Baptist Worship

Baptists, like the Puritans, desired a pure scriptural worship. Early Baptist worship sought to maintain a radically biblical worship that the Spirit was free to direct. Later, however, in response to what they considered to be excesses in other movements, Baptists came to place more emphasis on worship according to biblical form and order. As Baptists developed out of the Puritan movement in seventeenth century England, they were of two types: General Baptists and Particular Baptists. The General Baptists, who arose earlier, were given their name because of their belief that Christ's atonement was "general," sufficient for all persons. The Particular Baptists espoused the view that Christ's atonement was "particular," for God's elect only. Both groups, however, exhibited some of the Puritan concerns for purifying worship. They sought to eliminate the human forms of the established church and to base worship purely on the simple patterns provided by Scripture. But they also sought to…