Baptist polity

Baptist polity

I felt disturbing tremors again in the foundations of Baptist polity when I read the copy of a news item from the Baptist Press in the March 4 issue of The Alabama Baptist.

It reported a forthright statement made by a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) at an evangelism conference in Missouri Feb. 19.

He said that the former SBC presidents have named the person they have decided should be first vice president of the convention.

The statement shook me even more as I remembered it while reading David Dockery’s excellent article, “Overseers and Bishops” in the current issue of the Biblical Illustrator.

The author traces, with careful documentation, the development of ideas about the New Testament role of bishop through the three centuries that followed.

Assumptions began to surface that find no place in New Testament teaching.

These included the idea that submission to the bishop reflected submission to God, and that the bishops were successors to the apostles. However, there is no New Testament evidence that the apostles set up any system of personal succession.

Reading today’s unfolding Baptist story in the light of church history, I continue to be deeply concerned about the direction we are moving.

Charles Graham
Fairhope, Ala.