DIRECTORIES OF PUBLIC WORSHIP UNSHACLED! – AN OLD SCHOOL BAPTIST VIEW

By: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Chapter 22 of the Second London Confession (“Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day”) is treated with caution and partial acceptance. Old School Baptists shared many doctrines with their seventeenth-century forebears, but they eventually rejected the prescriptive and Puritan frame of that chapter because it became, in their judgment, a platform for ecclesiastical formalism and programmatic worship—precisely the tendencies the Black Rock Address later condemned.

1. On Regulated Worship
Old School Baptists agree that worship must rest on explicit Scriptural warrant—a “Thus saith the Lord.” They echo the Confession’s warning against “the imaginations and devices of men,” but they part company with the systematic “element-list” construction that later Reformed Baptists derived from Chapter 22. To Beebe, Trott, and their successors, the danger was that once “elements” were enumerated—preaching, prayer, singing, ordinances—churches would begin building apparatus around each, professionalizing and expanding them under the pretext of order. True regulation, they insisted, lies not in a tidy taxonomy but in subjection to the immediate authority of Christ through the Spirit and the written word, not through confessional codification.
2. On Institution versus Invention
Both Beebe and Trott argued that only what Christ and the apostles instituted has legitimacy in gospel worship. Where the Confession allows “circumstances common to human actions,” Old School Baptists saw a crack through which modern religious machinery—Sunday schools, missionary societies, choirs, clerical titles—could march. The Black Rock Address (1832) embodies this principle: “A ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ that is, direct authority from the word of God for the order and practice of every part of worship.” Anything lacking that warrant, even if well-intended, was considered “an invention of men.”

3. On The Lord’s Day and the Sabbath
Here they diverge sharply from the Puritan and Reformed Baptist reading of 22.7–8. Old School Baptists rejected the idea of a Christian Sabbath transferred to Sunday as a binding moral law. They acknowledged the Lord’s Day as a fitting time for worship but denied it was a legal “holy day” carrying Mosaic rest requirements. For them, the Sabbath is fulfilled in Christ, who is the believer’s rest; to reinstate a weekly legal observance was to regress toward Judaism. Worship should be continual, not compartmentalized into one consecrated day.
4. On The Confession as Authority
Although early Particular Baptists used the London Confession as a convenient doctrinal summary, nineteenth-century Old School Baptists came to view it as secondary literature, helpful only where it exactly mirrors Scripture. They refused to subscribe formally to any creed or confession as a test of fellowship, fearing that creedalism would become “a paper pope.” Thus Chapter 22, like the rest, was respected historically but not imposed ecclesiastically.

5. The Larger Theological Pulse
For Old School Baptists, worship is a spiritual, experiential act—the regenerate, indwelt church responding to the Spirit’s prompting. Where Chapter 22 speaks of “due preparation and reverence,” they speak of experimental godliness: broken hearts, humble dependence, and liberty of the Spirit, not liturgical regularity. Any attempt to regulate that living communion by confessional blueprint was seen as substituting mechanical order for spiritual reality. Old School Baptists would affirm Chapter 22’s first sentence and then begin to peel away nearly everything that follows.