The first Baptist church was founded by English exiles in Amsterdam
Baptists trace themselves to a band of English Dissenters who fled to Amsterdam in 1608 and, a year later, began baptising only adults who professed faith. Their leader soon doubted his own self-baptism and tried to join the Mennonites. His colleague went home, founded a church in east London and demanded freedom of conscience.
The movement grew out of Puritan frustration with the Church of England. Most Puritans stayed inside the established church, but some broke away as Separatists or Nonconformists. One such congregation formed at Gainsborough under the cleric John Smyth, and in 1608 it and the Scrooby congregation went into exile in the Dutch Republic. Reading the New Testament afresh, they concluded that infants should not be baptised, and in 1609, the year regarded as the tradition's foundation, they baptised professing believers.
Smyth's story took a twist. He came to think his self-baptism invalid, was expelled from the church in 1610 and applied to join the Waterland Mennonites, dying before the union was complete. Thomas Helwys took over, published a declaration of faith in 1611 and in 1612 brought the church back to England, settling it in Spitalfields. There he argued that church and state should be kept apart in matters of law so individuals could follow their consciences. His church became the first General Baptist congregation, holding that Christ's atonement covered everyone; the Particular Baptists, who emerged in the 1630s, limited it to the elect.
Where Baptists came from is still argued. Scholarly consensus sees them as English Dissenters with little or no Anabaptist influence, and early Baptists angrily rejected the label Anabaptist; in 1624 London's five Baptist churches condemned Anabaptists as heretics. A minority links them to the continental Anabaptists who began in 1525. Successionists claim an unbroken line back to Jesus, a view popularised by the 1931 booklet The Trail of Blood and held by Charles Spurgeon. William Whitsitt was pressured to quit as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1898 for denying it.
Today's Baptists vary widely but generally share believer's baptism by total immersion, the Bible as sole infallible authority, justification by faith alone and self-governing congregations. They usually observe two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper, and missionaries have planted churches on every continent. The largest communion is the Baptist World Alliance.
Source: Baptists
