Head Down and Mouth Shut

In the early 1800’s, baptist churches in America had reached a point where it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain doctrinal purity through creeds. Church members were also beginning what we know today as the church hop. Now it wasn’t what you have in mind when you think of church hopping, as a matter of fact, an excommunicated member may have serious trouble finding admission to another church. The “mutual oversight”, as Greg Wills puts it in his excellent book, Democratic Religion, was so stringent that churches had to watch themselves closely to keep from getting other churches in the association all worked up for a council, which would convene to scrutinize the erring congregation.

A member at LaGrange brought a charge against his own church that they were in the practice of “tolerating dancing.” LaGrange themselves requested that three churches send a contingent over in order to help consider the charge. Churches were regularly “disfellowshipped” through loose interchurch discipline, although they refused to call it that in order to maintain autonomy.

They really got worked up over membership though. You’ll enjoy this so I’m going to post it in its entirety. This is from David Shaver, editor of the Christian Index from that time:

They tell us that by virtue of “the time-honored Baptist principles of church independence and the right of private judgment,” our people everywhere “must receive evangelical Baptist churches into associational fellowship, without restrictions on the question of communion.”…Can that be true Independency which would compel churches, whether they will or will not, when forming Associations, to enlarge the bounds of fellowship until it embraces practices false to their own fundamental principles and fatal to their very being?…We, at least, shall content ourselves with the Independency, which leaves churches free to draw the lines of “associational fellowship” in consonance with their convictions as to scriptural order…We shall, therefore, turn a deaf ear to the pleas of that false Independency which means, first church-slavery, and then church extinction.

Did you get that? Shaver is all worked up over folks wanting to come into the Association. Why? Because they believe in open communion. For all of you that may not know, open communion is the practice I would dare say most of our Southern Baptist churches practice today. It is simply opening up the Lord’s Table to anyone professing faith in Christ. You see, communion used to be a big deal in its practice and its theology. It was integral to the discipline of the church and as such the purity was heavily guarded.

These loose interchurch councils didn’t excommunicate erring members from each others churches nor did they dissolve erring congregations. They simply stated, “if you will pursue a course contrary to that which we conceive the scriptures prescribe, you must pursue it alone.”

All this had me thinking about how far we have come in 174 years. How many churches do you know of that take membership so seriously that they would turn someone away if their doctrine wasn’t pure? How many churches do you know that will confront their own membership on sin issues, much less intercongregational sin? How many people have you talked to in the last month at your church where the conversation got past the obligatory, “Hey! How are you?” “Good! How are you?” “Great!” “See you later!”

These were not the golden days. Churches had some serious problems then just as now. But doctrinal and moral purity was put at a premium and I can’t help but think that we need a little bit of that past in our future. It might be good to look up every once in a while to see just where it is we’ve gotten ourselves to and then open our mouths and discuss it.