6. Digging deeper into the past to find the future

A decade ago my mate Darrell Jackson wrote a paper with the provocative title ‘Does the future have a denomination?’ I thought it pretty prescient and nicked it for the conclusion to my book Building a Better Body, where I asked it of the church.

I was working for BMS World Mission at the time and we were revamping our entire communications strategy to take account of the growing non-denominationalism of an increasing number of our supporting churches. They supported us because of what we were doing overseas, not because we or they were Baptist. Our focus was shifting from associations to individual churches and even individuals within those churches, who were being signed up as supporters. The centralising and slimming down of the co-ordinator team (of which I had been a part) seems a logical development of this.

Darrell’s paper and the BMS’ action were the result of trends within our churches where denominational awareness was decaying. People chose to attend Baptist churches because they were local, evangelical, charismatic, socially engaged, where my mum and dad worshipped (or any combination of those factors). Few confessed to being Baptists.

Even fewer had any awareness of the association of which their Baptist church was part or what the Union was. What mattered was that their church provided what they were looking for; if it came with a Baptist label that was ok, but inconsequential.

In eight years back in local church ministry, I’ve not seen anything that suggests this trend is being reversed. One member out of 300 lamented the passing of the Baptist Times, before commenting that he hadn’t read it for years; few go to association gatherings and only a couple show any interest in the Assembly – despite the fact that I was involved in putting together one strand of it for the first five years of my time here. They’re not alone: attendance at the annual jamboree has all-but halved in the last decade.

And in all this, the question that I can’t avoid is ‘does any of it really matter?’ If our churches are focused on embodying and proclaiming the gospel of the coming Kingdom of Jesus, does the label we hang around them make any difference? Is our mission in ways dependent on the resources provided by the larger movement of which we’re a part?

It’s that last question that leaves me torn. I’m a great believer in history – I have degrees in it, I’ve written about it and I teach it as a vital component of my NT classes at Spurgeon’s. I think that those who struck out at the fag end of the reformation period, declaring the independence of the church from the state and the priesthood of every believer, had rediscovered something precious and vital that the church had lost. History matters.

And the great thing that the Anabaptists and the early English Baptists grasped, that those before them had lost sight of and subsequent generations have taken for granted, is that while history matters, Jesus matters even more. At risk of sounding trite, it’s really all about him.

Luke Timothy Johnson in Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church reminds us that Luke’s first hearers (end of the first century, mainly gentile congregations scattered around the Greek speaking Roman Empire) would not have heard his story as a nostalgic recollection of the good old days, but as ‘a summons to an ideal that might be in danger of being lost, not as a work of bland historiography but as a thrilling act of utopian imagination.’ (p5). He goes on to assert that by virtue of these texts being taken into the canon, they have ‘a permanent normative value’ which means that ‘they are inspired by God…that they are prophetic for every age of the church, challenging it and calling it into question.’ (p5)

Alan Roxburgh makes the same case in his book Missional: Joining God in the Neighbourhood, arguing that Luke 10 urges us to see that mission comes before church (or denomination) and that our calling as missional Jesus followers ‘is about dwelling among, working beside, and eating at the table of men and women who live in our communities, who long for the personal rather than the pitch’ (p148).

And how will our movement help that happen? There are good lessons in our 400 year history that we need to pay attention to. But more than that, we need to dig down into the history of the earliest communities, the ones whose story has become normative for us, to see what happens when a group of Spirit-filled artisan Jesus followers armed only with the message about him, turned the world upside down.

And then we ask ourselves, armed only with the same gospel and the context in which we live today, what will church look like, how will Baptists thrive over the next 400 weeks, months, years…?

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Simon Jones is ministry team leader at Bromley Baptist Church, an associate tutor in NT at Spurgeon’s College and author of The World of the Early Church: A Social History (Lion 2011) among other books.