Baptist Church in Watertown, WI: What We Believe and Who We Are
Our Church is Christian, Evangelical, Baptist, and First Baptist of Watertown, WI.
We love Jesus Christ the Son of God, and we believe his word. Our church is Christian: we recite the early church creeds at the Lord’s Supper: we are evangelical in that we embrace the gospel recovered by the Reformation, and we cooperate with Christians who disagree with us about secondary issues but agree about the gospel: we are Baptist—to be a member of our church you must be baptized on profession of faith by immersion and agree with our doctrinal statement and church covenant. We have been in Watertown since 1854, and we pray that Jesus allows us to continue worshiping and proclaiming the gospel until his return.
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Historically, all Christians have believed the Bible is true and that the Bible teaches that there is one God who is three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, sinned against God, introducing sin and death into the world with the consequence of eternal punishment. God put forward a plan for saving humanity through faith in the coming Son of God. About 2,000 years ago, the Son of God became a man without giving up his divinity and died on the cross to save his people from their sins. He rose again on the third day and will soon return. Broadly speaking, this is what all professed Christians have believed throughout history.
Athanasius (296-373), Augustine (350-430), Anselm (1034-1109), and Aquinas (1225-1274) all believed the above. To be a Christian is to believe the Bible is true, that God is Trinity, that Jesus is both fully God and fully man, and that the Son of God died on the cross to save the world from the consequences of sin.
Yet, the Bible also teaches us that some people who claim to believe the above have a dead or useless faith. They are like the demons who believe the truth about God but shudder (James 2:19). Such people twist Scripture to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16). This means that there are some Christians, Evangelicals, and Baptist who do not have a living faith through the regeneration of the Spirit and trust in the Bible. In Church history one great division occurred in 1517 dividing Western Christians between those in fellowship with the Bishop of Rome and the Evangelicals or Protestants. The Protestants “protested” that the Roman Church had diluted and even changed the evangel or gospel.
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The word evangelical comes from the Greek word euangelion which is translated into English as good news or gospel. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a Roman Catholic priest who realized that neither the Bible nor theologians like Augustine and Athanasius offered the same gospel as the Roman Church of his day. Thus, Luther attempted to recover the gospel by the preaching of God’s Word. In particular, he focused on reforming the church through the Five Solas—Scripture, Faith, Grace, Christ, and God’s Glory. The gospel is that Scripture tells us we are saved by faith through grace given to us by Christ’s work to God’s glory alone.
The Reformation in the 16th Century was a return to the Bible and a response to theological changes within the Roman Church away from the Bible. Different Reformers—Luther, Calvin (1509-1564), Cranmer (1489-1556), Owen (1616-1686) —came to different understandings not of the gospel, but of what was the church. The gospel preached by the Reformers was identical, but their understanding of what the local church was and who should participate in the Lord’s Supper and baptism was different. Baptist Reformers like John Bunyan (1628-1688) bring us to the first Baptist churches.
Before, we can speak about the Baptists, we must notice that in the last 80 years the word evangelical has taken on a secondary meaning. The Reformers all understood that our sinful desires have two impulses—to add to God’s Word and take away from it. They understood the Roman Church as adding to God’s word through the hierarchy and traditions. But they also understood that professed Christians who disagreed with Rome could themselves add to God’s word or take away, and so they had the motto—Semper Reformata, always reforming.
In the early 1800’s a group of professed Christians started taking away from the Bible by claiming the Scriptures were only partially true. This led to the modernist crisis. Some Christians were claiming that Jesus was not born of a virgin or Jesus simply provides us a good example. The Christians who continued to believe in the truthfulness of the Bible became divided over how to separate from professed Christians who rejected the inspiration of Scripture. The Fundamentalists separated by isolating themselves institutionally from those with whom they disagreed on multiple issues. Evangelicals worked to limit institutional separation to the gospel while continuing to proclaim the truth in the public square and cooperating with Christians they disagreed with on lesser issues.
First Baptist is evangelical in both the old and newer meaning of the term. We agree with the Reformers about the gospel, and we separate from professed Christians who reject the gospel.
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The first distinctively Baptist churches were English speakers living in Holland in about 1611. These Englishmen were congregationalist. Congregationalists believe that the highest earthly spiritual authority is a local congregation united by a doctrinal statement and a church covenant.
These Englishmen also believed in infant baptism and in the possibility of a national church. In Holland, they began interacting with Anabaptists. Anabaptists believe in baptism on profession of faith, separation of church and state, refusal to take oaths, and pacifism.
The English Congregationalists became Baptists when they agreed with the Anabaptist on the timing of baptism and separation of church and state, but rejected pacifism and allowed the taking of oaths. When they returned to England, they began to organize Baptist churches on the British Isles and soon in the English colonies. English Baptist missionaries also started the first Baptist churches in Germany in the early 1800s.
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Our church was founded as a German speaking station church of Lebanon Baptist in 1854. We became an independent Baptist Church in 1882 as the First German Baptist Church of Watertown, WI. We adopted The New Hampshire Confession of Faith on our founding. Our last German service was held in the 1930s when we became simply First Baptist Church of Watertown, WI.
We cooperate with the old German Baptist convention now North American Baptist Conference and the Southern Baptist Convention. We use a lightly modified version of The New Hampshire Confession of Faithand a church covenant. Our confession of faith was written in 1833 and teaches eternal security and the imminent return of Christ