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"...The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."
I Timothy 3:15
Baptists Go Back A Long Way
In the report of the Council of the Archbishop of Cologne about the "Anabaptist movement", to the Emperor Charles V, it is said that the Anabaptists call themselves "true Christians", that they desire community of goods, "which has been the way of Anabaptists for more than a thousand years, as the old histories and imperial laws testify. " At the dissolution of the Parliament at Speyer it was stated that the "new sect of the Anabaptists" had already been condemned many hundred years ago and "by common law forbidden." It is a fact that for more than twelve centuries baptism in the way taught and described in the New Testament had been made an offence against the law, punishable by death.
Baptists Have Always Believed The Same Things
There was a church in London, founded on the ground of Scripture, in the reign of Edward VI, composed of French, Dutch, and Italian Christians. There were also English churches of this character considerably earlier, stretching back indeed to Lollard times, for the Bishop of London, in 1523, wrote that the great band of Wycliffite heretics were nothing new. There are records of "Congregations" in England in 1555 and Baptist churches are known to have existed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, before 1589. Both those called Independents or Congregationalists and those called Baptists were independent churches of believers, differing in this that the Baptists practiced the baptism of believers only, while the Independents baptized infants one of whose parents or whose guardian was a believer.