Churches – Baptist churches
Baptist churches are independent and each congregation makes its own decisions about leadership, governance and the location of their records.
The most widely known characteristic of Baptists is that they believe that baptism should only be administered to individuals who are able to profess personal faith and consequently reject the concept of infant baptism. Some of Cromwell’s army brought Baptist beliefs to Scotland in the 1650s and the reaction of Presbyterians to this led to a law requiring that infants should be baptised within 30 days of birth.[1] In 1750, Sir William Sinclair of Dunbeath established a Baptist church in Keiss, Caithness, and wrote a hymnbook for its use, but this congregation appears to have had no contact with developments further south until the 1790s, although later it contributed a number of notable ministers and missionaries to the wider Baptist movement.[2] In the 1760s Rev. Robert Camichael, a minister of the General Associate Synod (the antiburgher Presbyterians) and Archibald McLean, a layman, calling themselves Scotch Baptists, led a Baptist movement based on the teaching and influence of the Glasites. Like the Glasites, the Scotch Baptists relied on the leadership of several lay elders and appointed deacons to care for the poor. They also founded churches in England and Wales.[3] In contrast, so-called ‘English’ Baptist churches originated in English Particular (Calvinistic) Baptist ranks. In Scotland, these churches had a leadership team of deacons accompanied by a single pastor, usually with more formal training. At around the same time as these ‘English’ Baptist churches emerged, a significant missionary movement developed, led in the 1790s by Robert and James Haldane, two Presbyterians who became Independent, itinerant, lay evangelists. They set up meetings, called tabernacles, as far afield as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Wick and Campbeltown, founded the Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home in 1798, left the Church of Scotland in 1799, and sought believers’ baptism in 1808.[4] Haldanite Baptists held more pragmatic views on church governance, influenced most of all by Robert and James Alexander Haldane the leaders of their network. A fourth group emerged in the 1840s, who by the end of that decade were distinguished by being influenced by the theological views of James Morison, a Presbyterian seceder, who founded the Evangelical Union.
Baptist congregations frequently co-operated with each other ‘for the purpose of planting and sustaining congregations and other methods of mutual usefulness’.[5] There were various attempts to formalise these links, which confusingly used the same names: in 1827 a Baptist Union of Scotland, from 1835 to 1842 a Scottish Baptist Association, from 1843 to 1856 another Baptist Union of Scotland, and from 1856 to 1869 another Scottish Baptist Association.[6] The present Baptist Union of Scotland was formed in 1869.
The Baptist Home Missionary Society for Scotland was formed in 1827, merging three earlier missionary organisations. Scottish Baptists also supported and served within the Baptist Missionary Society, formed in England in 1792. One Scot, the Rev John Reid, from Keiss, Caithness, became the society’s India Secretary, 1922-29.[7]
Baptist churches are autonomous, independent bodies which are governed by the church meeting of all members, who choose their leaders. They co-operate with other churches voluntarily and decisions made by the Baptist Union of Scotland are not binding on any member church.
Baptist records are held by the National Library of Scotland, the Baptist Union of Scotland, Scottish local authority archives and individual congregations. The National Register of Archives Scotland holds lists of records of some individual congregations.
Compiler: Elspeth Reid (2024)
Related Knowledge Base entries
Independent churches
Bibliography
Bebbington, D. W., (ed), The Baptists in Scotland. A history. (Baptist Union of Scotland, 1988)
Little, Fergus, ‘Historical Registers of Scottish Baptists’ Baptist Quarterly 24.5 (1972) pp. 229-32
Lumsden, Christine, A rich inheritance. Sir William Sinclair and Keiss Baptist Church (Baptist Historical Society, 2013)
Meek, D.E., ‘Evangelical Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth Century Highlands’, Scottish Studies, 28 (1987) pp. 1-34
Meek, D.E., ‘The Independent and Baptist Churches of Highland Perthshire and Strathspey’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 61 (1991), pp. 269-343
Murray, Derek Boyd, ‘The social and religious origins of Scottish non-presbyterian protestant dissent from 1730-1800’ (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of St Andrews, 1976)
Murray, D. B., ‘The Scotch Baptist tradition in Great Britain’ Baptist Quarterly 33.4 (1989), pp. 186-98
Murray, D.B., ‘Baptists in Scotland Before 1869’, Baptist Quarterly 23.6 (1970), pp. 250-65
Talbot, Brian, Building a Common Foundation: The Baptist Union of Scotland, 1869-2019 (Pickwick Publications, 2021)
Talbot, Brian R., (ed), A Distinctive People: A Thematic Study of Aspects of the Witness of Baptists in Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Paternoster Press, 2014)
Talbot, Brian, R., Search for a Common Identity: The Origins of the Baptist Union of Scotland 1800-1870 (Paternoster Press, 2003)
References
[1] D. W. Bebbington, (ed), The Baptists in Scotland. A history. (Baptist Union of Scotland, 1988), p.12; Act against such who do not baptise their children The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. by K.M. Brown and others (University of St Andrews, 2007-2021), 1672/6/32, <http://www.rps.ac.uk/trans/1672/6/32> [accessed 25 Mar 2024].
[2] Bebbington, The Baptists in Scotland pp.15-16, pp.312-315.
[3] Bebbington, The Baptists in Scotland pp.23-26.
[4] Bebbington The Baptists in Scotland pp.30-32.
[5] Scottish Baptist Year Book, 1903, p. ii.
[6] Brian R Talbot ‘The Origins of the Baptist Union of Scotland (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Stirling, 1999), pp. 249-53, pp. 277-85. <http://hdl.handle.net/1893/1944> [accessed 12 April 2024]
[7] Bebbington, The Baptists in Scotland, pp.312-15. Baptist Missionary Society Annual Report 1930 (London) pp.308-09.