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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Baptists
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One of the world's major groups of Protestant Christians, which has evolved from congregations established in London in the early 17C. They differed from other radical Protestant sects in England at the time in their insistence that baptism must be a conscious choice made by believing adults rather than something imposed upon infants. In this they were following the much persecuted *Anabaptist groups on the Continent, for whom adult baptism had been a central article of faith from the earliest years of the Reformation, in the 1520s.
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The movement developed among separatists who escaped from Lincolnshire to the Netherlands in 1608. Some of them later became *Pilgrim Fathers. Others settled in Amsterdam, where under the leadership of John Smyth (d. 1612) they began practising adult baptism. At about the time of Smyth's death, members of his congregation returned from Amsterdam to establish the first Baptist church in London. Rival groups among them were soon preaching bitterly opposed versions of the faith, the main disagreement being between Calvinists and Arminians as to whether only the elect or all believers can be saved. But in one form or another Baptist churches spread.
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Roger *Williams established the first in the USA in 1639; the first in Canada dated from 1763; the English Baptist Missionary society, founded in 1792, evangelized Australia (1831) and New Zealand (1854). Each Baptist congregation retains a high degree of autonomy, but the majority in Britain combined in 1891 to form the Baptist Union. There are believed to be more than 38 million Baptists worldwide, with approaching a quarter of a million in the United Kingdom (for the numbers attending services in England see *Christians).
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