Baptist Church Leadership in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Introduction

This brief essay will examine some of the distinctives of Baptist leadership in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and compare them with Baptist convictions today. The primary focus will be on lay leadership, which is explicitly concerned with the Baptist doctrines of regenerate church membership and the priesthood of all believers.

J.L. Dagg, B.H. Carroll, and Regenerate Membership

In 1858, an influential Baptist theologian, John L. Dagg, authored the Second Part of the Manual of Theology titled “A Treatise on Church Order,” also published separately.¹ This treatise emphasized doctrines such as the authority of Scripture, quoting it extensively, and regenerate church membership. For instance, about Matthew 16:18, Dagg says, “From this promise we might infer… that the church was to be built of durable materials, of living stones, of real saints.”² In other words, he was convinced that the church was meant to be composed of believers or saints, so he led his church as such.

Likewise, the founder of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Benajah Harvey Carroll (1843-1914), emphasized regenerate church membership.³ He says that the ideal church “constitutes the standard of perfection toward which every pastor should work. It teaches not only that each individual member should have vital connection with Christ through faith, but should have living articulation connecting with the whole body of church members, and should contribute in due measure toward the development of the whole church.”⁴ Fundamentally, Carroll saw regenerate membership as a necessity that contributes significantly to church fellowship and mission. Believers and lay church leaders, empowered by the Holy Spirit and themselves priests, contribute to the ministry.

Comparison with the Present

Baptists today still emphasize regenerate membership and the priesthood of all believers, just as they have since the seventeenth century, and as demonstrated in the nineteenth and early 20th century.⁵ However, despite its emphasis, the Southern Baptist Convention struggles with its church membership numbers that are inconsistent with this biblical doctrine. It has posited these five solutions in the twenty-first century: “1. Instruction about membership,” “2. Repent for our sin of chasing numbers,” “3. Membership classes,” “4. Church confession,” “5. Clean the rolls.”⁶ If carried through, these five endeavors will align the denomination’s statistics with its values, contributing significantly to regenerating church membership just as J.L. Dagg and B.H. Carroll, among many others, did before them.

Still, this inconsistency is perhaps due to another Baptist distinctive: congregational polity, in which the church is governed autonomously through its lay congregation and appointed elders and deacons.⁷ Perhaps if the denomination had a more structured and cohesive polity, the 2008 resolution on regenerate church membership would have been more successful.⁸

Bibliography

Allen, Jason K., ed. The SBC and the 21st Century: Reflection, Renewal, and Recommitment. Revised ed. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2019.

Carroll, B. H. Baptists and Their Doctrines. Edited by Timothy and Denise George. Brentwood, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1999.

Dagg, John L. Manual of Theology, Part II: A Treatise on Church Order. Charleston, SC: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1858.

Finn, Nathan A., Michael A. G. Haykin, and Anthony L. Chute. The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2015.

Footnotes

1. Nathan A. Finn, Michael A. G. Haykin, and Anthony L. Chute, The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2015), 206. ↩

2. John L. Dagg, Manual of Theology, Part II: A Treatise on Church Order (Charleston, SC: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1858), 87. ↩

3. Finn, Chute, and Haykin, 226. ↩

4. B.H. Carroll, Baptists and Their Doctrines, edited by Timothy and Denise George (Brentwood, TN: Broadman and Holman, 1999), 140. ↩

5. John Mark Yeats, “More than Fifteen Million Southern Baptists? Recovering Regenerate Church Membership,” in The SBC and the 21st Century: Reflection, Renewal, and Recommitment, Revised ed., edited by Jason K. Allen (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2019), 103. ↩

6. Ibid., 106-108. ↩

7. Ibid., 106. ↩

8. Ibid., 105-106. ↩