Primitive Baptist Vision Narratives

The Primitive Baptists are among a small group of American churches which survived the nineteenth century with their Calvanism intact, and which still hold to doctrines long abandoned by both evangelicals and liberals. In the sense that the church believes in the Bible as a literal and infallible guide to Christian life, it is fundamentalist, but its fundamentalism actually runs deeper than a belief in Biblical inerrancy. The church views itself as a lineal descendant of the original apostolic church, a "primitive" church, not in the sense of "crude," but in the sense of "first," numbering among its ancestors independent and persecuted sects such as the Montanists, the Novatians, the Paulicians, the Albigenses, the Waldenses, and other groups which resisted the domination of the institutionalized church in the years before the Protestant Reformation. Primitive Baptist rejection of much of what has become commonplace in modern Christianity, including the use of musical instruments in church, complications in ecclesiastical organization, elaborately decorated church buildings, and the professional ministry, stems from the church's commitment to preserve the faith exactly as Christ established it, and to practice nothing not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament.