New Britain Baptist Church is a member of the American Baptist
Churches, USA, a voluntary association of Baptist churches, arranged
in 35 regions across the United States. Within this group is a great
diversity in ABC life. We embrace our diversity of culture, gender,
and theological perspectives as gifts for ministry, but we are still
bound together by the unity of the Spirit under the Lordship of
Jesus Christ. Locally, we are members of the Philadelphia Baptist
Association.
As individual congregations we come together for cooperative
ministry. Together we sponsor international mission efforts,
Christian education and publication, evangelism, church planting,
leadership development, youth ministries, crisis relief, and other
cooperative efforts.
While American Baptist Churches are
diverse, we are all committed to core Baptist principles:
1) . . . the freedom of the individual, led by God's Spirit within
the family of faith, to read and interpret the Scriptures, relying
on the historical understanding by the church and on the best
methods of modern biblical study;
2) . . . the freedom of the local church under the authority of
Jesus Christ to shape its own life and mission, call its own
leadership, and ordain whom it perceives as gifted for ministry,
male and female;
3) . . . the larger body of Jesus Christ expressed in various Christian traditions, and in cooperation with believers everywhere giving full expression to the Gospel; to repentance and faith, reconciliation and hope, social and economic justice;
4) . . . the principle of a free church in a free state and the opposition to any effort either by church or state to use the other for its own purposes.