By MICHAEL A. G. HAYKIN
Within five months of my being baptized by immersion in April of 1974 as a Christian at Stanley Avenue Baptist Church in Hamilton, Ontario, by Revd. Bruce Woods (a true father in the Faith to me), I was attending an evangelical Anglican seminary, Wycliffe College on the campus of the University of Toronto. I lived in residence at Wycliffe and loved my life there and for a time thought about becoming Anglican. And I cannot thank God enough for my professors at Wycliffe: Les Hunt, the principal when I first went to Wycliffe; Jakób Jocz; RK Harrison; Reg Stackhouse (the principal after Dr. Hunt); Oliver O’Donovan; Alan Hayes; David Luck; and the sole Baptist, Richard Longenecker.
I came to Wycliffe wrestling with being Baptist (Baptist ignorance about the past in general and their own past in particular was the central reason; it infuriated me then and still does). But I left a confirmed Baptist for reasons I may mention at a later point.
I found the worship model of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) deeply attractive and still do. It forms the pattern of my daily worship and I lead an evening service once a month at our Baptist church (West Highland Baptist Church in Hamilton, Ontario) that takes the BCP as its model. Some in our church call it the “monthly liturgical service,” as if our other services are not liturgical. But every church (from RC to Pentecostal) has a liturgy, a pattern of worship. I am very happy to use such a work as the BCP (one of the literary gems of the English Reformation), but I remain firmly Baptist. The marriage of BCP-like worship and being Baptist is the best of both worlds!
I have four sets of mentors:
The professors at Wycliffe College plus Dr John Egan, my Jesuit supervisor of my doctorate
The fourth-and fifth century Fathers like Basil of Caesarea, Grgeory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Macarius, Patrick, and Augustine—all of whom were baptized as believers as far as we know. But that is another story.
The English Particular Baptists of the long eighteenth century: figures like Andrew Fuller, William Carey, Samuel Pearce, John Ryland, Benjamin Francis, Thomas Steevens of Colchester, Benjamin Beddome, Abraham Booth, Anne Steele, Anne Dutton, Maria de Fleury—to name but a few.
And the founders of Baptist witness in nineteenth-century Ontario & Quebec (people like William Fraser, Benjamin Davies, B.D. Thomas, D.A. McGregor) and those who sought to preserve it in the twentieth century (W. Gordon Brown, W.S. Whitcombe, Hal MacBain, Jacques Alexanian—again to name but a few).
I feel a deep kinship with the latter two groups, and while I have issues with Baptist piety and the ethos at times, it would be an egregious breaking of faith with those who have made me what I am to leave the Baptist fold and to leave what I and those mentors considered to be a faithful reproduction of NT life.
I am well aware that there are other traditions besides the Baptist one (that of Anglicanism, for example) that have been witnesses to the purity of New Testament doctrine. But I deem the Particular Baptist stream to best represent NT life and polity. And having lived and breathed that world of late Antiquity, the previous sentence is not lightly made. It is fundamentally wrong to say that Baptist witness as we see it in the seventeenth century was a product of modernity and its deeply ingrained individualism. That shows a woeful ignorance of the Baptist worlds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
