Regular Baptist Church: Baptism, Authority, and Matthew 28
Short answer: A Regular Baptist church is a local, self-governing congregation that baptizes only those who have personally professed faith in Christ, and it does so because it reads Matthew 28:18-20 as the risen Christ commissioning his church under his own authority. In that passage Jesus says, as Matthew 28:18-20 says, "All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth." From that authority flow the commands to make disciples, baptize them, and teach them. Regular Baptists historically have emphasized that baptism follows faith rather than producing it, that the church is a gathered body of believers rather than a mixed body created by infant rites, and that local congregations govern their own affairs under Christ. This article studies the passage, the reasoning drawn from it, and how it shapes ordinary church life.
Why Matthew 28:18-20 Is the Anchor Text
The Great Commission is the only place in Matthew where the risen Jesus gathers his disciples and gives a standing command that reaches to the end of the age. Matthew places it on a mountain in Galilee, where Jesus had told the women and the disciples to go. The eleven worship him, and Matthew notes that some doubted. Into that mix of worship and doubt Jesus speaks with absolute calm about authority. He does not say he hopes to receive authority or that authority is delegated to committees. He says it has been given to him, in heaven and on earth, without remainder. Everything that follows in the passage rests on that claim.
That opening line matters because it settles who owns the church. Congregations may organise, ordain, budget, and discipline, but they do not own themselves. They belong to the one who holds all authority. This is why Baptists have historically spoken of the local church as accountable to Christ first and to one another second. Any structure, however old or useful, stands under his authority. Matthew 28:18-20 gives no authority to tradition as a co-owner with Christ. It gives none to the state. It gives none to a personality. It gives it to the risen Lord, and from his mouth come the instructions that shape the church's practice.
Notice also that the authority is universal in scope: heaven and earth. That means the commission is not a temporary arrangement for one nation or one era. Because Jesus reigns everywhere, his disciples are sent everywhere, and because he reigns at all times, the command continues until he returns. Matthew closes his Gospel with the promise that he is with them always, to the end of the age. Regular Baptist churches read that ending as the guarantee that a small, unimpressive congregation in an ordinary town is still engaged in the same mission the eleven received. The congregation's size does not measure the mission's importance. Christ's authority does.
The command itself is one main verb, make disciples, with three participles hanging from it: going, baptizing, teaching. English translations often render the first as a command, but the structure puts the weight on disciple-making. Baptism and teaching are not optional add-ons; they are the two visible ways disciples are made and formed. A church that evangelises but never baptises, or baptises but never teaches, has split the commission in half. Matthew 28:18-20 holds all of it together, and that wholeness is the reason it functions as a constitution for congregational life rather than a slogan for mission conferences.
Baptism That Follows Faith: The Baptist Conviction
If baptism is one of the two ways disciples are made, the question of who is baptised becomes unavoidable. The Baptist answer is that baptism is for those who have themselves received the word and believed. The Jerusalem crowd on Pentecost is the clearest case. Acts 2:41 says, "Then those who gladly received his word were baptized." The order is plain: the word was received, and then baptism followed. Luke does not describe a ritual administered to people who could not hear or respond. He describes baptism given to those whose own glad reception of the message marked them out. The three thousand added that day were added as believers, not as infants carried in by believing parents.
The Ethiopian official in Acts 8 makes the same point from the other direction. He is reading Isaiah, Philip explains the passage, and the man believes. Then, as they travel, he sees water and asks a question recorded in Acts 8:36, "Behold, here is water. What is keeping me from being baptized?" The only thing that could have kept him was a lack of faith, and that obstacle had just been removed. Nothing in the scene suggests he needed to complete a class, prove his family line, or wait for a bishop. His confession and the water were enough. Baptists point to this as the ordinary pattern: belief, then baptism, promptly and publicly.
It is important to be honest here. Baptists differ among themselves about how much of a confession a candidate must articulate, how long a waiting period is wise, and who may administer the ordinance. Some churches baptise within days of a credible profession; others take weeks to make sure the profession is not a passing emotion. Both instincts have precedent and both can go wrong. A church can become so lax that baptism means nothing, or so strict that it discourages genuine converts. The controlling principle is not speed or caution for its own sake but the reality of faith. Baptism testifies to something that has already happened; it does not manufacture it.
This is the historic dividing line between Baptists and paedobaptist traditions, and faithful Christians genuinely disagree about it. Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, and Lutherans have defended infant baptism on covenant grounds, and many of them preach the same gospel Baptists preach. A Regular Baptist church does not treat that disagreement as a test of salvation. It treats it as a matter of obedience. If baptism is for believers, then baptising an infant is not merely a different custom; it is a different ordinance. The Baptist conviction is not that Baptist churches are the only true churches, but that believers' baptism is what the New Testament actually describes and therefore what Christ's commission requires his churches to practise.
What Baptism Actually Signifies, and What It Does Not
The New Testament gives baptism meaning, not magic. Romans 6:3-4 asks, "Or don't you know that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?" Paul's point is union with Christ, pictured in the water. Going under the water represents death to the old life; coming up represents resurrection life. The act dramatises what God has done in the believer. It does not perform it. Paul can ask the Romans whether they know this because the meaning was taught to them, not because the water itself carried a hidden power. Baptism is a sign of a reality, and the reality is the Spirit's work of joining a sinner to Christ.
Colossians 2:11-12 makes the same connection using different imagery. Paul speaks of a circumcision made without hands, the putting off of the body of the flesh, and then says the believer was buried with Christ in baptism and raised with him through faith. Two things stand out. First, the circumcision is not made with hands, which means the decisive work is God's, not ours. Second, the passage explicitly ties the raising to faith. Baptism without faith pictures nothing true. That is why Baptists insist that the ordinance belongs to believers: the thing signified and the sign must belong together, or the sign is a hollow shell.
First Peter 3:21 is often quoted in this discussion, and it repays slow reading. Peter writes, as 1 Peter 3:21 says, "This is a symbol of baptism, which now saves you—not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Peter calls baptism a symbol, explicitly denies that it saves by washing away physical filth, and locates salvation in the appeal of a good conscience toward God, grounded in Christ's resurrection. Whatever else this verse does, it does not make water a saving agent. It makes baptism the outward expression of an inward appeal, and it anchors the whole thing in the resurrection rather than in the ceremony.
Put the three passages together and a clear picture emerges. Baptism pictures union with Christ in his death and resurrection. It marks a break with the old life. It is the answer of a good conscience toward God, resting on Christ's resurrection. It is administered to those who have believed, because faith is the hand that receives what the water portrays. None of this makes baptism small. It makes it weighty, because it is the public line in a person's life where allegiance to Christ is confessed before witnesses. That weight is why the ordinance deserves careful administration and why it should never be reduced to a formality performed on people who cannot yet answer for themselves.
Why Congregational Government Follows From This
If Christ holds all authority and gives it to no intermediary institution, then the local congregation has a real responsibility it cannot hand off. Regular Baptist churches have historically governed themselves: calling their own pastors, holding their own property, adopting their own statements of faith, and exercising discipline within the body. This is not a claim that every congregation is right or wise. It is a claim that the New Testament pattern is a gathered body of believers accountable to Christ and to one another, not a franchise office awaiting orders from a distant headquarters. The congregation is the church in that place, not a branch of something larger.
This conviction has practical consequences. It means a church can be wrong and must be corrected from Scripture rather than from above. It means the congregation bears the weight of choosing leaders carefully, because no outside body will do it for them. It means disagreements about doctrine are not settled by appeal to a denominational office but by appeal to the text, argued out in the open and sometimes at real cost. Congregational government is slower and messier than hierarchical government. Its defenders argue that the messiness is the price of obedience, since Christ gave the keys to the gathered church and not to a cabinet.
Regular Baptists have also historically distinguished themselves by what they are not. The word Regular was used to distinguish churches holding to confessional Baptist doctrine from others who used the name Baptist loosely. The point was not to claim superiority but clarity: these churches held to specific confessions, practised believer's baptism, and ordered their life by Scripture rather than by revivalist enthusiasm or novel teaching. That instinct is still worth preserving. A church that cannot say what it believes will eventually believe whatever it feels, and a church that has no confession has no way to tell whether it has drifted.
None of this makes the congregation autonomous in the sense of being answerable to no one. Every local church is accountable to Christ, to the Scriptures, and in a real if informal way to other churches who can warn, encourage, and in extreme cases withdraw fellowship. Congregational government and connectional responsibility are not enemies; healthy Baptists have practised both. What is denied is that any body outside the congregation can command its conscience on matters Christ has already decided in his word. That denial rests on Matthew 28:18, where the authority is Christ's, not a hierarchy's.
Teaching Them to Observe: Discipleship as the Long Work
The final participle in the commission is teaching, and Matthew is specific about its content: teaching them to observe all that Jesus commanded. This is not information transfer. It is formation. A church can run classes for years and produce people who know the right answers and obey none of them. The measure Matthew gives is observance, not awareness. That reframes the entire ministry of the church. Sermons, classes, small groups, and one-on-one conversations exist so that people actually do what Jesus said, in their homes, their work, their money, their speech, and their conflicts. Doctrine that never reaches conduct has failed the commission's own wording.
It also tells us the work is never finished in this life. Jesus says teaching them to observe all that I commanded, and the promise of his presence runs to the end of the age. There is no graduation. The oldest saint in the congregation is still being taught, and the newest convert is already a teacher's responsibility. This is why a church's health cannot be measured by a single dramatic season of growth. It is measured by whether ordinary people are slowly becoming more like Christ over years. That kind of progress is unspectacular and easy to overlook, but it is exactly what the commission asks for.
Baptism and teaching belong together in the same sentence for a reason. Baptism marks the beginning of a public life of discipleship; teaching sustains it. A church that baptises enthusiastically and then leaves converts to fend for themselves has obeyed half a command and created a crowd of untaught believers. A church that teaches endlessly and never calls anyone to the waters of baptism has also obeyed half a command, and its teaching has no visible line where allegiance is declared. The two ordinances and the ongoing ministry of the word form one continuous work, and Matthew 28:18-20 is where they are joined.
This also gives the congregation a way to think about its own members who have drifted. Discipline, when it is done biblically, is teaching in its most serious form: an effort to bring a wandering brother or sister back to observance of what Christ commanded. It is not punishment for its own sake, and it is not an exercise of personal spite dressed up as church action. It aims at restoration. Where a church practises discipline without love it becomes harsh; where it practises love without discipline it becomes indifferent. The commission's word, observe, holds both together and keeps the congregation's aim on the actual obedience of actual people.
How This Shapes Ordinary Congregational Life
On a normal week, none of this looks dramatic. A pastor prepares a sermon from a text and tries to explain it accurately. A Sunday school teacher works through a book of the Bible with eight people who have questions. A young believer is interviewed before baptism, not to test her worthiness but to hear her say in her own words what Christ has done. That conversation matters because baptism is a public act and the church needs to know that the profession is real. When she is baptised, the congregation watches and sings, and the act is both her testimony and the church's declaration that it recognises her as a sister. This is Matthew 28:18-20 happening in real time.
Membership follows naturally. If a church is a gathered body of believers, then joining it means saying, in effect, I believe this gospel, I submit to this teaching, and I will walk with these people. That is not a formality, and it is not a commitment to an institution. It is a commitment to a people under Christ. Membership gives the congregation the ability to know whom it is responsible for, to care for them, and, when necessary, to pursue them if they wander. A church with no meaningful membership cannot practise the teaching half of the commission well, because it does not know who is being taught or who has gone missing.
Regular Baptist churches have also historically insisted that the ordinances are for the church, not for the public at large. Baptism is administered to believers who are being added to the congregation; the Lord's Supper is shared by those in good standing. This is not a way of guarding privilege. It is a way of taking the symbolism seriously. If baptism means union with Christ and his people, then baptising someone who shows no interest in Christ or his people empties the sign. If the Supper means communion with Christ and his body, then treating it as a casual snack for anyone present confuses exactly what it declares. Fences around the table and the water exist because the things they guard are precious.
Finally, this pattern keeps a congregation's eyes outward. A church that takes Christ's authority seriously will take his commission seriously, and the commission sends people. Some go far away; most stay and live as witnesses where they already are. Matthew ends with Jesus promising his presence, not with a strategy document, because the mission depends on him and not on the cleverness of the planners. A small Regular Baptist congregation in a declining town may feel like nothing. But if it is baptising believers, teaching them to observe all Christ commanded, and sending them into their neighbourhoods, it is doing exactly what the risen Lord told his church to do, and he has promised to be with it to the end of the age.
Biblical fidelity check
Matthew 28:18-20 establishes that Jesus possesses all authority, that his disciples are to make disciples of all nations, that baptism and teaching are the means by which this is done, and that he will be present with them to the end of the age. It does not establish a particular form of church government, a required liturgy for baptism, the precise age at which someone may believe, or the administrative structure of a denomination. It says nothing about buildings, budgets, or titles. What it does establish is binding: Christ's authority is total, the mission is global, and the work continues until he returns.
A common misreading treats the passage as a command to baptise people in order to make them disciples, so that the water itself does the disciple-making. That reverses the grammar and the narrative. In Acts 2:41 the people first received the word and were then baptised; the water marked a change that had already occurred. Another common misreading turns the promise of Christ's presence into a guarantee that any activity done in a church's name will succeed. The promise is his presence with those who obey his commission, not a promise of numbers, comfort, or institutional survival. Faithfulness, not visible results, is what the text requires, and a church that confuses the two will eventually compromise the very commission it claims to serve.
Other passages that speak to Matthew 28:18-20
Baptism is not an isolated theme, and these studies trace related threads in the New Testament. See What Does 1 Peter 1:2 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application for the election and sanctification that precede a believer's calling, What Does 1 Peter 1:13 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application for the sober-minded obedience that follows conversion, What Does 1 Peter 1:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application for the holiness that teaching is meant to produce, and What Does 1 Peter 1:18 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application for the redemption that gives baptism its meaning. Together they show that the commission's commands rest on what God has already done in Christ.
Frequently asked questions
Why do Regular Baptists baptise only believers?
Because the New Testament consistently places baptism after faith. Acts 2:41 describes those who received the word being baptised, and the Ethiopian in Acts 8 asked to be baptised after believing. Baptism pictures union with Christ in his death and resurrection, and that picture only makes sense where faith is present. Baptising someone who has not believed would attach the sign to nothing. This is why Baptist churches ask candidates to give a credible profession of faith before administering the ordinance, not to earn baptism but to show that the reality it signifies is present.
Does baptism save a person?
No. 1 Peter 3:21 calls baptism a symbol and specifically denies that it saves by removing physical filth, locating salvation in the answer of a good conscience toward God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Salvation is by grace through faith, and baptism is the public expression of that faith. This does not make baptism unimportant. It makes it a response rather than a cause. A person who trusts Christ and is never baptised is saved but disobedient; a person who is baptised without faith has performed a ritual with no spiritual reality behind it.
Are only Regular Baptist churches true churches?
No. Baptists have historically recognised other congregations that preach the gospel and practise the sacraments as genuine churches, even where they differ on baptism. The disagreement over infant baptism is real and important, but it is not a test of salvation, and many paedobaptist believers love Christ and serve him faithfully. A Regular Baptist church holds its convictions because it believes they are biblical, not because it believes it alone possesses the church. Where Christians differ on these matters, they should do so with charity while still arguing honestly from Scripture.
