine our church believes. This is a confession that is similar to the Westminster Confession that Presbyterians hold to or the Savoy Declaration that congregationalist churches use, just with a Baptist explanation of the church and biblical covenants.  

Conclusion

When someone asks you what a Reformed Baptist is, you do not have to be paralyzed. Neither should you always answer the question the same way in every situation. But if you will put a little work into knowing what the label means, and if you will put a little forethought into how you might explain it to different people in different settings, you should be able to help others understand the concept.

No matter what kind of church one claims to belong to, that label will carry with it definitions and distinctions which make one church different from another. As taxonomic classifications identify organisms from kingdom down to species, certain distinctions help us to know what a church is when we see what they claim to be.

When one sees the word “reformed” in a church’s name or identity, a few possible meanings may be present. For example, a church may suggest that being reformed is particularly tied to a Presbyterian denomination or confession, denying that any can be reformed who are not part of that group. More loosely, another may use the word reformed simply to mean Calvinistic as concerns the church’s beliefs relating to salvation. Still others fall somewhere in the middle, believing that a reformed church is one which has some particular distinctives, but which is not necessarily Presbyterian—Reformed Baptists for example.

Because Reformed Baptist is the context of Providence Reformed Church where I serve, and because many wrestle with exactly how to explain what a Reformed Baptist is, I thought it might be useful to pull together a couple of threads of thought and share them here. This post will include a summary of several key ideas which would take you a while to explain to someone else. Next week, I hope to lay out some strategies for explaining Reformed Baptist to others in a short and simple way. I am not here claiming to be the authority over how the phrase is used, but am only hoping to help explain what we mean in our church when we say “Reformed Baptist.” 

Reformed Baptist churches are:¹

• Christian
• Protestant
• Reformed
• Baptist

Christian – Christian churches embrace the true message of the Bible and the gospel of Jesus Christ. The basic beliefs of Christians are often summarized in classic creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition. These statements focus particularly on the identity of the one true God existing as trinity and the person of Jesus as truly God and truly man. This distinction separates Christianity from other world religions and cults which deny the trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, or the basic gospel. 

Protestant – A Protestant church, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, embraces the five Solas of the Reformation. These churches believe that the Scripture alone is the final and highest authority for the church on earth. They teach that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and to the glory of God alone. Protestants recovered these biblical doctrines during the era known as the Protestant Reformation.

Reformed – A subset of Protestant churches, Reformed churches embrace the beliefs of key doctrinal confessions such as the Belgic, Westminster, or Second London confessions. Much of what is recovered in these confessions beyond the basic faith of the classic creeds has to do with the authority of Scripture, the structure of the church, and the doctrine of salvation including election. Reformed churches are distinct from other Protestant churches which do not embrace these confessions and doctrines.

Baptist – A Baptist church is a Protestant church that expressly declares that only those who are saved by Jesus are part of the true church. Baptists believe that those who are saved obey Christ through the ordinance of believer’s baptism as a public declaration of their faith. Baptists value the autonomy of local congregations and the congregational voice in church government. These beliefs distinguish Baptist churches from our Presbyterian brothers.²

Other theological and practical particulars are often seen as identifying Reformed Baptists as different from non-Reformed Baptists. One author suggests the following five distinctives:³

• The Regulative Principle of Worship
• Covenant Theology
• Calvinism
• The Law of God
• Confessional

The Regulative Principle of Worship – This teaching limits the acts of a church in worship to those which God commanded in Scripture. This distinguishes Reformed Baptist churches from others which practice the normative principle of worship, the belief that all things are permissible in worship so long as they are not forbidden in Scripture.

Covenant Theology – This doctrine accepts the covenant of redemption, covenant of works, and covenant of grace. The covenant of redemption is the plan among the persons of the trinity to rescue a people for the glory of God. The covenant of works is the covenant Adam failed to keep when he disobeyed God in the garden and brought condemnation on humanity resulting in the truth that no human being can now earn his or her way to God through good works. The covenant of Grace is the free gift of salvation by grace through faith in Christ who lived perfection and died as a sacrifice to pay for the sins of God’s people. Believers in covenant theology understand that Christ is the fulfillment of God’s promises from the Old Testament and that the Bible is a unified account of God’s accomplishment of his plan of salvation.  Covenant theologians, because of these beliefs, are distinct from dispensationalists. 

Calvinism – Calvinists believe in the sovereignty of God in the salvation of all who are saved. Calvinism embraces sovereign election and denies that people come to Christ without God first moving them to do so. 

The Law of God – A reformed understanding of God’s law includes the belief that the moral law of God is summarized in the Ten Commandments and that no one will fully understand the gospel apart from the law of God. Reformed Baptists will often see the law of God as useful to show a person their need for salvation, to help societies to restrain evil and destructive behavior, and to help the saved to understand the character of God and what pleases him. 

Confessional – Reformed Baptists often subscribe to the Second London Baptist Confession (written in 1677, published in 1689). This is not to say that there may not be small points that require further explanation or with which the church may quibble. Yet the Reformed Baptist Church will declare the confession to be a true summary of the church’s beliefs.

While different individuals or churches may disagree with one or more of the points above, they are a fair summary of what is broadly assumed to be a Reformed Baptist Church.

Next week, we will look at how to explain what a Reformed Baptist is in a short and simple way.

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1 The 1st 3 items of this list are found in Daniel Hyde, Welcome to a Reformed Church (Sanford, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2010), Introduction.

2 Baptist began to distinguish themselves during the period of the English Reformation along with Congregationalists. Such Baptists are not linked with the anabaptist movement.

3 This list comes from Tom Hicks, “What is a Reformed Baptist?” (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Ministries) [article on-line]; accessed 15 July 2023; available

from https://founders.org/articles/what-is-a-reformed-baptist/; Internet.