What's in a name?
We're a Baptist Church. While we respect the traditions and convictions of other Christian churches, as Baptists we try to model our approach to baptism on what we understand to have been the practice in Bible days. That means that we don't baptise children, though we do offer a service of Infant Dedication and Thanksgiving. We only baptise those old enough to have made up their own minds about following Jesus. And we normally baptise them by immersing them in a sort of mini-swimming bath which is a symbolic way of showing that as new Christians we have died to our old life and have come alive again in Christ.
Another distinctive practice in Baptist churches is that key decisions about church life are made collectively, by the church members at a members' business meeting (“Shaping MBC”).
You may be interested to know that Baptist Churches date back to the seventeenth century. One of the earliest Baptist churches in the country, dating from 1640, is only a few miles away in King's Stanley. Baptists make up a large part of the Christian community in the USA and, perhaps surprisingly, in Eastern Europe and Russia.
We're also an evangelical church. That means that we base our preaching and lifestyle on the Bible. We believe that each person needs to make an individual response to follow Jesus Christ, and we place a strong emphasis on the need for each individual Christian to keep in contact with God through prayer and Bible-reading, to live a morally upright life and to be involved in bringing good into the community. MBC is a member of the Evangelical Alliance, a registered charity (number 1126338) and also a Fair Trade Church.
