This article is an adapted excerpt from A. Blake White, What is a Baptist? (Greenville, SC: Courier Publishing, 2026), 9-16.
Regenerate church membership is the Baptist distinctive. It is what makes Baptists Baptist. It is our North star, our foundational tenant. It simply means that only regenerate people, i.e. born-again believers, can join the local church.
Church Membership & the New Covenant
There are many reasons that Baptists hold to a regenerate church membership, but pride of place goes to the newness of the new covenant. In their book, The Baptist Vision, Matthew Emerson and Luke Stamps write, “The Baptist understanding of the relation between the covenants is truly our defining theological commitment. Our covenantal hermeneutic influences everything from liberty of conscience to believer’s baptism and covenantal Communion to the autonomy of the local church and religious liberty. It truly is the foundation of Baptist theology and practice.”1
The covenants form the backbone of the biblical Story, and Scripture is fundamentally structured around two covenants: the old and the new. Our English Bibles consist of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Testamentum is a Latin translation of the Hebrew word for covenant. We would probably have a slightly better hermeneutic if we still used that terminology!
God established the old covenant with Israel. It built on the covenant with Abraham, which was built on the covenant with Noah, which is rooted in creation and Adam’s headship. The covenant with David is built within the old covenant but points forward to the new covenant, which is the culmination of all of these covenants.2
Gifts of the New Covenant
There are two main gifts of the new covenant: full forgiveness and inward transformation. New covenant Christians receive pardon for the past and power for the present. All Protestants agree on the former. Full atonement, can it be! My sins, not in part, but the whole! Gloriously, all Protestants agree about full forgiveness, but there is some disagreement on the work of the Spirit in the covenant community.
Baptists emphasize the newness that the new covenant brings by virtue of the fresh work of the Son and the Spirit.3 The new covenant is not more of the same. It is not a renewed administration of a previous covenant, but is actually new. The key passage here is Jeremiah 31:31-34:
Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
Jeremiah explicitly says that this new covenant will not be like the old covenant. How will it be different? In short, it will be unbreakable. Why? Because God will change the people from the inside out. The demand of God will no longer merely be external, but in the new covenant it will be external and internalized. Now, the people of God will be able to obey.
The Holy Spirit & the New Covenant
The new covenant is new in part because there is a new, fuller, fresh work of the Spirit. Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Joel describe the same concept as Jeremiah but attribute this internal work to the work the Spirit will do when He is poured out from on high (Isa 32:15, 44:3, 59:21, Ezek 36:25-27, Joel 2:28-29). This is why Paul can call the Spirit “the promised Holy Spirit” (Eph 1:13, my emphasis). Of course, the Spirit has always existed from all eternity, but He has not operated the same for all eternity. He does a fresh new work in the new covenant era. The new covenant is the age of the Spirit. He operates on new covenant people in a qualitatively different way than He did on old covenant people.4
The permanent indwelling of the Spirit within the believer is a new covenant reality. The Spirit was active in a host of ways, and did operate on the old covenant remnant, but indwelling was not an old covenant reality. His old covenant activity was usually temporary, task-specific, and limited to appointed key leaders. This is why David, after his terrible fall, can plead, “Take not your Holy Spirit from me” (Ps 51:11). A new covenant saint shouldn’t pray this way. David had seen the Spirit leave Saul.
Jesus clearly teaches this new new covenant work of the Spirit in the Gospel of John. After mentioning the Old Testament’s promise of the coming spirit, John writes this: “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (7:39). The believers were to receive the Spirit – later. Here is how the NIV translates it: “By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.” Because as yet the Spirit had not been given. Again, the Spirit was alive and well and operative, but the pouring out of the Spirit had not happened yet. That would come at Pentecost, the dawning of the new covenant after the resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In John 14:17, Jesus says of the Spirit, “he dwells with you and will be in you.” At that time, the Spirit was with the disciples, much like He was with the old covenant remnant, but in the future He would go from being with them to being in them. This reality of indwelling was future tense for the disciples. In John 15:26, the Son says of the Spirit: “When the Helper comes, who I will send to you from the Father.” When. Meaning: he has not yet come. Jesus will send Him – future tense verb. In John 16:7, Jesus says, “If I go, I will send him to you.” Once again, future tense. The permanent indwelling of the Spirit is a new covenant reality. The new covenant community consists of those who have been indwelt by the promised Spirit. They are regenerate people who are being changed from the inside out.
How else is the new covenant different? Crucially, in the new covenant, all will know the Lord. No longer will one covenant member teach another covenant member saying “know the Lord.” This fresh work of the Spirit brings drastic changes to the nature of the covenant community.5 In the old covenant, the community consisted of some believers and some unbelievers. Old covenant Israel was a “mixed” community. The new covenant community – the church – is not a mixed community. It consists only of believers; only of those forgiven of their sins; only of those indwelt by the Spirit of God. In other words, a regenerate church. In the old covenant, there is a remnant within the covenant community. In the new covenant community, the remnant is the whole.
Article VI of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 states the point well:
A New Testament church of the Lord Jesus Christ is an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel; observing the two ordinances of Christ, governed by His laws, exercising the gifts, rights, and privileges invested in them by His Word, and seeking to extend the gospel to the ends of the earth. Each congregation operates under the Lordship of Christ through democratic processes. In such a congregation each member is responsible and accountable to Christ as Lord. Its two scriptural offices are that of pastor/elder/overseer and deacon. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.
- Matthew Y. Emerson and R. Lucas Stamps, The Baptist Vision (Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic, 2025), 49. ↩︎
- To dive deeper into the covenantal structure of Scripture, see Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, God’s Kingdom Through God’s Covenants (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015). ↩︎
- For some brief reflections on this biblical theme, see my The Newness of the New Covenant (Frederick, MD: New Covenant Media, 2008). Emerson and Stamps write, “This understanding of the change from the old covenant to the new covenant dictates every theological and practical distinctive of the Baptist tradition.” The Baptist Vision, 57. ↩︎
- See James M. Hamilton, God’s Indwelling Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2006). ↩︎
- D.A. Carson, Showing the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1897), 152; Stephen J. Wellum, “Beyond Mere Ecclesiology: The Church as God’s New Covenant Community,” in Kendell H. Easley and Christopher W. Morgan, The Community of Jesus (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), 195-209. ↩︎
