Looking in the Other Direction: The Story of the Believers Church Conferences

By Teun van der Leer

In this study, Teun van der Leer tells the story of the Believers' Church Tradition, a tradition, mainly rooted in the so-called Radical Reformation, which prefers to be called a movement, or rather a renewal movement. Its name is a program, a vision, and a way of being church. Based on extensive source research, this book describes and analyzes the defining characteristics of this so-called "third type of church" and investigates its ecumenical value. With an extensive description of its nature of faith, the church, hermeneutical discernment, and mission, this book colors a movement within the church landscape that has never been mapped in such detail before. As such, the book provides an in-depth introduction to this ecumenically important but still a bit underexposed movement and makes a substantial contribution to the ecumenical ecclesiological debate about the church and its future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Sep 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666766813

Teun van der Leer

Teun van der Leer is Tutor at the Dutch Baptist Seminary in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Book preview

Introduction

This is a story. A story about a tradition. The Believers Church Tradition (BCT). A tradition that prefers to be called a movement, rather a renewal movement. Its name is a program, a vision, and a way of being church. It says that the Church consists of and is constituted by conscious committed believers who respond to God’s gracious call through the Holy Spirit. The term Believers Church¹ (BC) originates from the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was not before the 1950s and 1960s that it gained momentum and started to search for its own identity. How this movement arose, how it came to understand itself and what this harvested, both for the movement itself and for the church as a whole; that is the story being told here.

I will tell this story through nineteen Believers Church Conferences (BCC) held between 1967 and 2017. Together these conferences provide a unique insight into what the BCT stands for. The story is unique in the sense that until now it has not been told as substantially and exhaustively as is done so here. This is the first time that all available sources are unlocked and presented in a coherent story.

This book originated as a (PhD) research project at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and the Dutch Baptist Seminary, which is embedded in this University, in the years 2013–2021. The aim of the project was to map as clearly as possible the defining characteristics of the so-called third type of church (known under names such as congregational churches, free churches, gathered or gathering churches, or believers churches) and to investigate what this tradition can contribute to the ecumenical ecclesiological debate about the church and its future. Accordingly this book consists of two parts: Part I seeks to map the defining characteristics of the BCT on the basis of the story of the nineteen BCC. Part II will look at its ecumenical contribution.

1

. Believers Church is also often written with an apostrophe as Believers’ Church. According to Donald Durnbaugh this is done purposely to emphasize the communal and collective quality of belief, in opposition to the individual alone (Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church,

7

). Since the communal and collective is already evident in the use of the plural, apart from any quotations and book titles where it is present, I have left the apostrophe out. This is all the more justified because Durnbaugh himself later regretted his use of the apostrophe, since he had come to see the apostrophe as less than helpful in promoting conversations across Christian traditions because it seemed to claim that the eponymous church was the possession of some particular group. (Quotation by Nathan E. Yoder, Introduction, in EE,

7

).

Part I

The Story of Nineteen Believers Church Conferences

1

The Growing Importance of Ecclesiology

1.1 From Below and From Above

The twentieth century has been called the century of the church.¹ Due to the emergence of the Pentecostal Movement (1906), the World Missionary Conference Edinburgh (1910), the Ecumenical Movement (1920, 1948)² and Vatican II (1962–65),³ ecclesiological questions have become a focal point of attention in theological reflection.⁴ This has become even more urgent in the twenty-first century, where we see many new phenomena like Liquid Church, Emerging Church, Mission-Shaped Church and Fresh Expressions of Church, seeking to find their place in this secular age of post-Christendom.⁵

Roger Haight, in his three-volume study Christian Community in History,⁶ which according to Gerard Mannion is rapidly becoming the standard work in its field,⁷ delivers a helpful approach to study the church, historically and comparatively, in its concrete existence. For a long time, church was empirically obvious. This was the place where faith was received, kept and passed on. Certainly, the church fathers wrote about the church⁸ and the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church was both confessed in the Nicene Creed and used in the Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem around 350,⁹ but it was only in the fifteenth century that ecclesiology slowly became a separate locus.¹⁰ According to Wolfhart Pannenberg, the Reformers were the first to introduce the doctrine of the church into dogmatics and Melanchton was the first to project and develop a theology of the church as a whole in the second edition of his Loci in 1535.¹¹ The term ecclesiology was first mentioned in the second half of the seventeenth century and it is only since 1945 that it has subsequently been used as a specialized term.¹²

While all loci of systematic theology are developed under eschatological reservation and will always be under construction, since all theology is and remains a theologia viatorum,¹³ this is even more so when it comes to ecclesiology. Haight, in fact following Barth here,¹⁴ clearly shows how Church is both divinely constituted and historically situated, so the direct object of ecclesiology is a finite reality, a social movement and institution that understands itself in faith as responding to God’s grace.¹⁵ These two sides of the same coin ask for a balanced approach when it comes to ecclesiology, from below as well as from above. According to Haight it is impossible to do ecclesiology apart from the history of the church and the world in which it has existed along the way.¹⁶ An ecclesiology from below is concrete, realist, and historically conscious and uses a genetic approach, based on the axiom that in order to fully understand any historical organization one needs to understand its origins as well as its journey from them to the present.¹⁷ Viewing the church as an act of God (from above) does not make this any different, since God acted in history. Moreover, the theological and spiritual consciousness of the church is included in this historical approach. What churches state about themselves, Scripturally and traditionally, is part of their self–definition and as such part of the data concerning the concrete, historical church.¹⁸ Thus

the church is simultaneously a human, historical, social reality on the one hand and a theological reality on the other hand. These two dimensions of the church are quite distinct, but it is crucial that the discipline of ecclesiology [does] not focus its attention on either dimension to the exclusion of the other.¹⁹

Therefore the church will be understood theologically through its historical and sociological development, and this historical understanding provides a window for understanding how God works to form the church through Jesus Christ and through his disciples.²⁰ Haight points to Edward Schillebeeckx, who talks about the church as one single reality in history that must be understood in two irreducible languages.²¹ These are two dimensions of one reality; they are not two churches. That is why we need a theological method that respects these two dimensions of the one church, that does not hold them in balance over against each other but integrates them in a single understanding.²² This is how I want to study these BCC: in their historical concreteness in this defined period of fifty years, and as such seek to understand this tradition through an explicit appeal to sources that transcend one particular BC.

1.2 The Other Direction

In a preparatory document for the inaugural meeting of the WCC in Amsterdam in 1948, Karl Barth wrote, "It is obvious that the last remnants of sovereign authority in the idea of a corpus christianum are disappearing; this suggests that we should now look in this other (Congregationalist) direction."²³ Barth was in fact referring to Friedrich Loofs who in 1901 asked the question, Who knows whether, once the national churches of the old world will collapse, the congregational form of church also here with us will have the future? In his (expansive) background paper, written in German, Barth quotes Loofs and adds that really could have been a prophetic ‘Who knows’.²⁴ In a time when, according to Miroslav Volf, the understanding of the church seems to be moving away from the traditional hierarchical model to the (no longer quite so new) participative models of church configuration, and where today’s global developments seem to imply that Protestant Christendom of the future will exhibit largely a Free Christian form,²⁵ this who knows is being tested here for its prophetic value. If Volf is right in wondering whether we are standing in the middle of a clear and irreversible ‘process of congregationalization’ of all Christianity,²⁶ then understanding the nature of this process and what is meant by and involved in congregationalization is a key task for the church if it is to move towards a common vision for its future.²⁷ What might this other direction mean for the churches that are part of it, but also for the broader church?

What do we see when we look in this other direction? A diverse and polyphonic landscape of churches and church bodies which share a certain family resemblance and at the same time differ in polity, liturgy and theology. Since there is no hierarchical authority nor authoritative confessional agreement, the common voice of this other direction is not easy to find. So where to look?

Barth calls the other direction Congregationalist and Volf talks about a process of congregationalization. To find its common voice, if there is such a thing, we have to listen to the voices from within, mapping its self-understanding. I will use the so-called BCT, as a representative part of this type, a pars pro toto, to come as close as possible to this common voice. This is possible since the BCT has articulated itself more and more in the second half of the twentieth century, and, with a growing self-consciousness, started its own search to more fully develop the concept of the BC through this series of BCC, which began in 1967 and still continues to be held on average every three to four years.²⁸ I will examine and analyze this search and use the outcomes to find the defining characteristics of the BCT. Thereafter I will show how this outcome challenges and sharpens the understanding of the church in the ecumenical ecclesiological debate. In order to do so I will first describe what is meant by the BCT and how it emerged in the twentieth century (chapter 2). Thereafter I will describe the development of its self-understanding by describing and analyzing the content of the nineteen BCC held between 1967 and 2017 (chapters 3–7). Based on these outcomes I will display the defining characteristics of the BCT according to its self-understanding during these conferences (chapter 8). In the final chapter I will present what contribution the BCT has to offer to the ecumenical ecclesiological conversation and, in order to test this contribution for its sustainability in concrete church practice, I will propose how to deal with the tensions around mutual recognition of baptism and rebaptism (chapter 9).

1. Avery Cardinal Dulles in his introduction to the English translation of Lumen Gentium in The Documents of Vatican II, 9. And Pelikan, The Christian Tradition 5, 282: As the twentieth century began, each of the major churches of a divided Christendom was obliged, for reasons of its own, to address anew the doctrine of the church. Citing Pelikan, Ferguson even says that ecclesiology may be regarded as the organizing theme for twentieth-century theology (Ferguson, The Church of Christ, xiv). Cf. in two recent studies: "It is only in relatively recent times that ecclesiology as an independent locus has been discussed" (Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology 1, xxxii); and, It is now a commonplace that ecclesiology, of all the theological sciences, only began to come of age in the twentieth century, often referred to as ‘the century of the Church’ (DeVille, Church, 224).

2. From respectively 9 to 12 August and from 12 to 20 August, 1920, in Geneva, preparation meetings were held for respectively Life and Work and its first conference in Stockholm, 1925, and F&O and its first conference in Lausanne, 1927. In 1948 the two movements merged into the World Council of Churches at its first Assembly in Amsterdam, 22 August to 4 September. (Rouse and Neill, A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1, 417, 535, 719).

3. Paul Avis calls this the greatest ecclesiological event of the twentieth century (Avis, "Introduction, 11) while Adam DeVille talks about "the landmark ecumenical–ecclesiological event of the twentieth century (Adam DeVille, Church," 225).

4. Cf. Pelikan who concludes that it was only in the twentieth century that the doctrine of the church now finally attained ecclesiological maturity (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition 5, 289); Jenson, The Works of God, 168, comments that it is only in this century . . . that the church has come to see herself as a theological question; in a similar way George A. Lindbeck states, Ecclesiology is a dogmatically undeveloped area . . . separate treatises on the Church as a whole are modern phenomena. Among all the major theological loci, ecclesiology has been the last to develop. (Lindbeck, The Church in a Postliberal Age, 146).

5. Cf. Ward, Liquid Church; Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches; Archbishop’s Council, Mission-Shaped Church; Taylor, A Secular Age; Murray, Church after Christendom; Murray, Post-Christendom.

6. Haight, Christian Community Vol. 1–3.

7. Mannion, Constructive Comparative Ecclesiology, 163.

8. See, for example, well-known words such as For where the Church is, there is also the Spirit of God. And where the Spirit of God is, there is also the Church and all grace; for the Spirit is the Truth (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.24.1); But where three are, a church is, albeit they be laics (Tertullian, De exhort. castit. 7) ; "He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the church for his mother" (Cyprian, De unitate ecclesiae 6).

9. Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology, 10.

10. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, 21–27. Haight dates the beginning of ecclesiology a bit earlier, judging the Western Schism to be a comparison between ecclesiologies (centrist over against conciliarist), so that during the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ecclesiology began to emerge as an autonomous or distinct discipline (Haight, Comparative Ecclesiology, 389). Jacobus van Viterbo’s De regimine christiano, dated 1301, is sometimes considered to be the first tract on the church, see Le Guillou, "Ecclesiologie," 194. Other tracts to bear in mind are Johannes van Ragusa, Tractatus de Ecclesia (1431) and Johannes van Torquemada, Summa de Ecclesia (1486).

11. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, 22.

12. Michael Beintker, Ekklesiologie, Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4, Bd. 2 col. 1183.

13. There is a difference between theologia in via and theologia in visione (Berkhof, Inleiding, 15). Donald Bloesch observes, "Evangelical theology is a theologia viatorum (a theology of wayfarers), not a theologia comprehensorum (a theology of those who have arrived conceptually). It sees itself on a pilgrimage to a heavenly city where faith will be supplanted by direct vision, but at present it is content simply to walk by faith." (Bloesch, Essentials I, 19).

14. Cf. "The Church is, of course, a human, earthly–historical construct, whose history involves from the very first, and always will involve, human action. But it is this human construct, the Christian Church, because and as God is at work in it by his Holy Spirit. In virtue of this happening, which is of divine origin and takes place for men and to them as the determination of their human action, the true Church truly is and arises and continues and lives in the twofold sense that God is at work and that there is a human work which he occasions and fashions." (Barth, CD IV, part 2, 616).

15. Haight, Christian Community 1, 44.

16. Haight, Christian Community 1, 1–2.

17. Haight, Christian Community 1, 5.

18. Haight, Christian Community 1, 36.

19. Haight, Christian Community 1, 38.

20. Haight, Christian Community 1, 61.

21. Haight, Christian Community 1, 39. Schillebeeckx, Church, 210–213.

22. Haight, Christian Community 1, 39. This also means that there will always be a fruitful tension between the ideal and the real in ecclesiology (45).

23. Karl Barth, The Church—the Living Congregation of the Living Lord Jesus Christ, in WCC, Man’s Disorder, 76.

24. My translation of the German original: "Wer Weiss ob nicht dereinst, wenn einmal die Landeskirchen der alten Welt zusammenbrechen, die kongregationalistische Kirchenform auch bei uns ihre Zukunft hat?, und Das könnte nun wirklich ein prophetisches < Wer weiss? > gewesen sein" (Barth, Die Kirche, 23.)

25. Volf, After Our Likeness, 13.

26. Volf, After Our Likeness, 13.

27. Cf. TCTCV.

28. Nineteen conferences from 1967 up to 2017. See the overview in the Appendix.

2

The BCT as a Possible Third Type

This chapter starts by introducing the broader concept of congregationalism, as used by Barth and Volf, and thereafter introduces the BCT and the hypothesis of its self-understanding as a so-called third type of church. This is a typology that represents what might be termed as a separate stream or type of the church that is known under a variety of names like Congregationalist,²⁹ Free Church,³⁰ Believers Church,³¹ Gathered³² or Gathering³³ Church, Anabaptist,³⁴ Pentecostal,³⁵ baptist or baptistic³⁶ and Convictional Communities.³⁷ It is a family of traditions with both similarities and differences. This chapter demonstrates how the term BC gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s and examines how the BCC came about.

2.1 Congregationalism

Although he never used the term Congregationalism himself, the English separatist Robert Browne is named by many as the father of Congregationalism.³⁸ When, in 1580, he declined the post of minister in Cambridge, because he could not accept ordination by the hands of a bishop from (what he considered as) a false church, he moved to Norwich and formed an illegal congregation of like–minded Christians, an act which, according to Youngs, was the historical antecedent of the Congregational church.³⁹ In 1582 he published three treatises—Reformation without tarrying for anie, A Booke which sheweth the life and manners and A Treatise upon 23. of Matthewe—in which according to Williston Walker, he presented with great clearness the essential features of modern Congregationalism.⁴⁰ Important in Congregationalism is the independence of each local church from ecclesiastical and secular magistrates, with the right to govern themselves and appoint their own pastors and elders.⁴¹ Such churches, planted or gathered . . . by a willing covenant made with their God were subject to neither bishops nor magistrates.⁴² Congregationalism developed into a form of church government, alongside Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism, as respectively, communal, personal and collegial forms of government. It is Christocratic rather than democratic, called to seek the mind of Christ as a community. According to Alan Sell this is of great ecumenical significance: Christ alone is Lord, and church order must reflect this fact.⁴³

The Theologische Realenzyklopädie calls 1662 the birth year of Congregationalism, being the year in which Charles II promulgated the Uniformity Act in England.⁴⁴ Both Sell⁴⁵ and Nuttall take a longer view, seeing the period of 1640 to 1660 as the founding years of Congregationalism. Nuttall states that the first person ever to use the word was probably the merchant and Baptist William Kiffin in 1641: Christ hath given this Power to his Church, not to a Hierarchy, neither to a National Presbytery, but to a company of Saints in a Congregationall way.⁴⁶ However, both Nuttall and Sell do affirm that we can find a clear prehistory of Congregationalism in the separatist movement from 1570 onwards,⁴⁷ while others go further back to the Anabaptists at the beginning of the sixteenth century⁴⁸ and even to Martin Luther in 1526. In discussing Luther’s introduction to Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdiensts of 1526, Williams observes that one can see "the Congregationalist pattern suggested by Luther as a ‘third form’ of the church.⁴⁹ Here Luther talks about people who seriously want to be Christian and confess the Gospel with hand and mouth.⁵⁰ Durnbaugh calls this an excellent résumé of the character and concerns of members of the Believers’ Churches. Earnestness, witness, covenant (signing their names), discipline, mutual aid, simple pattern of worship—these are hallmarks of the believing people."⁵¹

Luther‘s words seamlessly join the heart of Congregationalism, which is about visible saints who in covenanting communities form a gathered church. The church is constituted by believers who covenant themselves with God and with each other.⁵² These believers voluntarily join themselves to walk together according to the appointment of Christ; giving up themselves to the Lord, and to one another by the will of God in professed subjection to the ordinances of the gospel.⁵³ Thus, in Congregationalism the full emphasis is on the local church, who in Christ receives everything that it needs to be a (full) church (wholly church, but not the whole church),⁵⁴ directly, without any intervention. John Owen (1616–1683), according to Nuttall termed with justice the leading figure among Congregational divines,⁵⁵ even stated that, since the local church was the only form of church that Christ had set up,⁵⁶ separation from the Church of England could not be a schism, for it is no crime to depart from nothing.⁵⁷ In the words of the first Baptist John Smyth, whose Congregationalism was even more radical than Robert Browne’s, a congregation is,⁵⁸ a visible communion of saints is of two, three, or more saints joined together by covenant with God and themselves, freely to use all the holy things of God, according to the word, for their mutual edification and Gods glory.⁵⁹

It is this immediacy that the Savoy Declaration also emphasizes repeatedly:

By the appointment of the Father all Power for the Calling, Institution, Order, or Government of the Church, is invested in a Supreme and Soveraign maner in the Lord Jesus Christ, as King and Head thereof . . . To each of these Churches thus gathered, according to his mind declared in his Word, he hath given all that Power and Authority . . . These particular Churches thus appointed by the Authority of Christ, and intrusted with power from him for the ends before expressed, are each of them as unto those ends, the seat of Power which he is pleased to communicate to his Saints or Subjects in this world, so that as such they receive it immediately from himself.⁶⁰

So it is in the act of gathering that a church is constituted, as the Lord’s free people joining themselves into a church estate.⁶¹ What is fundamental is the gathering of conscious committed believers in answering the call of the Gospel.⁶² In this way an independent church can be a true church: I do affirm that a company of Saints Separated from the World, and gathered into the fellowship of the Gospell . . . are a true Church.⁶³ This means that visible saints were the only and fundamental matter of the church: When a visible Church is to be erected, planted, or constituted, by the Appointment of Christ, it is necessary that the matter of it in regard of quality, should be Saints by calling, Visible Christians and Believers.⁶⁴ The seventeenth–century writers discern between matter and form, being respectively the saints and the covenant.⁶⁵ John Smyth talks about three things that a true visible church requires, namely true matter, true forme, true properties, and the true matter of a true visible Church are Saints . . . men separated from all knowne syn, practising the whol will of God knowne vnto the[m].⁶⁶ Karen Smith, while acknowledging that the idea of covenanting is particularly notable among British Baptists and not so central in other Baptist theologies, makes the point that

whether one begins with the Separatist tradition formative for British Baptists in the seventeenth century or looks to continental Anabaptists as important shapers of European Baptists, among all Baptists is the insistence on the idea of the church being gathered by God. The clear premise is that God is always gathering and drawing and calling individuals to life in relationship with God and one another.⁶⁷

Nuttall concludes that there is still no better witness to the Kingdom’s reality than a band of men whose heart God has touched, of whom others take knowledge that they have been with Jesus.⁶⁸ And Volf states, "The church is essentially communio fidelium, whatever else it may be beyond this. Without faith in Christ as Savior, there is no church. Those who gather in Christ’s name allow their own lives to be determined by Jesus Christ and the public confession of faith in Him is the central constitutive mark of the church, for that which the church is, namely, believing and confessing human beings, is precisely that which (as a rule) also constitutes it."⁶⁹

2.2 Believers Church Tradition

It is around this central constitutive mark, namely believing and confessing human beings, that the BCT comes to the fore. As mentioned, free churches and gathered or gathering churches are designations used as well, but many times as synonyms.⁷⁰ These are partly different and partly overlapping traditions with a lot of family resemblance. In his study on the BCT, Donald Durnbaugh acknowledges that the term Free Church was originally used to describe the third type, but explains that this concept is too broad and general in its meaning. Moreover, given the success of the wall of separation in the United States and beyond,⁷¹ even Roman Catholics could be classified as Free Churches.⁷²

The term Believers Church (BC) as such dates back to Max Weber, who in 1904 in the first edition of his Der protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,⁷³ introduced this English term rather than a German equivalent, defining it solely as a community of personal believers of the reborn, and only these,⁷⁴ immediately followed by his conclusion in other words, not as a Church but as a sect.⁷⁵ The word sect as a (sociological) type, along with church and mysticism, is known from the work of Ernst Troeltsch, who defines sects as relatively small groups, seeking a personal inner awareness and a personal direct bond of the members of its circle, who behave against world, state, society indifferent, tolerating or hostile.⁷⁶ With this description of sect Troeltsch comes close to the church type that is the focus of this study.⁷⁷ Weber explains why he uses the word sect (and in his view, does so prior to Troeltsch)⁷⁸ for (Ana)Baptists:⁷⁹

Because such a religious community could only be voluntarily organized as a sect, not compulsorily as a Church, if it did not wish to include the unregenerate and thus depart from the Early Christian ideal. For the Baptist communities it was an essential of the very idea of their Church, while for the Calvinists it was an historical accident.⁸⁰

Paul Fiddes, however, doubts that Baptists can be seen as sects in Troeltsch’s terms, since according to Fiddes, Troeltsch was not so much looking for a categorization of three types, but for some kind of new blend of the three types, which could be found in the Free Church. Moreover, Fiddes considers that Weber’s almost exclusive focus on the element of voluntarism overlooks the Baptist theology of covenant. Fiddes’ conclusion is that while the behavior of the early Baptists sometimes showed the marks of a sect, their covenant theology supplied a momentum towards ‘free church’ which was unstoppable.⁸¹

2.3 A Third Type

The historical accident, as Weber called it, differs at certain points from Catholicism and Protestantism. It is mostly associated with the commonly named Radical Reformation and its heirs.⁸² Robert C. Dodds talks about radical protestantism,⁸³ describing it as a movement with the purpose of changing the established patterns of church life and calling it a broad and broadly important stream in Christianity, a way of Christianity which is as old as the faith, but which is just beginning to be identified for what it is.⁸⁴ In this book I seek to contribute to this identification by putting the spotlight on these types of churches and specifically those that identify themselves as BC, searching for their identifying characteristics. What does this (sub)type look like? Durnbaugh defines it as the covenanted and disciplined community of those walking in the way of Jesus Christ.⁸⁵ John Howard Yoder sees it as "a type sui generis, which . . . keeps arising again and again, in every country, taking on similar shapes, mutatis mutandis."⁸⁶

Like Yoder, different authors view this type as a distinct type or stream,⁸⁷ usually the third one, alongside catholic and protestant (Newbigin) or catholic and orthodox (Volf). Littell talks about a ’third force’ in Western Christianity, a force just as original as Roman Catholicism or ‘magisterial Protestantism’.⁸⁸ Durnbaugh counts the BC as a sixth Christian family, alongside Anglican, Puritan, Catholic, Orthodox and Continental Protestant,⁸⁹ while Nigel Wright reduces the whole ecclesiastical landscape to two, seeing the catholic and baptist tendencies as being like the twin foci of an ellipse and as representing divergent tendencies in that phenomenon we call global Christianity. The catholic approach is the sense of historic connectedness with the apostolic tradition flowing all the way back to the early church and centred in the common confession of the creeds and in the role of the bishops as agents of fellowship and relationship. The baptist approach finds the essence of the church not in historic connectedness but in the living presence of Christ by the Spirit among those who believe.⁹⁰ Haight similarly speaks of the ‘two ends’ of the spectrum of ecclesiologies generated in the sixteenth century under the title ‘Free Church’ and ‘Universal Institutional Church’.⁹¹

Using baptist with a small b, Wright is following in the footsteps of James Wm. McClendon Jr., Lesslie Newbigin and Angus Dun. Dun talks about three different ways of embodiment of the vision of the church and names them catholic (the church as a great society), classical protestant (the church as the community that receives in faith the Word of God) and the fellowship of the Spirit (the church as a community of the Spirit-led life in Christ).⁹² Newbigin characterizes them as manners of our ingrafting or incorporation into Christ, naming them in this order as protestant (incorporated by hearing and believing the Gospel), catholic (incorporated by sacramental participation in the life of the historically continuous church) and pentecostal (incorporated by receiving and abiding in the Holy Spirit).⁹³ McClendon, following Newbigin, chooses baptist as name for what he calls a third type of Christian community, a third understanding of ‘church’, which is local, Spirit-filled, mission-oriented, its discipleship always shaped by a practice of discernment.⁹⁴ He believes the type to be distinctive, having its own role and destiny in the Kingdom of Christ.⁹⁵ Keith Jones sees in the decision of the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE) at its assembly in 2006 not to include the EBF in their church fellowship, proof that

the family of protestant/reformed and proto-reformation churches in Europe have themselves declared gathering baptistic churches to be out with the church as defined by the Leuenberg Agreement. This recognition of the distinct otherness of Baptists over against churches of a congregational, synodical, methodistical and episcopal ecclesiology, must be acknowledged as more than sociological. It is indeed, at heart, theological.⁹⁶

Conclusion here is that the voices from outside the BCT (Dun, Newbigin) and from inside the BCT (Littell, McClendon, Jones) together give enough footing for the hypothesis that the BCT is a distinctive ecclesiological type, not so much to classify as to clarify.⁹⁷ Even recently a new method in ecumenism was proposed along the same tripartite by William J. Abraham. He talks about three ecumenical options, three ways of thinking of the origin, identity, and continuity of the church. Option one is a Roman Catholic version of the church where the emphasis falls on purity of institutional and juridical identity, on the privileging of hierarchical epistemic authority, on the necessity of episcopal succession, and on a strong sacramental realism. Option two spans the world of Magisterial Protestantism where the emphasis falls on biblical authority, on the purity of various ecclesiastical polities, on justification by grace alone through faith alone, and on a robust vision of divine sovereignty. Option three he says, following Newbigin, is best represented in classical Methodism and in Pentecostalism and its goal is to capture afresh the Christianity of the New Testament and to be faithful to its message, its practices, its spiritual experiences, and its missionary zeal.⁹⁸

2.4 Emerging Interest in the Believers Church

A revival of interest and research into the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, largely resulting from opening up numerous new sources,⁹⁹ was the cradle for the emerging interest in BC ecclesiology in the decades of the fifties and the sixties in the twentieth century. Although, as mentioned, Max Weber coined the term in 1904 and together with Troeltsch legitimated the Anabaptist sect-type,¹⁰⁰ it was during these later decades that scholars both from within and from outside the BC showed a growing interest in rethinking ecclesiology from the BC perspective. In these early reflections we already discover two characteristics that return over the proceeding years, namely (a) an awareness of the dynamics between the institutional church and the BC and (b) an ambivalence regarding the concept of the BC. These recurring themes will be illustrated through a number of articles from 1951, and a conference in 1955.

2.4.1 The Anabaptist Conception of the Church

Three years after the founding of the WCC in Amsterdam in 1948, and no doubt stimulated by the new interest in ecclesiology that accompanied it, the first issue of the 1951 MQR contained three articles on the Anabaptist conception of the church written by respectively Erland Waltner, Robert Kreider and S.F. Pannabecker.¹⁰¹ Waltner states that the ecclesiology of Protestantism is by no means a closed issue¹⁰² and argues that the Anabaptist conception of the church with its focus on regeneration, obedience, fellowship and brotherhood, can be helpful for modern Protestantism in seeking a more satisfying ecclesiology:

While Luther held that the church exists wherever the gospel is preached in purity and the sacraments are properly administered and thus could accept the concept of a Volkskirche or a Landeskirche, the Anabaptists held it completely un-Biblical to define the boundaries of the church according to sacramentarian rites or geographical lines. For them the church was not a society of the baptized nor primarily a church of the elect (Zwingli), but a church of believers, that is, of those who personally accepted Christ and whose lives show fruits of repentance.¹⁰³

Kreider examines the Anabaptist conception of church as the brotherhood type parallel to the church type.¹⁰⁴ This is a dynamic conception of the church which demands that each individual and every generation of believers confront the claims of the Cross.¹⁰⁵ On the basis of the history of the Mennonite Church in Russia in the nineteenth century, he shows how difficult it is for a brotherhood type of church to perpetuate itself. He concludes by saying that the tension between the concept of the church as brotherhood and the church of the people . . . is a struggle in the heart of Mennonitism the world around.¹⁰⁶

Pannebecker discovers the same in America and describes the sociological phenomenon of the sect passing into the church:

The separatist church starts from scratch and it can do so because it rejects the old and sets new forms, calling out believers in a clear

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cut voluntary decision to join a community of saints. The children of the saints are not in the same position as the saints, their fathers. Much as they may desire to enter the fellowship by voluntary choice, they are not as free as their parents to start from nothing. Forms have been laid down; methods of expression have become current; the differences between being on the inside and on the outside are not as clear

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cut. Consequently, training and tradition inevitably assumes a larger portion in the picture. Thus successive generations build up a body of patterns from which it is not easy to vary. The initial creative spark is no longer possible to the degree originally required. Thus we see the sociological phenomenon of the sect passing into the church.¹⁰⁷

This sociological phenomenon is still in view today. Bill Jackson, referring to Weber’s routinization of charisma,¹⁰⁸ calls this the cycle of church history: The natural process whereby new religious movements form structures and rituals to survive for the long haul . . . What began as a reform movement now needs to be reformed—and so the cycle of church history is a history of routinization and renewal.¹⁰⁹ Olof de Vries, Professor of Baptist History and Theology at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1991–2009, used the metaphor of a pendulum clock, going back and forward between renewal and institutionalization.¹¹⁰ So the sect type and the church type seem to be not so much fixed types over against each other, but rather form a dynamic tension, which asks for a constant theological and sociological reflection.

The two key factors that we see emerge from these articles are, firstly that the Anabaptist conception of the church, here called the brotherhood type, deserves serious study and a rightful place in the ecclesiological conversation. Secondly, that this type of church is never self–evident and remains sensitive to the sociological phenomenon of the sect passing into the church.

2.4.2 Study Conference on The Believers’ Church

The dynamics between the institutional church and the BC, seen in the articles above, is also present in a conference on the BC in 1955.¹¹¹ So, it is not the case that the BCT developed this concept of a BC as if this concept could exist without an institutional tradition. On the contrary, all kinds of theologians who have contributed to the reflection on the BCT have explicitly reflected on the existence of other traditions and relate to them. This is in evidence in the 1955 conference as discussed below, and will be seen again in the course of the other conferences.

In August 1955 the General Conference of the Mennonite Church of North America organized a Study Conference on The Believers’ Church in Chicago, USA, bringing together around 130 representatives from the United States and Canada.¹¹² Here we find passionate talk about the rediscovery of the biblical church,¹¹³ immediately followed by the finding that this church has not been sufficiently realized . . . in any historic situation, for there is always the tendency to decline from the initial high vision and pattern of total discipleship. This calls for a thorough constant self-examination, repentance and rededication, a willingness to yield to the leading of the Holy Spirit, and a renewed and systematic study of the Scriptures.¹¹⁴ For the Anabaptists the Church of Believers was basic and significant . . . .The church is present where Christ’s redemptive act is experienced and where on this basis fellowship with Christ exists among fellow believers. In that sense there was ‘no salvation outside of the church’.¹¹⁵ This makes the practice of scriptural discipline a necessary characteristic of a brotherhood church.¹¹⁶

The whole conference breathes firstly, a strong commitment to the BC as being the biblical pattern, with a strong emphasis on the conversion experience as a qualification for membership, and true discipleship as belonging to the essence of the church;¹¹⁷ secondly, a great awareness that this is not easily realized and remains more a striving after then a reality, and a continuous struggle for its perpetuation, which cannot be found in duplicating the forms of the first or the sixteenth century, but their spirit;¹¹⁸ and thirdly, an openness to other churches for correction and completion, since there are many doctrines of the church and it is dangerous to assume that our concept is the only true one.¹¹⁹

Again, in the content and the nature of the discussion of this conference we see the same strong conviction that the Anabaptist conception of the church—here called for probably the first time Believers’ Church—deserves serious attention, and remains open for correction and completion.

2.5 Conclusion and Way Forward

What has thus far been shown is that in the second half of the twentieth century the study of (many new) sources on Anabaptism gained momentum. It stimulated research into one’s own roots (especially among the Mennonites) and raised the challenge to present this type of church to a wider ecclesiastical forum that had become more visible through the ecumenical movement. It led, amongst other things, to a Mennonite initiative in 1955 in Chicago to study the BC. Here we find the first seeds sown in what seems to have become fertile ground for exploring further the concept of the BC and harvesting its fruits. Twelve years later a BCC took place in 1967 in Louisville, which turned out to be the first in a still ongoing series of (at this moment) nineteen BCC.¹²⁰ Mennonites and Baptists took the lead, and others joined in. In the chapters hereafter, I will present the story of these conferences.

So what is the BCT and how did it emerge in the twentieth century? It is a tradition, rooted in the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century, and also fuelled by separatist puritanism, pietism and revival movements in the following centuries, characterized by conceptions of church as forms of brotherhood and discipleship. Focused on the gathering of conscious committed believers in answering the call of the Gospel, it seeks to fulfil its mission as church in the world. It emerged in the wake of two independent historical events that impinged upon each other: new historical sources and a new worldwide ecumenical movement. Its identity is fluid and in motion, and subject of its own search. I will follow this quest in the next chapter through nineteen conferences that attempt to clarify its concept.

29. Jenkins, Congregationalism; Nuttall, Visible Saints; Sell, Saints: Visible, Orderly & Catholic.

30. Littell, The Free Church. Rosemary Ruether makes the interesting tripartite distinction of sacerdotal, reformed and free church in her paper at the Second BCC in Chicago 1970. (Ruether, The Believers’ Church and Catholicity, 2).

31. Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church.

32. Over against Given Church, as noted by Williams, The Believers’ Church and the Given Church, 325–32.

33. Jones, A Believing Church, 64; Jones, Rethinking Baptist Ecclesiology, 8; Jones, The European Baptist Federation, 2. Jones prefers gathering over gathered, as being more dynamic and under construction rather than fixed.

34. Littell, The Anabaptist View.

35. Newbigin, The Household of God, 9.

36. McClendon Jr., Systematic Theology 1, 18, 27–34; Freeman et al., Baptist Roots, 2–3; Parushev, Doing Theology, 7–22 (in Dutch, Original English version can be found at https://unie–abc.nl/images/seminarium/publicaties/artikelen/artikel_baptistway_parushev_h1.pdf [accessed June 30, 2021]).

37. Randall, Communities of Conviction, v–vii; Randall, Tracing Baptist Theological Footprints, 133–48.

38. See the titles of two books that were written about him: Burrage, The True Story of Robert Browne (1550?–1633): Father of Congregationalism, and The Retraction of Robert Browne: Father of Congregationalism. Also in Walker, The Creeds and Platforms: Though he proved unfaithful himself to the beliefs which he preached and for which he suffered, Robert Browne must be accounted the father of modern Congregationalism, 17. Grenz also makes this point: His ecclesiology earned for Browne the honor of being termed the father of modern Congregationalism. His emphasis upon the church as a company of the converted bound together and to God in a voluntary covenant was to become a distinguishing mark of later Congregationalism (Grenz, Isaac Backus, 21, 22); similarly Youngs states: In the year 1580, in the English town of Norwich, a man named Robert Browne organized a Congregational church and began preaching the Gospel. By this simple act Browne broke the law, risked his life, and became founder of a new religious body, later to be known as Congregationalism . . . The obscure person and sometimes rebel Robert Browne was in some respects, the father of Congregationalism (Youngs, The Congregationalists, 11, 13); Pastoor and Johnson, Historical Dictionary of the Puritans, note that in 1582, the principles of Congregationalism were first set forth by the Separatist Robert Browne, who is considered the father of Congregationalism, 84; and Kirby, Congregationalism, writes: A leading figure among the early Independents was Robert Browne (1553–1633), a Cambridge graduate who has been called the father of English separatism (204).

39. Youngs, The Congregationalists, 12. Walker named Browne as forming the first Congregational Church of a long series which has continued since that day in 1580 or 1581 in Norwich (Walker, The Creeds and Platforms, 10).

40. Walker, The Creeds and Platforms, 12. For a recent in–depth study on Robert Browne, see Abrahamse, Ordained Ministry.

41. Congregationalism is that form of Church polity which rests on the independence and autonomy of each local church (Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary, 399); Congregationalism tends to place the ultimate choices in the hands of the entire congregation (Carson, Church, Authority, 229).

42. Kirby, Congregationalism, 204.

43. Sell, Congregationalism, 219. Cf. Leer, Wij zijn niet autonoom, 146–62.

44. Theologische Realenzyklopädie 19, 452.

45. Sell, Congregationalism, 218.

46. Nuttall, Visible Saints, 8.

47. Nuttall, Visible Saints, 1–11; Sell, Saints, 9–28.

48. The original Swiss proto–Anabaptist ideal ecclesiology may have been comparable to non–Separating Congregationalism in the original vision a century later of Puritan independency (Williams, The Radical Reformation, 180). Erland Waltner argues that the congregational principle of church government, now so widely accepted, was first introduced by Balthasar Hubmaier when he resigned his office as a priest and was immediately thereafter elected as minister by his Anabaptist congregation (Waltner, The Anabaptist Conception, 12).

49. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 661 (italics mine). See also Williams, ’Congregationalist’ Luther, 283–95. Interestingly Williams also uses the term Third Church referring to Erasmus, who was looking for a better church, neither finding it under the corrupt papacy of his own day nor under the belligerent and predestinarian Reformation church of the invisible elect. After describing Erasmus’ search for a better one, Williams concludes, Though not taken directly from Erasmus, the ideal of a ‘Third Church,’ with its slightly eschatological overtone, might be taken as indeed the slogan, or at least as the program of Catholic Evangelism. (Williams, The Radical Reformation, 46).

50. Leute die mit Ernst Christen sein wollen und das Evangelium mit Hand und Mund bekennen, Luther, Vorrede, 77. See also Leer, Wij zijn niet autonoom, 147, 148.

51. Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church, 4, where he adds, The tragedy of Protestantism is that when such groups emerge in history, Luther and his colleagues could see nothing in them but enthusiasts, fanatics, and rebels. This prejudice has not been completely overcome to this day.

52. To join themselves to the Lord in one covenant and fellowship together as Robert Browne writes in A True and Short Declaration, 422.

53. From the The Platform of Polity, thirty sections relating to church-order, appended to the Savoy Declaration of 1658, A Declaration of the F&O owned and practiced in the Congregational Churches in England, based on the Westminster Confession (1546), largely using the same text, but differing when it comes to church and church order. It was written under the leadership of Thomas Goodwin and John Owen. For the whole text of the Declaration and the appended sections, see Walker, The Creeds and Platforms, 340–408. The quotation is from page 404.

54. The second of five affirmations, being the outcome of a symposium on the question Are Baptist Churches Autonomous?, organized by the Baptist World Alliance in Elstal, Germany, March 2007, which were, at least until 2009, published at https://www.baptistworld.org/ [accessed June 30, 2021]. See on this also Kasper, That They May All Be One, 90, and compare Grenz, who speaks about the local church as the church of Jesus Christ in miniature in Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 468.

55. Nuttall, Visible Saints, 39.

56. There is no other sort of visible church organized but a particular church or congregation, where all the members thereof do ordinarily meet together in one place (Owen, "The True Nature," 3). According to Nuttall, Owen was converted from Presbyterianism to Congregationalism through reading John Cotton’s The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644) (Nuttall, Studies, 128). See further Knapp, John Owen, on schism, 333–58, and Bakker, Draads en tegendraads, 84–87.

57. Owen, "Of Schism," 191. However, Congregational Churches from the beginning did not isolate themselves locally: From the first they recognized the bond of a common F&O, and the stronger among them used to help the weaker. (Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary, 399) In the United Kingdom local Congregational churches in 1966 even covenanted together to form the Congregational Church and six years later, in 1972, formed together with the Presbyterian Church, the United Reformed Church. With this development Congregationalism, as traditionally understood, largely disappeared from the scene in England, but . . . it remains the basis of church order in Baptist churches as well as in a growing number of independent evangelical churches. (Kirby, Congregationalism, 205).

58. Abrahamse, ’Is Smyth also among the Brownists?’, 1–10.

59. Smyth, Principles and inferences, 252. Elsewhere Smyth writes, "We say the Church or two or three faithful people separated from the world and joined together in a true covenant, have both Christ, the covenant, and promises, and the ministerial power of Christ given to them, and that they are the body that receive from Christ’s hand out of heaven, or rather from Christ their head this ministerial power (Smith, Paralleles, Censures, Observations, 403 [italics mine]). Volf in his ecclesiology takes as point of departure the thought of this first Baptist John Smyth and the notion of church as ‘gathered community’ that he shared with Radical Reformers. This starting–point is very important for him since he wants to argue that the presence of Christ, which constitutes the church, is mediated not simply through the ordained ministers but through the whole congregation," (Volf, After Our Likeness, 2).

60. Walker, The Creeds and Platforms, 403–4, taken from the The Platform of Polity (italics mine).

61. https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/nereligioushistory/bradford–plimoth/bradford–plymouthplantation.pdf, accessed 28 January, 2020, 85. Cf. Volf, After Our Likeness, 137–45.

62. The idea of the saints gathered is fundamental to Congregationalism (Sell, Saints, 2). See also his quotation from Stephen Ford’s A Gospel–Church, or God’s Holy Temple Opened (1675): A true Instituted Gospel–Church is . . . A company of Believers united together in a holy Band, by special and voluntary agreement (Sell, Saints, 37).

63. Katherine Chidley, Iustification of the Independent Churches of Christ (1641), 37, cited in Nuttall, Visible Saints, 52. Cf. Volf: In its most concentrated form, the church does manifest itself concretely in the act of assembling for worship, and this is constitutive for its ecclesiality. (Volf, After Our Likeness, 137).

64. Richard Mather, Church-Government and Church-Covenant Discussed (1643), quoted in Sell, Saints, 31.

65. "The constitution of the church that is the collection and combination of saints as matter in and into covenant with God as the form, is that which gives true being unto a church and nothing else" (John Robinson, A justification of separation from the church of England [Amsterdam, 1610], 81 [italics mine], quoted in Brachlow, The Communion of Saints, 69). Also, Thomas Hooker in New England uses this terminology: Visible Saints only are fit Matter appointed by God to make up a visible Church of Christ (A Survey of The Summe of Church Discipline, Wherein the Way of the Churches of New England is warranted out of the Word [1648], 14, quoted in Sell, Saints, 35).

66. Smith, Principles and inferences, 253.

67. Smith, A Baptist Vision, 10.

68. Nuttall, Visible Saints, 162.

69. Volf, After Our Likeness, 147, 150, 151. Cf. Volf’s words in the Introduction: "I argue that the presence of Christ, which constitutes the church, is mediated not simply through the ordained ministers but through the whole congregation, that the whole congregation functions as mater ecclesia to the children engendered by the Holy Spirit, and that the whole congregation is called to engage in ministry and make decisions about leadership roles." (2).

70. In his Introduction to After Our Likeness, Volf also refers to Believers’ church ecclesiology and the Believers’ church heritage (2, 3). During the first BCC in 1967 in Louisville, Littell more or less identified free churches with believers churches, although he was opposed by John Howard Yoder, who regarded the latter as a less comprehensive category (Littell, The Concept of, CBC, 16). In this same conference Williams calls the gathered church a possible equivalent term for the BC, although in the end he prefers the name pilgrims’ church, given, gathered, and yet to be gathered in . . . beholding a new vision of God’s purpose . . . and new ways in their pilgrimage through contemporary history (Williams, A People in Community, CBC, 102, 142). In the second conference in 1970 in Chicago, Littell continues to use the term free churches instead of believers churches (Littell, The Contribution of, 47–57). Also, in his Preface to the conference book of Winnipeg 1978, Zeman uses BC and Free Church in one paragraph (Zeman, Preface, TBCC, xiii).

71. The classic name to express the separation of church and state, from a letter written by the third president of the United States (1801–1809) Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802, see https://www.usconstitution.net/jeffwall.html (accessed January 28, 2020). However Puritan and short time Baptist Roger Williams, first governor of Rhode Island, where, for the first time in modern history, religious liberty had become the law of the land (Tull, Shapers, 51) used the expression in a letter to John Cotton in 1644, talking about a hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world (Balmer, Evangelicalism in America, 3). Cf. Barry, Roger Williams.

72. Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church, 4, 7.

73. Originally published as Der protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik, Bd. XX, Heft 1, S. 1–54 und Bd. XXI, Heft 1, S. 1–110 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1904–5).

74. eine Gemeinschaft der persönlich Gläubigen und Wiedergeborenen rund nur dieser.

75. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 136. Yoder comments that Durnbaugh’s The Believers’ Church (1968) is the classical typological synthesis, but the typology was that of Max Weber, following up more objectively, formally the polemic notions of Gottfried Arnold (d. 1714) and Ludwig Keller (d. 1915) (Yoder, Introduction, BAC, 209). Already in 1929, Niebuhr confirms the usefulness of this typology: Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch have demonstrated how important are the differences in the sociological structure of religious groups in the determination of their doctrine. The primary distinction to be made here is that between the church and the sect, of which the former is a natural social group akin to the family or the nation while the latter is a voluntary association. The difference has been well described as lying primarily in the fact that members are born into the church while they must join the sect. (Niebuhr, The Social Sources, 17).

76. My translation from the original: Verhältnismässig kleine Gruppen, erstreben eine persönlich–innerliche Durchbildung und eine persönlich–unmittelbare Verknüpfung der Glieder ihres Kreises, verhalten sich gegen Welt, Staat, Gesellschaft indifferent, duldend oder feindlich (Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren, 362).

77. The way Troeltsch uses the word sect is different from the negative connotation it usually carries. It can be used as a label for churches who wish to be less institutional. According to Dodds, Troeltsch’s church-sect typology blurred the vision of . . . radical protestant expressions of Christianity for what they really were but this seems a bit overestimated (Dodds, Ecumenical Problems, 40). Underwood suggests applying the terms voluntary, gathered, and confessional to the Sect-type and the terms institutional, Catholic and confessional to the Church-type, adding that no suggestion is likely to command universal approval. He opposes the idea of the Sect-type as an inferior side–issue or an unfortunate exaggeration or abbreviation of ecclesiastical Christianity, quoting Troeltsch, saying that the sects, with their greater independence of the world, and their continual emphasis upon the original ideals of Christianity, often represent in a very direct and characteristic way the essential, fundamental ideas of Christianity. (Underwood, A History, 18, 19.)

78. Weber writes in footnote 173: "The concept of sect which I have adopted here has been used at about the same time and, I assume, independently from me, by Kattenbusch in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (Article Sekte). Troeltsch in his Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen accepts it and discusses it more in detail. Durnbaugh confirms that Troeltsch borrowed the ‘ideal types’ from Weber, but warns that they were meant to clarify, not to classify" (Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church, 24).

79. The English translation has Baptists while the German original uses Täufer,which, I contend, should be translated as Anabaptists.

80. Weber’s footnote 173 reads in full as follows: "Naturally the Baptists have always repudiated the designation of a sect. They form the Church in the sense of the Epistle to the Ephesians v. 27. But in our terminology they form a sect not only because they lack all relation to the State. The relation between Church and State of early Christianity was even for the Quakers (Barclay) their ideal; for to them, as to many Pietists, only a Church under the Cross was beyond suspicion of its purity. But the Calvinists as well, faute de mieux, similarly even the Catholic Church in the same circumstances, were forced to favour the separation of Church and State under an unbelieving State or under the Cross. Neither were they a sect, because induction to membership in the Church took place de facto through a contract between the congregation and the candidates. For that was formally the case in the Dutch Reformed communities (as a result of the original political situation) in accordance with the old Church constitution (see v. Hoffmann, Kirchenverfassungsrecht der niederl. Reformierten, Leipzig, 1902). On the contrary, it was because such a religious community could only be voluntarily organized as a sect, not compulsorily as a Church, if it did not wish to include the unregenerate and thus depart from the Early Christian ideal. For the Baptist communities it was an essential of the very idea of their Church, while for the Calvinists it was an historical accident. To be sure, that the latter were also urged by very definite religious motives in the direction of the Believers’ Church has already been indicated. Volf states that traditionally, Believers’ church ecclesiology has championed both voluntarism and egalitarianism" (After Our Likeness, 2).

81. Fiddes, Church and Sect, 57. See also Fiddes, Walking Together, 21–47; Fiddes, A Fourth Strand, 153–59; Fiddes, Covenant, 63–92.

82. Williams speaks about the Magisterial Reformation or classical Protestantism of the Lutheran and Zwinglian movement over against the Radical Reformation of Anabaptists, Spiritualists and Rationalists, discerned through the idea of reformation on the one side and "the more radical slogan of restitution" on the other (Williams, The Radical Reformation, xxix–xxxi). See also his Introduction to Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, 19–38. Cf. Klaassen, Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant.

83. Referring to Littell’s Free Church as well as Williams’s The Radical Reformation, in a reflection on his visit as a guest to the first BCC in Louisville in 1967 in Ecumenical Problems, 40. Dodds served as director of planning and of Ecumenical Affairs for the National Council of Churches in the USA in the 1960’s. He was a minister of the United Church of Christ.

84. Dodds, Ecumenical Problems, 40, 41.

85. Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church, 33.

86. Yoder, Believers’ Church Conferences and Hubmaier, 12. Littell also uses this term, saying, "With the new sources available, the continuity of the Free Church line can be established and its uniqueness demonstrated. Williams put it this way in his preface to The Radical Reformation: ‘There is no aspect of sixteenth century research that is so alive with newly discovered and edited source material and monographical revisions as the Radical Reformation.’ Once the thesis is established that the Free Church type is sui generis, a clear line can be traced from the biblical Anabaptists of the sixteenth century through the radical Puritans to the American scene. (Littell, The Historical Free Church Defined," 83) This essay was initially presented at a Free Church conference at Earlham College on June 9, 1964. It was subsequently elaborated for use at the Second Theological Study Conference at Bethany Theological Seminary on July 23, 1964 and in this form published in BLT.

87. Stream is used for example by Freeman in the Introduction to Baptist Roots, 2–3. He uses stream