Being a "good" Baptist

What does it mean to be a Baptist? That’s the name on the sign, but what does it really mean? The most obvious of the Baptist distinctives is that we believe in adult baptism for believers who have made a public profession of their faith. In the Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, and Orthodox Churches (among others), baptism is performed for infants as a sign that the parents and the local church intend to raise the child in the faith. As Baptists, we don’t believe that this is the best practice according to our understanding of the Scriptures, but it is the practice just the same, for the majority of the world’s Christians. What is our response? In the relatively recent past, being a “good” Baptist also meant feeling the need to condemn those who don’t practice adult baptism and even to question the validity of the salvation of those who attend such churches. That was the old definition of being a good Baptist; evidently, the church isn’t what it used to be, and that’s a good thing. Go ahead and be proud of being a Baptist, but keep in mind that it’s no longer an us vs. them Church; we’re in this together because the word Church on the sign if far more important than the word Baptist which precedes it.