History of the Reformed Baptist Movement

​“A reformed Baptist church is a church that is part of a restorative movement returning to the biblical doctrine and practices of the New Testament and the first Baptists in Britain and America.   It is not a movement to create anything new, but instead it's a return to our Baptist roots grounded in the Scripture and reflected in the Protestant Reformation.

 

Reformed Baptists are nothing new.  What we call "Reformed Baptists" today were known as "Particular Baptists" in Great Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were called "Regular Baptists" in America before 1850.  In 1845, all 243 messengers who formed the Southern Baptist Convention would today be considered to be from reformed Baptist churches because they shared the same polity, confessions, and doctrine as today's reformed Baptists” [1]

 

But let's go further back to the Roman Catholic Church: 

 

“The Catholic Church fell into superstition, spiritual corruption, and moral decay during the Middle Ages.  When the Word of God was finally translated out of Latin into the common languages of the people of Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the people began to see for themselves how far the Church had fallen from Scriptural doctrine and practice.  Movements began to try to reform the Catholic Church to bring it in line with Scripture. This movement to reform the Catholic Church is known as the Protestant Reformation.
 

When these reform movements failed, the Protestant Reformation birthed new churches such as the Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches in the 1500 and 1600s.  These groups shared a common God-centered doctrine that stressed the sovereignty of God, the power of grace, and the inability of man to save himself. These shared doctrines were summed up in the Five Solas, or Five Alones; Scripture Alone, Christ Alone, Grace Alone, Faith Alone, and the Glory of God Alone.  These Baptist churches which returned to biblical doctrine and practice of the New Testament were the first to be considered "reformed" Baptists.

 

Midway through the nineteenth century, a shift began to take place among Protestant churches.  Their biblical, reformed, God-centered doctrine was replaced with a man-centered focus.  In many denominations, this resulted in becoming unmoored from Scripture and descending into theological liberalism.  In other groups such as Southern Baptists, the focus moved from the glory of God to attracting man, from biblical practice to pragmatism, from discipleship to an emphasis upon decision-making and numbers, and the Gospel was cheapened so that more people could easily "accept" Christ and church rolls could be padded.  The result has been the formation of churches with full rolls and empty pews, many decisions but few disciples, and the substitution of stunts and personalities for the Word of God.

 

In the mid-twentieth century, seeing the condition of the Church and the damage the modern Gospel was doing to lost souls, some Baptist groups and even churches in the other denominations began to reemphasize the biblical doctrines and practices reflected in the reformation-era Church.  They put the adjective "reformed" to their names as a reaction against the man-centered doctrine of the day and a signal that they were returning to the God-centered doctrine and the Five Solas of the early Baptists.” [1]

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Citations:
Used with permission from Christ Reformed Baptist Fellowship