Expert: Bruce Gourley - 11/4/2007

Question
how does a baptist worship

Answer
There are approximately 250 different Baptist groups worldwide, plus within each group, any given local Baptist church is autonomous, which means that each congregation decides how it will "do church."  The answer to your question, therefore, is ... there is no one answer, or even only 100 answers, or even only 1000 answers. There are about 50-60 million Baptists worldwide, and perhaps as many as 1 million congregations. If one were to examine all Baptist individuals and congregations, one would find that Baptists worship in tens of thousands of different ways (and perhaps more than that).

The closest one can come to answering your question in a general way is to say that many Baptists worldwide, when gathering together in their congregations to worship, do one or more of the following: pray, listen to a sermon, and/or have congregational singing. Many do all three. But beyond these basic things which (many of these) Baptists share with many other Christians, there are all kinds of other things which might take place in any given worship service (not to mention that music varies widely among Baptists, as do sermon styles, and even the manner in which folks pray).

In short, Baptists are a very diverse folk which are hard to pin down.  If you want to get to know a little more about Baptists, I suggest you pick ten Baptist churches out of your local phone book and visit them one at a time. That would give you just a tiny slice of Baptist life.

Bruce Gourley
www.baptistlife.com
www.centerforbaptiststudies.org
www.brucegourley.com