mark may also be called the principle of regenerate church membership. At the first Baptist World Congress in 1905, J. D. Freeman said of Baptists, “This principle of a regenerated Church membership, more than anything else, marks our distinctiveness in the Christian world today.”2 More recently, Justice Anderson has affirmed its centrality for the Baptist doctrine of the church: “The cardinal principle of Baptist ecclesiology, and logically, the point of departure for church polity, is the insistence
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