So how did you get here?
I am not asking about the birds and bees but about Queen’s Park Baptist Church.
My journey started off in a parking bay near Glasgow High Street. I was a first-year bible college student with a desperate need for cheap accommodation. As I walked past a car, the door opened and out popped a friend of mine who asked if I wanted to move into his rent-free flat in the Gorbals!
Talk of actual “sliding doors” moments.
And, he added, you could easily walk to Queen’s Park Baptist Church from there.
And so it happened. I moved in and began to walk to Queen’s Park Baptist Church on a Sunday. Of course, there was more to it than that: I did know Edwin Gunn, I did know the church’s reputation and my background was Baptist.
How did you get here?
All sorts of God-driven and human-influenced reasons lead us to a specific local church. When we join an existing Christian community, we find ourselves caught up in a story of God at work which has been going on for years. We stumble into a heritage that can be to us a guide and inspiration.
So, as we come to the end of our “Who do you think you are” series I want to call our attention to the blessings received from our Baptist heritage and invite us all to live up to the legacy we find ourselves in.
Our roots are radical. Baptist Christians of all sorts emerge out of the “radical reformation.” This was the wild end of the new-found freedom that believers in Jesus discovered in the 16th century as they cast off the restrictions of the Roman Catholic Church and its ties to political power. A relationship with Jesus without the need of a middleman was a potent experience and it resulted in many even dumping the authoritarianism and hierarchy of the new protestant churches to form their own believers’ churches. Many of these gutsy grassroots groups came to be known as “anabaptist” (re-baptisers) because they did not accept the legitimacy of infant baptism.
This was costly. We are talking lose-your-life by drowning at the hands of other Christians costly. Yet these churches were overflowing with the Spirit of revival and missionary zeal. For example, the Mennonites with their passion for global mission and discipleship, or the Moravians with their Holy Spirit empowered revival and their 100 yearlong non-stop prayer meeting.
This my friends, is the history and heritage we claim as our own.
Meanwhile back in Scotland the switch to Protestantism kept other expressions of Christian faith small and sporadic.
That is, until the late 1700s when, after the revivals under George Whitfield, local evangelists began to spearhead mission expeditions throughout the country. Foremost amongst them were brothers Robert and James Haldane who criss-crossed Scotland preaching daily and drawing crowds of up to 5,000 people. The existing church opposed their efforts outlawing what they described as “vagrant preaching” outside of church buildings by untrained men. Undeterred, these evangelists pressed on, speaking powerfully and plainly, their groundbreaking approach and their rejection of elitism (they wore ordinary clothing!) won many to Christ. They sold their vast estate and ploughed their money into massive auditoriums in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee. They became convinced that believer’s baptism was the norm and, having been baptised, their mission projects became some of the first Baptist Churches.
This is a brief blog, not a detailed history, but I hope it makes the point. Our DNA comes from a Spirit empowered missionary movement for Scotland. People who, for the sake of the gospel, broke convention, pioneered new things and reached out into new places, despite opposition and resistance.
That, it seems to me, is a great legacy to live into – maybe it’s no accident you are here after all!
Iain