According to recent LifeWay Research data, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000′s article on the Lord’s Supper no longer reflects what the majority of Southern Baptist pastors believe and practice. More than 50% of pastors surveyed practice something other than “close communion.” That is to say, the majority of Southern Baptist pastors do not require “baptism by immersion” in order to participate in the Lord’s Supper. Most require only that one “be saved” with 5% of pastors allowing “anyone who wants” to participate.
This abandonment of the BFM2000 by pastors and autonomous local SBC churches is certainly within the rights of the local church. However, the abandonment of “close” communion by professors at SBC seminaries is not acceptable as professors are required to be in agreement with, and teach in accordance with and not contrary to, the BFM2000. The BFM2000 reads:
VII. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper
Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience 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. It is a testimony to his faith in the final resurrection of the dead. Being a church ordinance, it is prerequisite to the privileges of church membership and to the Lord’s Supper.
The Lord’s Supper is 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.
Dr. Gregory Wills of Southern Seminary writes on the adoption of “close communion” in the Abstract of Principles, a Southern Baptist seminary confession which precedes the Baptist Faith and Message:
The most controversial practice of Baptists, for most other denominations, was known as “close communion.” It was a simple doctrine: only baptized persons were eligible to participate in the Lord’s Supper. It was controversial because Baptists held that the immersion of professing believers was alone baptism. Because the Greek word baptizein meant “to immerse,” by definition sprinkling and pouring were not baptism. And because only those who professed repentance and faith in Christ were proper subjects of baptism, applying water by any form to infants was not baptism. Baptists therefore viewed Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Congregationist believers as unbaptized. They could not therefore invite them to participate in the Lord’s Supper.
Manly’s draft stated this principle indirectly by affirming that baptism was “prerequisite to church fellowship,” and that the Lord’s Supper was, in part, a “renewal” of their “communion” with one another. The committee and the convention opted for a more explicit statement: baptism “is prerequisite to church fellowship and to participation in the Lord’s Supper.” They also made it more explicit in the article on the Lord’s Supper, changing “renewal of their communion…with one another” to “renewal…of their church fellowship.”
When seminary professors do not hold to the BFM2000 and/or teach future pastors in accordance with the BFM2000′s position on “close communion,” it is not surprising to find the doctrine abandoned within a generation. Though the BFM2000′s article on the Lord’s Supper is certainly not the first doctrine to examine in maintaining doctrinal orthodoxy, it is evidence that taking our confessions lightly will lead to the abandonment of historic, biblical, and distinctly Baptist, doctrine.
Today, we find one article of the Baptist Faith and Message largely abandoned in the pew and classroom because of a half-hearted confessional commitment being allowed in our Southern Baptist seminaries. If a half-hearted commitment to confessionalism continues, why should we Southern Baptists not expect more doctrinal abandonment in the years to come? A confession must be affirmed and upheld in its entirety or it will be viewed as negotiable, eventually becoming a useless relic of a bygone doctrinal era.
Gregory A. Wills, Southern Baptist Seminary 1859-2009 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39.
January 14, 2013 at 11:08 am
I’ve been in an SBC church .. our pastor is about as Baptist as you can get .. for about 32 years. With the exception of one or two Sunday night services in which he covered the BF&M, maybe 25 years ago, there’s been no hint of the BF&M anywhere in the church.
Except .. I taught it to my Sunday School class 8 or 9 years ago, comparing its beliefs side-by-side to the Methodist, Presbyterian, and AoG beliefs. And I have gone through the 1925 vs 1963 vs 2000 versions with a small group, twice in the last few years. I think there may have been 15 people in those two small groups, and perhaps 12 in the Sunday School class.
Aside from that, nobody in the 1000 or so that are at FBC every Sunday have a clue what’s inside the BF&M, let alone what sort of changes have been made in the last 2 revisions. In fact, I have for 5 years or so asked people why you have to be baptized to join an SBC church. NOBODY has ever given me the correct answer. Not teachers, not the deacon body, not even a table of pastors at an Executive Board Meeting of our local association.
Not even a well-known professor at one of our best-known seminaries.
BF&M? What BF&M?
January 14, 2013 at 5:25 pm
Bob,
You may be asking the wrong people if NOBODY has given the correct answer. In the last 30 years, I have been a member of 3 different SBC churches and in every one of them, what is stated in the BF&M is exactly what was taught & preached about Baptism.
Or maybe I have just been blessed to be under some good pastors.
Admittedly, the BF&M was not always mentioned by name but the principles were taught because they are biblical.
We all need to be careful. Our allegiance is not to the BF&M but to scripture. The BF&M is relevant only as it correctly reflects and echoes Biblical principal and precept. (BTW, it does exactly that.)
January 14, 2013 at 8:57 pm
Of course our allegiance is where it should be. But the BF&M is our only consensus statement of faith, and while we’re only attracting attendance of 36% of the people God sent down our aisles to make disciples of, we’re apparently not teaching many of the ones who do show up, what it is that Baptists believe.
I continue to ask other faithful members elemental questions, like where it says that Jesus is God. Answers are mostly quite weak.
The GC is to make disciples. It is that, at which we’re failing. Evangelism we do a little better at, but that’s only the first step. My wife didn’t even want to join our current church because she’d been saved in a Baptist church and said it was a “love’em and leave’em” sort of deal where, once she was a member, that was the end of their attention to discipleship.
Again, we’re poor at discipleship and one place to start is teaching our folks what Baptists believe. From my discussions with folks from lots of places, including here in the Bible belt, we’re simply not doing the job.