of overseas missions, the laity eclipsed the clergy in significance. The facts suggest otherwise – that not until lay professionalism and the demand for female personnel altered the character of the work towards the end of the nineteenth century did clerical status cease to be the missionary norm and domination of the movement by the ordained ministry begin to falter.

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-13

Chapter

of overseas missions, the laity eclipsed the clergy in significance. The facts suggest otherwise – that not until lay professionalism and the demand for female personnel altered the character of the work towards the end of the nineteenth century did clerical status cease to be the missionary norm and domination of the movement by the ordained ministry begin to falter.

Chapter

ABSTRACT

Among the Southern Baptists of America a different kind of obstacle to the general priesthood emerged in the form of extreme individualism. Whereas seventeenth-century separatist writers, such as John Smyth, had emphasized a corporate, Pauline understanding of the church as an integrated body of believers and had maintained a conventional regard for ministerial leadership with respect to preaching and the ordinances, influential Baptist thinking at the turn of the twentieth century adopted a post-Enlightenment individualism, which insisted upon the ability of the human soul to deal directly with God. The outcome of this approach was the creation of a body composed of atomistic believers possessing an attenuated Christology, an impoverished understanding of church and ministry and an undue regard for the autonomy of the human will.34