Baptist Autonomy

by Timothy George                                                                                   Vol. V, No. 5, September 1992

[The following is excerpted from a guest editorial in the Florida Baptist Witness of 28 May 1992. Timothy George is founding dean of the Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, AL. The context of this editorial was the debate engendered by the pro-homosexual actions of Pullen and Binkley Churches in North Carolina and the moderate assertion that for the SBC to disfellowship those churches would be to violate the autonomy of the local church.]

Baptists do share with other Christians in the Free Church tradition a strong commitment to the autonomy of the local congregation. We hold that every community of covenanted believers is responsible to God – not to presbytery, bishop, or papal magisterium – for the ordering of its own faith and life. No extra-congregational body, whether association, state or national convention, can or should coerce any local church to act contrary to its own perception of divine truth.

However, from their earliest days Baptists and other congregationalists bonded together in associations, societies, and conventions for the purpose of declaring a common faith and sharing a common mission. Independence was balanced by interdependence. As the 1644 London Confession of Faith put it: "Although the particular congregations be distinct and several bodies, every one a compact and knit city in itself, yet are they all to walk by one and the same rule, and by all means convenient to have the counsel and help one of another in all needful affairs of the church, as members of one body in the common faith under Christ their only head."

The autonomy of the local church is qualified by the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The idea that a given congregation can believe anything it chooses, or do anything it dares, however outrageous or unbiblical, and still be considered in good standing within the wider community of faith flies in the face of both New Testament ecclesiology and Free Church history. This distortion, born of modern rugged individualism, has eviscerated the corporate witness of the church in an age which needs desperately to hear an unmuffled trumpet from the camp of Zion.

The same principles of liberty of conscience and the priesthood of all believers which safeguard an individual congregation from external religious constraint also under gird the right and responsibility of every other association of like-minded believers to guard its own integrity in matters of faith and practice. The purpose of discipline, whether personal or congregational, should always be remedial, never merely punitive. However, there are limits to tolerable diversity in any community of faith that owns Jesus as Lord and the Bible as an infallible rule of faith and practice. A church which has become so elastic that it will not stand against anything, will not very likely stand for anything either.

...The mandate of the gospel now as [in New Testament times] is to speak with conviction and to act with compassion. However, it is not a mark of compassion, rather a sign of complicity and apostasy, to sanction as normative what Almighty God in His truth-telling Word has declared immoral and wicked.

...[Our great gospel message] will be blunted unless it is conveyed in a lived-out fidelity to the God who calls us to stand against the world in order that we can stand for it and with it.