Southern Baptist theologian Russell Moore had some very provocative words to say about his own definition and experience of evangelicalism. I’m particularly interested in the last two paragraphs.

Evangelicalism is Protestant, and thoroughly so: The sola statements of the Reformation represent how Evangelicals understand what it means to be centered upon Christ. Evangelicalism is also inexplicable apart from a sense of Great Commission urgency to seek and save that which is lost.

The definition has indeed changed over the past half-century. What would have been considered non-negotiable for Evangelical identity fifty years ago (the truthfulness of Scripture, the impossibility of salvation apart from faith in Christ) is now often considered “Fundamentalist.”

I think the term “Evangelical” is less and less of value. I rarely use it of myself, except in the broadest of terms to describe myself to someone in another tradition. On Sunday morning, I do not go to an “Evangelical” church, but to Ninth and O Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist church with which I am in holy covenant and through which I cooperate with like-minded churches across the country to fulfill the Great Commission.

The people to whom I am held accountable share with me a common confession of faith—one that includes Great Tradition affirmations such as the deity of Christ and the virgin birth and Reformation distinctives such as justification through faith alone by grace alone in Christ alone. The sermon is central, and concludes with a call for unbelievers to identify publicly with Christ and his church. If that’s “Evangelical,” so be it.

Moore is saying that he doesn’t find evangelicalism “out there” somewhere, but that he finds evangelicalism in a particular church with roots, mission, tradition and connection.

This is typical of the Baptist reaction to the term evangelical. In the 1980’s, a number of Baptist theologians on the moderate-liberal side of the fence were distancing themselves from the increasing use of the term evangelical. They felt they had a better pedigree, a more substantial identity and a deeper substance in their identity as Baptists.

Now I know my Baptist family well enough to know that we are not exactly the world’s greatest joiners. My team, the Southern Baptists, actually withdrew from the worldwide Baptist body The Baptist Alliance because…..well……because……well…….something Mohler read somewhere was just intolerable. And instead of using our clout to change things- the SBC was the biggest contributor to the BWA- we just left. Because….we’re just happier when we can pretend its just us.

But I don’t think Moore or those moderate Baptists were entirely wrong on this one. The less evangelicalism is a term used to describe something about congregations, the worse things seem to get. The general vacuity of evangelicalism today is everywhere, but where it is being reversed, it’s being reversed primarily by people who are rediscovering orthodoxy, orthopraxy and missional purpose in local congregations.

Perhaps the worst recent development in evangelicalism is the beginning stages of selling Christianity as an individual self-improvement philosophy, discussed over coffee, Googled and networked online and practiced mostly by consuming some aspect of evangelical style, product or experience. There are more and more evangelicals who are envisioning the demise of the congregation as the primary expression of Christian community.

Evangelicals are people, as one forum participant points out from the EO perspective, who value the unmediated, direct experience of God more than anything else. I’ll submit that history and experience are loudly teaching us that’s all fine in its place, but it’s frequently the path of rapid burnout and disillusionment.

That’s not to overlook the many failures of congregations, but it’s not to overlook the implausibility of evangelicalism surviving as a movement defined by individualism more than community. There is no comparison of the hope offered by a diffused and consumeristically dominated evangelical movement to that of a reimagined and reinvigorated congregationalism.

I say all of this because there is a growing aspect of evangelicalism that is prepared to delete congregational Christianity from the menu and morph the movement into something resembling a worldwide Jesus fan club with a products page and lots of rad music.

Dr. Moore makes sense to me. Evangelicalism, whatever that is, should take a back seat to the rediscovery of congregational, covenantal, confessional Christianity.

And another thanks to those of you who have encouraged me with gifts from my wish list. It’s been such a difficult year, and your thoughtfulness in a tremendous lift to my spirits.

God’s blessings and peace to all of you.

On another topic, if you are looking for a simple Christmas program for your church with drama and easy to plug in musical ideas, my wife Denise has a free program on her website you may want to check out.

Sometimes, I think we evangelicals talk way too much about the wrong things and far too little about more important things.

I hardly ever- ever- find myself in a conversation about what is the Gospel. Or what Jesus would be teaching us about the kingdom today. Or how to meaningfully repent of our entanglement in various American idolatries. These conversations just don’t happen around me (and I am surrounded by evangelical Christians.)

But the church? Oh yeah, we talk about church all the time. Preachers. Sermons. Music. “Worship.” Music. Programs. Buildings, Budgets. Music. Why we changed churches again. What we like. What we don’t like. How great such and such a church is. What our church needs to start doing. Why this group at our church is wrong, or bad, or stubborn. Why a particular worship leader gets it right. Why we need a new whatever.

The talk about church is endless.

Now I believe deeply in the church as a place of spiritual formation, but I am also deeply aware of the problems and limitations of the church.

For instance, I realize that the church has a tendency to become self-defining. Worship becomes those songs we’re singing in the service. Discipleship becomes participation in church programs. Commitment is time spent at church and jobs at church volunteered for.

Spirituality is…..well…we don’t like that word. Evangelism is what we’re always training to do and telling ourselves we should be doing. Missions is whatever church program lends a hand, money or food to someone in the community.

And so on.

Or there’s the tendency of church’s today to think marketing at every turn. The morning worship service is suddenly all about people who have never been to church. All kinds of changes appear with the same justification: reaching Unchurch Harry and Sally. Ads, signs, logos and scenery worthy of a theatrical production are now very important, because every church is in competition with every other church and everything else people like to do.

Of course, it’s very important your church win this little competition, or at least that’s what the pastor says.

Then you have churches that pull rather stupid stunts with money, or “authority.” Some churches talk about leadership or gender roles to the point you want to put your head into a fan. Justifications for expenditures, new building programs and more staff all seem to come from the same playbook. These are the kind of churches that persuade thousands of people to never go back to what they’ve known as church again. Who can blame them? (I know some will, but seriously….think about it.)

If you have the kind of Christianity that needs an emphasis on the basics, spiritual formation, authentic human interaction, or some occasional experience of spontaneity, good luck finding a typical evangelical church that cares about such things.

And then, there are those of us who’ve gotten burned. Fired. Hurt. Rejected. Sent packing. Thrown under the bus and kicked to the curb. Told we weren’t supporting the pastor or were quenching the Holy Spirit.

We talk about the church too much because we can’t get it out of our system or get over what it’s done to us that is completely outside of Christian humility and decency.

Yes, we talk about the church too much because, unfortunately, the church looms very, very large in evangelicalism. Too large, in my view, at least in its current evangelical version.

But we aren’t going to get away from it either. Many of us are continuing to wrestle with what it means to be Christian in some form of community. We know the church is a long way from the ideals and commands in the New Testament, but it’s like someone has removed all the roads and markers on the way back there.

That’s where voices like Frank Viola come into the conversation.

Viola is the primary voice in evangelicalism these days advocating “organic” church. That’s not as simple as rejecting the institutional church and adopting a house church. It’s not as simple as having a massive historical, Biblical and practical critique of the denominational church, its leadership and programs.

No, it’s more complicated than all of that, and you will make a terrible mistake if you read either of Viola’s recent books with that mindset.

It’s not simple at all, and it’s not the way of protest and accumulating reasons to never go back to church.

What Frank Viola is doing for all of us- even those of us who don’t come out entirely where he does- is practicing “that Protestant thing” of “reimaging” the church in the light of the scriptures, right down to the foundations; right down to the stuff we generally don’t ever hear from the clergy (surprise!).

What Viola is doing that will probably make thousands of readers mad and thousands more glad is exactly what Catholic apologist Louis Bouyer said is wrong with Protestantism in the first place: It keeps trying to reinvent the church again by going back in history and back to the scripture without going back to the Catholic church and admitting its infallibility, antiquity and endorsement by Christ.

Amen. Here’s what I say: Good for Frank Viola. We need to listen to him, even if we aren’t awarding him all ten points on every dive.

You need to read his books and when they make you angry, or when you disagree with his conclusions or spot a historical error, you need to keep reading. You may not wind up where Viola goes, but he goes somewhere, and once there, you can see that, contrary to that last announcement, there IS another way.

Frank Viola isn’t content to just talk about the church. He isn’t content to just live in all the usual assumptions. He’s not content to assume that the way we use words or relate to leadership or experience fellowship is the real thing.

Frank Viola believes that there is a real church and a real church experience underneath all of the mess we’ve made of things. He loves the people of God and I, for one, can’t fault a man who believes the people of God as a people are more important than the church as an institution.

Like any Socrates, there are people who want to get out the hemlock. This discussion makes us nervous. It ought to. We have a lot to be nervous about.

I don’t for a moment believe that Frank’s vision of organic church is the entire answer. I do believe that Frank’s vision of organic church is a lot closer to the truth in the New Testament than the vast majority of institutional churches and Christians want to acknowledge. I don’t think one guy has it all worked out. But I have to say, in Frank Viola’s case, it’s not for lack of trying, and most evangelicals have just quit trying to be the New Testament church and they are full on trying to be a bigger megachurch.

The nuances Frank brings to various leadership and pastoral terms are much needed balances and reminders, even if they can’t be pressed as far toward the option of the organic, non-institutional church as some might wish.

I’ve been reading about church renewal for years, having cut my teeth on Howard Snyder more than 25 years ago. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: the people who made the problem, and who have invested large amounts of themselves in the way things have always been done, are unlikely to see any value in renewals and reformations that bring into question what has been their own religious security.

I’m not saying all of Viola’s critics are purposely refusing to admit their complicity. No, I believe Viola’s work can be critiqued by church historians and practitioners of Christian community in church and academy. But I believe Viola’s critiques and proposals have serious merit, even with my own exceptions to them.

Many of us suspect that the church should be much simpler, more focused, more organic, more aware of its non-New Testament influences and more characterized as a movement with institutional expressions at times than an institution that struggles to remember when it was a movement.

I don’t know exactly what a New Testament church looks like. I’m not sure how to detox the church from cultural influences and take a radically restorationist view of everything. I’m not entirely sure that it is particularly important that we try to fix everything or understand everything. Perhaps the church most of us are looking for is a matter of learning to see things like Jesus does and build up the church through the work of the Spirit in each of us as well as in the people of God.

On that journey, I count Frank Viola as a major asset. If we can’t find the courage to read what he has to say and appropriate it as God leads, then we need more courage and more honesty. Both of Viola’s books are helpful perspectives and words that will encourage us in the right direction.

I have to admit that I’ve never been particularly excited about any book called “Treasury.” It’s a title I’d be reluctant to use for any serious resource. So aside from that extremely minor point of personal taste, I want to use every superlative possible to tell my readers that Concordia has produced the most comprehensive, well edited, plainly explained and thoroughly impressive resource for liturgical daily prayer I’ve ever encountered.

If you want a resource for personal or small group liturgical prayer, with abundant options, complete explanation of the Christian year, scripture passages printed out, readings from Church fathers included and much more, your search is permanently over. The Treasury of Daily Prayer surpasses any resource I’ve seen.

What impresses me the most here is not what other resources do, but what no other resource does. I am constantly looking for resources synced with the Christian year AND for the Christian year to be completely explained. Done.

I’m looking for Lenten devotions with a catechetical focus. Done. I want liturgical prayer that includes readings from the church fathers and reference to doctrinal confessions. Done. I want the process of liturgical prayer explained step by step and in its component parts, so that those with no background in such prayer can begin with confidence. Done.

This is a Lutheran resource, published by the LCMS publishing house. It is catholic in the sense that conservative Lutheran resources are expected to be. This isn’t a resource that does anything with contemporary generic evangelicalism in mind. The confessions referenced are Lutheran confessions, and Luther is generously represented in the readings. The lectionary is the LCMS lectionary.

This in no way limits the value of this resource for any Protestant. Even with the sacramental disagreements that may be underlined in some portions of the material, the vast majority of what you’ll find in The Treasury of Daily Prayer is completely usable by any Christian.

It’s a feast folks. Seriously. I’ve seen nothing this good or even close.

This is the kind of large resource that can make a lifetime contribution to personal worship. It is a complete education in the Protestant liturgical prayer tradition, Lutheran version.

An excerpt from the Treasury is available here.

An explanation of how to use the Treasury is here.

You can order it from Concordia, and it will be shipping October 23rd.

When I think of people beating themselves up with guilt and beating other people up with a guilt-inducing God, I always think of this essay and the stupefying discovery that the New Testament isn’t trying to turn us into hamsters on an evangelistic, church growth wheel. If you are one of those people who find me shocking, go get a coke and be shocked. I wrote this in 2001.

Read: The Original “Wretched Urgency.”

And smile while you do it.

The Baptist Hymnal (also called The Worship Hymnal) 2008 has been reviewed at Isaiah Six and if you are interested in worship music check this out. This hymnal project is the first to begin to use the abilities of the internet to expand both the content of the hymnal and the online resources to use along with it.

I’ve been looking at my copy for a couple of weeks, and I am thoroughly impressed.

Check out the review and acquire a copy.

But seriously, I need to say this: You have to trust the Gospel to do what it says it promises to do.

I Thessalonians 1:2 We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, 3 remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. 4 For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, 5 because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake. 6 And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit, 7 so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. 8 For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. 9 For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.

You have to preach the gospel and trust it to the work it should do.

Two mistakes to avoid:

1) Making your own agenda the “to do” list for the Holy Spirit. That’s a big leap: I want it to happen to God wants it to happen.

2) Turning to other motivations- like guilt, condemnation, guilt, manipulation and guilt- to get the work done.

Really. This is so important and so true.

If the Holy Spirit isn’t going to produce it by constant, earnest presentation of the Gospel to the people of God, then does it need to happen?

And if the Holy Spirit isn’t the primary motivator, how can other motivations- like guilt and condemnation- actually do anything worthwhile?

I love Paul’s advice in Ephesians 6. Take up the whole armor of God…and having done all, just stand there.

That’s so good. Put on God’s resources, God’s vision, God’s heart. Do all that the Gospel commands and demands.

Then do nothing. Stand.

We take this and do something like this:

We use some of God’s resources, and things don’t go the way we want. So we start doing things our way, and finding what does work. Or we just get frustrated and start beating ourselves and other people up with guilt and condemnation for what’s not happening. They we are upset at people, ourselves and God because nothing’s working.

Scripture has a better way. Stay with the Gospel. Speak the truth in love. Design a path of radical loyalty to Christ, specific repentance and clear obedience. Does those things and do them God’s way.

Then stand.

I believe that part of the method of Paul in I Thessalonians was to do his ministry God’s way and to then look for the resulting work of the Holy Spirit and to ENCOURAGE GOD’S PEOPLE with what he saw the Spirit doing.

Even when Paul is strongly correcting the church, he does so from the standpoint of the grace of God in the Gospel, never by resorting to guilt.

That’s very different from setting the agenda, living in frustration that things aren’t working, then resorting to beating up yourself and other Christians in hopes something will change.

Life is too short, folks. Grace is the good stuff. Stay with it. Don’t quit and take the road back to legalism as so many do. Preach yourself happy in God, then encourage, persuade and exhort God’s people in the grace of Jesus.

Check out my other blog at Jesus Shaped Spirituality.

Our sponsor, New Reformation Press.

Music by Rhodes and Randy Stonehill.

(And- at least in my experience- it’s always a woman. Why is that? Does maternal instinct want to see baby smile?)

I’ve been fighting this battle for quite some time, and I don’t plan to give up. It’s a small thing, but it’s all about what it means to be a human being and what it means to be a Christian.

Millions of unbelievers are far more emotionally healthy than we are because we have a crowd running around telling us we can’t be human, can’t feel human emotions, can’t be emotionally honest and so on. Instead, we have to be high, giddy and smiling like we’re possessed by grinning aliens so that we have a “testimony.” Ugh.

I’m so not going there. This, friends, is the person Jesus loves. I’m fat. I’m not giddy. I don’t feel the least bit of responsibility to telegraph to anyone that I’m full of happy thoughts, because I’m not.

So here’s the record of my battle for the right to not smile all the time:

He Wouldn’t Smile for the Camera. Mark Heard is the patron saint of unsmiling Christians. (I need a Mark Heard icon…a real icon.)

“You Need To Smile More.” Brrrrrrr. I deal with the situation directly here.

Can A Christian Sing the Blues? Michael Horton brought this up, and it’s why so many of us can’t stand most of the art produced by evangelicals. It’s one emotional lie after another.

Check out “Singing the Blues With Jesus” by Michael Horton.

Dr. Finn has an A.A. from Waycross College, a B.A. from Brewton-Parker College, and the M.Div. and Ph.D from Southeastern Seminary. He has been teaching at Southeastern since 2006.

His areas of interest include Baptist Studies, American Religious History, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism and the History of Missions. Dr. Finn’s recent podcast at the Insight blog should be of real interest to IM readers as well.

Dr. Finn has distinguished himself as not only one of the clearest thinkers on the current SBC landscape, but as someone who understands the importance of the blogosphere. He’s a superb writer, and one of the few people in the establishment to be unafraid to have critical engagement with contemporary SBC life.

I want to tell the IM audience that I am more excited about this interview than almost any I’ve conducted. Dr. Finn’s answers on the historical background of the demise of church membership in the SBC and especially his comments on child baptism in our convention are absolutely pure gold.

Dr. Finn, thanks for taking time at what must be a very busy time of the year to answer some questions on church membership. I’m going to try and stay within your areas of expertise and interest, but you wherever you wish in your answers.

1. You’ve written the following: “”The biggest problem in the SBC is our loss of the gospel. It is pervasive. It is often subtle. It is likely accidental, or at least it has not been deliberate. And it is a tragedy. . . . In many corners of the SBC, the gospel has either been redefined, dumbed-down, confused, prostituted, or downplayed. Again, I think almost none of this is deliberate. But it has happened.”

Avoiding for the moment the twenty great questions I could ask from this quote, how does this affect the issue of meaningful church membership in the SBC?

That’s a great question (one of the best of the twenty you could have asked!). I think it’s critically important for Baptist Christians and other evangelicals to understand that the church is a community that is created by the gospel. The church is comprised of individuals who have responded in faith to the good news of all that God is doing to reconcile the world unto himself. When the gospel is eclipsed, churches become something other than the community of the redeemed, even if there are still many individual Christians who participate in the life of that church. The gospel is the reason that the church is different from every other group of like-minded individuals on earth.

Because of the “gospel charter” of the church, it is important to see church membership as a gospel issue. I do not mean to imply that one must be a member of a local church to be saved. There are many believers who identify with something other than a church as their primary Christian community, often a parachurch ministry or informal Bible study. But I do not think this is the way things are meant to be. As I understand the New Testament (and I admit I read it through primarily reformational and baptistic eyes), the church universal is most visibly evident in local churches, each of which is a covenanted community of regenerate believers. To be a Christian was to be part of a church or playing a role in the creation of a new church (as with missionaries). So I believe that the more seriously we take the gospel, the more seriously we will take church membership. Evangelicals must understand that the gospel is more than a checklist of doctrines that is floating around out there, doing little more than animating Reformed conferences and inspiring John Piper books. The gospel is a living truth that gives birth to churches that are comprised of individual, like-minded gospel people.

2. At what point in Southern Baptist history do you begin to see evidences that meaningful church membership- and especially meaningful church discipline- was starting to wane in some quarters? What brought this about?

Let me begin with some background. Most evangelicals have historically argued for the importance of redemptive church discipline. Church discipline is intended to perform two roles. On the one hand, it should help safeguard the gospel purity of a church by protecting it from heresy, sin, and schism. On the other hand, it often functions as a means of grace in the life of the one being disciplined, either bringing strayed Christians to repentance and renewed growth or bringing false professors to genuine repentance and faith in Christ. Baptist Christians have historically given particular emphasis to church discipline because we see it as closely related to the doctrine of regenerate church disciple, which is our foundational Baptist distinctive.

Back to your question itself, I think that church discipline (and meaningful membership in general) began to slowly decline among Southern Baptists around the turn of the 20th century, reaching its height in the latter half of the 20th century. There are several reasons for this turn of events, all of which overlap each other. First, the Convention and her churches began to embrace secular understandings of efficiency and professionalization. This gradually transformed worship services into performances, deacons into trustees or directors, pastors into administrators and CEOs, and members into clients or stockholders. By the 1950s and 1960s, joining a Baptist church was like joining the Rotary Club, except the membership requirements were often more stringent for the latter.

Second, the Convention and her churches became dominated by a programmatic identity that resulted in a pragmatic basis for cooperation. Many of these programs were devoted to enlistment, like “A Million More in ’54,” a push to enroll 1,000,000 new Sunday School members in the 1953-1954 school year. The SBC’s membership push was happening between about 1945 and 1960, when America’s Protestant civil religion was reaching its apex during the Eisenhower years. Becoming a church member, especially in the South and Midwest, was just something that good, red-blooded, middle class Americans did. It was during this time that you began to see increasing disparity between membership records and actual church participation. For most of our history (and this is still true with many Baptists in other parts of the world), local churches had more regular attendees than members because membership was a commitment. By 1960, we were long past those days in the SBC.

Finally, and I think most importantly, Southern Baptists were negatively influenced by at least a couple of outside trends. Progressive Southern Baptists, who are often treated as the bad guys in the contemporary SBC, increasingly rejected or refined traditional orthodoxy, though not to the same degree as mainline liberals or radical theologians. Many progressives embraced a neo-orthodox view of Scripture, embraced the higher-critical method of interpretation, flirted with and sometimes embraced soteriological inclusivism, and in a very few instances out-and-out rejected the virgin birth or bodily resurrection of Christ. The more cosmopolitan many progressives became in their theological convictions, the less emphasis they placed on practices like church discipline.

But progressives were mostly confined to denominational jobs and “First Church” pulpits—the majority of SBC pastors were probably not affected by or even interested in the above theological trends. Many conservative Southern Baptists were influenced by trends that were prevalent in the broader fundamentalist and evangelical movements in the mid-20th century. Many became so singularly focused on evangelism that they essentially redefined the historic Baptist understanding of a local church, at least in practice. Instead of being seen as a covenanted local body of Christ, churches were often little more than outreach centers, a type of weekly, ongoing evangelistic crusade. Other doctrines complemented this approach. A Keswick understanding of holiness emphasized individual “victorious living” to the exclusion of corporate holiness in the church. Classical dispensationalism furthered this individualism because it emphasized the church universal to the virtual exclusion of local churches, considering the church visible to be mostly apostate. Among many dispensationalists, a deficient view of eternal security argued for salvation by sincerity: if you really mean it when you pray the prayer, then you are saved no matter what your life look likes post-conversion. This idea slowly supplanted the traditional view of Christian perseverance among many conservatives, often resulting in antinomianism and false professors. These doctrines resulted in a perfect storm that worked against church discipline: getting them in the church was more important than keeping them in the church or protecting the integrity of the church.

3. When I was in seminary in the early 80’s, I took a course on Baptism from Dr. G.R. Beasley-Murray, the great British Baptist and scholar. I will never forget the day he told our class that Baptist churches in Europe did not receive members until they were at least in the mid-teens. Of course, the majority of preachers in the room had been baptizing children well under the age of ten as a common practice. Is the common practice of baptizing children and receiving them as members an innovation in American Baptist life? How has this practice affected church membership and other areas?

Beasley-Murray was right, and to this day most Baptists in the world do not baptize pre-teens. The only exceptions are Southern Baptists, Independent Baptists, and international groups with strong ties to Southern and Independent Baptists.

Baptizing small children is an innovation in American Baptist life. I think that this is a clear area where we have been influenced by some of the fundamentalists, though it worked in tandem with our home-grown programmatic emphasis on enlistment. The average age of baptism increasingly declined during the 20th century. In 1995, the old Home Mission Board published a study that showed the only age group where baptisms were increasing was the “under 5” category. I have a hard time seeing how this makes us very different than pedobaptists. A perusal of church records and associational minutes will show that our American Baptist forefathers did not regularly baptize pre-teens, though there were occasional exceptions when a child gave extraordinary evidence of both genuine conversion and an understanding of the cost of discipleship as entailed through meaningful church membership.

The practice of baptizing pre-teens has affected church membership in a number of ways. First, it has contributed to the growth of our membership roles—the majority of our baptisms are of elementary aged children and preschoolers. Second, it has contributed to the phenomena of multiple “baptisms” and rededications as teenagers and adults have to assess the validity of childhood spiritual decisions that they can sometimes hardly remember. Third, when coupled with an inadequate view of eternal security, it has led to millions of inactive members who are convinced they are Christians because they walked the aisle as a kindergartener during Vacation Bible School forty years ago. Finally, it has greatly contributed to the decline in redemptive church discipline: what church wants to discipline an eleven year old for having premarital sex, vocal racism, or habitually getting into fistfights with his classmates?

I do want to offer one clarification before moving on. I think it is very possible for small children to be regenerated. There are many people I know who can clearly remember being converted at a relatively young age. But being able to understand the basics of sin, judgment, redemption, and faith and being able to maturely covenant in membership with a local church are two different things, in my opinion. Some will argue that virtually all of the New Testament baptisms happen almost immediately after conversion. This is true. I would respond that almost all New Testament examples are clearly adults who are older than even teenagers. Furthermore, we have absolutely zero examples in the New Testament of when to baptize children who are raised in Christian families. Our pedobaptist friends address this situation by baptizing infants. Most Southern Baptists and Independent Baptists address this by baptizing anyone who can articulate a prayer for salvation. I am an old-fashioned Baptist who believes we should withhold baptism until a child is old enough to publicly identify with a local church through covenant, meaningful membership, though I would be reluctant to arbitrarily set a particular age requirement for baptism.

4. Many people would say that the traditional concept and practices of Baptist church membership come from a time and a rural culture that have now passed by, and the lifestyle of the typical contemporary Christian makes our Baptist concept of church membership irrelevant. Why is church membership still important in a postmodern culture that sees on-line community and downloaded sermons as normative?

This is a very relevant question. Church membership is about more than mere affinity. If it was about like-mindedness alone there would be many viable alternatives to membership. As I mentioned above, I am like-minded with European Baptists on the age of baptism issue. If affinity alone was the basis of church membership I could become a part of a chat-room with some Croatian Baptists and forget about my local church in Durham (which, for the record, shares my baptismal convictions).

But church membership is about more than affinity. It is about authentic community, which I still believe primarily occurs in a face-to-face context. How can you covenant with, hold accountable, and share in the everyday lives of people you never see in person? There is a geographic component to church membership.

Church membership is also about more than a particular preacher or teacher. I listen to my share of sermons online, but only my pastors regularly preach to me. Only they understand the particularly needs of our congregation because they are part of our congregation. There is a contextual component to church membership that comes out especially in preaching and teaching.

For the record, I reject the idea that “the traditional concept and practices of Baptist church membership come from a time and a rural culture that have now passed by.” First of all, it has not passed by in many places—drive around the rural South for a couple of hours! Second, many other Christian groups through church history would agree with what I said in the previous paragraphs; these ideas are not “Southern Baptist” ideas. Online communities and sermons are wonderful aids in our Christian walk, but they do not and cannot take the place of real community as embodied in local church membership.

5. In the previous interview, I asked Jonathan Leeman if we can offer assurance of salvation to those who remain outside of local church membership. Here is his answer: “Let me answer that two ways. First, Jesus gave the local church the explicit authority to give such assurance through membership (Matt. 16:19; 18:18-19; John 20:23). No other individual or institution on earth has been given the authority to give assurance. Second, and more to your question, I would argue that the person who claims to be a member of the church (universal) without being a member of a church (local) is in an analogous position to the person who claims to be righteous in Christ (by position) but does not pursue a life of righteousness (in practice). In other words, let me propose that such a person is in a very dangerous position, and it raises real questions about the nature of their “faith.”

What is your response to the same question? Can we offer assurance of salvation to the person who is not a church member?

I would agree with Jonathan, with one caveat. As I mentioned in my answer to your first question, I think there are individuals who have substituted involvement in a non-church ministry for local church membership. I think many of these folks clearly have faith in Christ, but they are confused about the nature of the church. So while I agree in principle with Jonathan (and IX Marks has influenced much of my thinking on church membership), I would want to note that many Christians who reject the notion of church membership have not rejected the concept of covenanted Christian community—they simply look to the wrong places as the primary locus of such community.

6. Charles Spurgeon took one night a week and personally interviewed every person who came to join his church. What does this tell us about the role of the pastor in dealing with the issue of meaningful church membership?

I believe that pastors should interview every individual who desires church membership. I am not opposed to training other church memberships to participate in some steps of the membership process, but it is ultimately the church’s pastors who are accountable before God for that particular congregation. Pastors have to both model meaningful church membership (as they should model the Christian life in general) and labor to preserve meaningful church membership insofar as is humanly possible.

7. Can Baptists practice church discipline in a litigious culture or is a church that actually practices church discipline inevitably going to be viewed as an abusive cult?

I think you are actually asking two different but related questions. Can Baptists practice church discipline in a litigious culture? Yes, but it must be done wisely and compassionately. From a wisdom standpoint, churches need to adopt procedures in their legal documents and perhaps also in position papers that all church members understand and agree to by virtue of their membership. While this would not necessarily preclude litigation, it would go a long way toward protecting the church in such instances. This is why pastors should, as a general rule, spend considerable time teaching on church discipline and allowing church members to come around to embracing the concept for themselves before taking the step of actually enacting discipline.

From a compassion standpoint, churches must avoid the twin dangers of recklessness and punitive intentions in their discipline. Churches must be wise in when and how they pursue discipline, and they must always be willing to end church discipline at the moment that repentance occurs. Churches cannot act like the ambitious hall monitor who is always on the prowl looking for someone to nail with a detention slip. Churches must also remember that church discipline is redemptive, not punitive. We do not discipline to punish; we discipline to rescue the perishing and preserve the integrity of the church. If we practice church discipline compassionately and wisely, I think the likelihood of litigation is diminished, though it is always a possibility.

Will Baptists be viewed as an abusive cult? Perhaps. This is another reason why it is so important to be compassionate and wise in our church discipline practices. We cannot control the fact that many non-Christians will abhor church discipline in principle. This has always been the case. We cannot compromise on this biblical principle in an effort to accommodate our critics. But we can control the manner in which we teach about and pursue discipline, trying our best to refrain from being offensive, pugnacious, or punitive. Let’s allow the gospel (and practices that flow from the gospel) to be the stumbling block, not our attitudes.

Dr. Finn, thanks for your time and responses. God bless your ministry