What Do Baptists Believe? Baptism, the Bible and Local Churches

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Baptists believe in one God in three persons, in Jesus Christ, God made man, crucified and risen for us, and in the Bible as the word of God, and on all of that they stand with the historic creeds. What makes them Baptists is their conviction that nobody can believe on another person’s behalf. So they baptize only people who have come to faith themselves, and they put them all the way under the water. Each congregation runs its own life, and for four centuries Baptists have been telling kings and governments that no earthly power can command a person’s faith.

On the desert road down to Gaza, Philip met “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians,” who was going back from worship in Jerusalem and reading Isaiah in his chariot. Philip climbed up beside him and “preached unto him Jesus.” They came to some water, and the man said, “See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?” Philip told him, “If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest” (Acts 8:36–37). The water was right there, and the one thing Philip asked about was whether the man believed. Baptists have been giving that answer since about 1609, when a small company of English exiles in Amsterdam began baptizing believers. If we open an NIV or an ESV we will find verse 37 only in a footnote, because Philip’s answer is missing from the early Greek copies of Acts and comes in a few later ones. The King James keeps it, and the translators of the NET Bible, who leave it out, judge that it was no part of the original text of Acts and that it shows “how some in the early church viewed the necessity of a confession of faith.”

When we say Baptists, though, we have to ask which ones, because no single person or office speaks for them all. They are one of the largest Protestant families, and the Baptist World Alliance, a fellowship founded in 1905, counts 53 million baptized believers in 180,000 churches, gathered in 283 conventions and unions across 138 countries and territories. In America the largest group is the Southern Baptist Convention, which is one branch of the family, with 46,876 churches and 12,722,266 members in its count for 2024. Alongside it stand American Baptist Churches USA and the National Baptist Convention, USA, whose articles of faith are a slightly edited New Hampshire Confession, and then the Free Will Baptists, and the Calvinist Baptists who are still guided by the Second London Confession of 1689. They agree on a great deal and part on a few things that matter, and since each of them has written down what it holds, we can let them speak for themselves.

The Trinity

The God Baptists pray to is the God of the historic creeds, and their own documents teach the same. Southern Baptists, in the confession they call the Baptist Faith and Message, write that “The eternal triune God reveals Himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with distinct personal attributes, but without division of nature, essence, or being,” and they call Jesus “the One Mediator, fully God, fully man.” American Baptists say the same thing more simply, that they worship “the triune God of the Bible, who is eternally one God in three persons.”

The Calvinist Baptists of 1689 spent a long paragraph on God’s “one substance, power, and eternity,” and then they came down from it to say that this doctrine “is the foundation of all our communion with God, and comfortable dependence on Him.” Comfortable is their word, at the end of all that, because the God they were being so careful about is the God we lean on.

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article II

The Bible and the confessions

Baptists have written a good many confessions, and they keep reminding us what a confession is for. When Southern Baptists revised theirs in 2000 they repeated a rule from 1925, “That the sole authority for faith and practice among Baptists is the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Confessions are only guides in interpretation, having no authority over the conscience.” American Baptists, for their part, “accept no humanly devised confession or creed as binding.” Yet the same Southern Baptist report calls confessions “instruments of doctrinal accountability,” which is to say that no paper rules a Baptist’s conscience and Baptists still expect one another to answer for what they have confessed.

All of them send us back to the Bible, and they describe it in different words. Southern Baptists say it has “God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.” American Baptists call it “the divinely inspired Word of God, the final written authority and trustworthy for faith and practice,” and they add that it is “to be interpreted responsibly under the guidance of the Holy Spirit within the community of faith.” And if we ask which translation to open, there is no official Baptist Bible.

From Report of the Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee

Grace, received by faith

What Baptists say about salvation is what Paul told the Ephesians: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). American Baptists write that salvation and eternal life “are granted in grace to all who trust Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.” Southern Baptists call justification “God’s gracious and full acquittal upon principles of His righteousness of all sinners who repent and believe in Christ,” and an acquittal is what a judge gives to someone who then walks out of the court free. Then they add, “There is no salvation apart from personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord,” which means that a believing mother can pray over her daughter every night of her childhood, and the day will still come when that daughter has to answer Philip’s question for herself.

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article IV

Once saved, always saved

The Baptist Faith and Message never uses those words, though the teaching is all there: “All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ, and sanctified by His Spirit, will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end.” It knows that believers stumble. They “may fall into sin through neglect and temptation,” it says, and even so “they shall be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.” The Second London Confession says it in older English, that such people “can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace.”

A Free Will Baptist reads the same Bible and will tell us something else. Their Treatise says there are “strong grounds to hope that the truly regenerate will persevere unto the end,” and then it goes on, “but their future obedience and final salvation are neither determined nor certain, since through infirmity and manifold temptations they are in danger of falling.” Kevin Riggs, writing for their national association, says it in fewer words: “We believe strongly in eternal security; we simply believe it is conditional on faith in Jesus Christ.” So if we had one neighbour of each kind on the same street, we could ask them both whether a Christian can be lost and hear two different answers, each from someone with a Bible open.

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article V

Calvinists and Free Will Baptists

This argument goes back to the first Baptists, the General Baptists of England, so called because they held to “an unrestricted or general atonement,” meaning that Christ died for everyone. Within a generation there were Particular Baptists as well, Calvinists who held to “a limited or particular redemption,” meaning that his death was for those God had chosen. Both convictions are still with us. Free Will Baptists say that “everyone has the ability to reject or accept Christ,” and the Second London Confession says that “from all eternity” God decreed “all things, whatsoever comes to pass.”

Southern Baptists have both kinds under one roof, and they tell us how they manage it. Their confession calls election “the gracious purpose of God, according to which He regenerates, justifies, sanctifies, and glorifies sinners,” and says in the next breath that “It is consistent with the free agency of man.” The Convention explains that this article “was carefully worded to allow churches and individuals which differ on this important biblical topic to cooperate together,” and by its own account most of its churches are not Calvinistic and a large number are.

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article V

Baptism

Anabaptist, the old word for them, means rebaptizer, and it began as “a pejorative nickname,” because a person who went to be baptized as an adult was telling his parents and his parish that the baptism they had given him as a baby did not count. These were English Separatists, and modern Baptists have little connection with the radical Anabaptists of the century before them, from whom today’s Mennonites descend. In time they took up the shorter name “as a point of honor.” At first the argument was about who should be baptized. The way of baptizing came later, when the Particular Baptists brought back the ancient practice of immersion as “a more suitable symbol of one’s burial with Christ,” and that is still what a Baptist congregation sees when someone goes under the water, a burial and a rising. Southern Baptists define it as “the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” an act “symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus.” Those last words come from Paul, “that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).

Southern Baptists call baptism one of “the two ordinances of Christ,” something he told his church to do, and they do not hold that the water itself gives grace. They say that it “symbolizes that God’s grace is only conferred upon us through faith in Jesus Christ.” That is why they will not baptize a baby, and they are gentle about it: such a baptism “may be meaningful to the family,” they write, but “a baby cannot make such choices.” When someone baptized as an infant wants to join a Southern Baptist church, “each cooperating Southern Baptist church determines such policies for itself.” Free Will Baptists define baptism as “the immersion of believers in water,” and American Baptists “follow the Lord in believer’s baptism,” and so all of them come back to the side of that road and to Philip’s one condition.

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article VII

The Lord’s Supper

At the table Baptists look back and look ahead at the same moment, and Paul gave them the words for it: “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26). Southern Baptists call the Supper “a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.” American Baptists speak more warmly of “the meal of the kingdom,” at which they “receive nourishment by communion with the Risen Christ.”

If we came to a Southern Baptist church on a Sunday when the bread and cup were being passed, whether we could take them would depend on that congregation. Their confession puts baptism first, “prerequisite to the privileges of church membership and to the Lord’s Supper,” and the Convention leaves the rest to the local church, so one congregation may ask a visitor to wait and the next may not. Free Will Baptists lean the other way and say no one has the right to keep the bread and cup from “the least of His disciples,” and in their churches the members also wash one another’s feet, a third ordinance that Southern Baptists do not list, which their Treatise says “teaches humility and reminds the believer of the necessity of a daily cleansing from all sin.”

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article VII

Each congregation governs itself

As a rule the people in a Baptist church answer to no bishop and no headquarters, so when a Southern Baptist congregation needs a pastor nobody sends it one. Southern Baptists define the church as “an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers,” and the members decide for themselves. The Convention those churches belong to says of every one of them, “Jesus Christ is the head of the local church—we are not.” Free Will Baptists likewise will have no “connectional church government,” and American Baptists “live and work together ‘in association,’” so a congregation can run its own life and still have neighbours to call on.

Behind all of this is what both Southern and American Baptists honor as the priesthood of believers, and it comes back to the conviction we began with. People in the back pew stand before God with nobody standing in for them, and they will answer to God for themselves, so Southern Baptists say that each member “is responsible and accountable to Christ as Lord.” Paul said it to the Romans in one line: “So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God” (Romans 14:12).

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article VI

Women as pastors

On who may be a pastor, Southern Baptists and American Baptists have given opposite answers in writing. The Southern Baptist confession, in the article as it was amended in 2023, says, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” American Baptists have a ministry called Women in Ministry, where they say, “we recognize and advocate for the full partnership of women and men in ministry.” Even among Southern Baptists the ordaining belongs to the congregation, because the Convention “neither ordains nor ‘recognizes’ ordination,” and “the BF&M and resolutions are not binding upon local churches.” The Convention still decides which churches it will work with, and in 2023 its messengers upheld the decision that Saddleback Church in California and Fern Creek Baptist in Louisville were “not in friendly cooperation” because women served there as pastors, so a congregation may keep its woman pastor and lose its place in the Convention. In June 2026 messengers gave the first of two required two-thirds votes to an amendment that would write the limit on pastors and preaching into the SBC Constitution, and the second vote was set for the 2027 annual meeting in Indianapolis.

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article VI (amended 2023)

Religious liberty

Thomas Helwys brought part of the Amsterdam congregation home to England in 1612, and that year he published A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity. In the copy he sent to King James he wrote, “The king is a mortal man and not God and therefore has no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual lords over them.” The king put him in prison and he died there, around 1616. A generation later and on the other side of the ocean Roger Williams, exiled from Puritan Massachusetts, made his way in 1636 on foot through fourteen weeks of New England winter to the head of Narragansett Bay. He bought land from the Indians and named his first settlement Providence, in gratitude to God for bringing him through, and in 1639 he established a Baptist congregation there. Rhode Island was founded on full liberty in matters of religion, so it took in “all manner of religious pariahs: Baptists, Quakers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, Gortonists, and many others,” and in that colony nobody had to answer to the government for how they worshipped.

American Baptists today are “committed to religious liberty and to the separation of church and state,” and Southern Baptists are still saying what Helwys wrote in the king’s copy. “God alone is Lord of the conscience,” their confession teaches, and “The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind,” and then it says what all of this has been for: “A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal.”

From Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article XVII

Speaking in tongues

If we ask Southern Baptists whether the gift of tongues is for today, they tell us straight away that they have no single answer: “There is no official SBC position on this issue.” Then they tell us how things stand among them. “Probably most believe that the ‘gift of tongues’ as described in the Bible ceased upon the completion of the Bible,” they say, and some take it as a gift “enabling them to communicate the Gospel to foreign cultures in a language the speaker had not known previously.” What their confession does settle is when the Holy Spirit comes: “At the moment of regeneration He baptizes every believer into the Body of Christ,” so a Southern Baptist does not look for a second baptism of the Spirit after faith.

From Frequently Asked Questions, Southern Baptist Convention

Mary and the saints

Mary is named once in the Baptist Faith and Message, in the place where Baptists confess with the whole church that Jesus was “conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.” When it comes to prayer and worship, the Second London Confession says, “Religious worship is to be given to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to him alone; not to angels, saints, or any other creatures,” and it goes on, “and since the fall, not without a mediator, nor in the mediation of any other but Christ alone.” So a Baptist prays to God through Christ, and asks no one else to stand between.

From Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, chapter 22

Alcohol

In 2006 the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting at Greensboro, declared its “total opposition to the manufacturing, advertising, distributing, and consuming of alcoholic beverages,” and it went on to ask “that no one be elected to serve as a trustee or member of any entity or committee of the Southern Baptist Convention that is a user of alcoholic beverages.” The same Convention tells us that its resolutions “are not binding upon any individual church or successive Convention,” so the rule Baptists live by is the one taught in their own congregation.

From On Alcohol Use In America, Southern Baptist Convention resolution, 2006

Purgatory, heaven and Christ’s return

The Second London Confession tells a mourner that the soul of someone who has died does not sleep or wait somewhere in between. It goes to God at once, the righteous to be with Christ and the wicked to hell, and “besides these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none.” So a family in a church that holds this confession, standing at the grave of a believer, has no purgatory to think about and believes that person is already with Christ. Southern Baptists look on to the end of everything, when “Jesus Christ will return personally and visibly in glory to the earth; the dead will be raised; and Christ will judge all men in righteousness,” and the righteous “will dwell forever in Heaven with the Lord.”

On the timing of it all they leave one another room. “There is no official stance in the SBC beyond what you find in The Baptist Faith and Message,” the Convention says, and Kevin Riggs of the Free Will Baptists, running through the rival timings of the rapture, puts it lightly: “You can be a pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, or no-trib, as long as you believe in the literal return of Jesus.”

From Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, chapter 31

When the Ethiopian came up out of the water he had nobody left to answer his questions, for “the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more.” What he had left was what he had said at the water, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,” and the last thing Luke tells us about him is that “he went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:37, 39).

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