When I was in my late teens, the Soul Survivor summer festival craze was in full swing, and for several years I attended with friends and church groups — often also participating in the New Wine conferences to combine and create a bumper series of charismatic Christian carnival.
During those weeks camping in a field in the Southwest of England, I often pivoted from a sense of cathartic delight at being a teen let loose with his friends, albeit at a Christian camp, and fear and loneliness as I looked around at the hands in the air and was subsumed into the loud music and lights: I tried hard, but I didn’t really fit in.
Luke Dowding
Therefore, in Brisbane at the Baptist World Alliance Congress in June 2025, it was somewhere around the third consecutive set of stadium-style “worship songs” that I began to feel the very same sense of disconnect. Of course, the band was polished, the lights were calibrated, the lyrics were projected in that familiar font seen in churches around the world; and all over the conference venue, thousands of Baptists from dozens of countries had gathered to celebrate the breadth and diversity of this global tradition.
Yet, what was on offer liturgically could have been lifted wholesale from any mid-size evangelical megachurch in the American South or suburban Australia. I looked around and wondered once again: Where do I fit in all this?
A few months later, at the European Baptist Federation Council in Jordan, I encountered the same flattening: A different continent, in a different context, but the same singular mode of worship presented as though contemplative prayer, liturgical variation, silence and space for those whose encounter with God does not come through high-energy musical performance had not been considered.
Sadly, I am increasingly convinced that Baptist identity is being homogenized into a narrow evangelical-charismatic expression and that the tradition’s historic commitment to freedom of conscience and diversity of practice is being eroded — not by external pressure, but quietly, from within. This is then expressed, in one way, through our style of worship when we gather together collectively from our own local church contexts.
“Baptists did not emerge as a tradition defined by a single worship style or a uniform theology.”
This matters deeply because that very freedom of conscience was the whole point. Baptists did not emerge as a tradition defined by a single worship style or a uniform theology; we emerged as dissenters from enforced conformity.
Thomas Helwys and others did not champion separation of church and state in England so that four centuries later, his spiritual descendants could enforce their own brand of uniformity in its place. The foundational Baptist commitments — soul competency, liberty of conscience, the priesthood of all believers, the autonomy of the local congregation — were not merely theological positions, but they were, at their core, commitments to pluralism within the body of Christ.
The Baptist family historically has been breathtakingly diverse: From the rich liturgical traditions of Black Baptist churches in America, to the contemplative piety of European free church movements, to liberation-oriented communities across the Global South. Baptists have sung hymns and spirituals and chorales, they have worshipped in cathedrals and house churches and open fields, and they have read Scripture through lenses of liberation, of covenant theology, of mysticism, of social justice.
What I witnessed in Brisbane and Amman tells a different story. At both gatherings, one representing the global Baptist communion, the other the European, worship was functionally monochrome and the music was exclusively contemporary, performance-driven and amplified. The liturgy assumed a single mode of spiritual engagement: Extroverted, emotionally demonstrative, charismatic-adjacent. And there was no provision for different learning styles, no acknowledgement of neurodivergent participants for whom sustained high-volume sensory input is not spiritually enriching but actively distressing and, to my lament, there was no reflective prayer, very little participatory liturgy and no silence.
I often found myself asking: How could we hear the still small voice, if she spoke, with all this noise going on around us?
Arguably, there were gestures toward diversity, with speakers from different nations invited to the platform and languages other than English making occasional appearances. However, these felt tokenistic rather than structural: diverse voices slotted into an unchanged framework, rather than a framework reimagined to make genuine diversity possible.
“The architecture of the worship remained stubbornly singular even as the people within it were wonderfully plural.”
Therefore, the architecture of the worship remained stubbornly singular even as the people within it were wonderfully plural.
When one style or theology becomes normative, the question we must ask is: Who disappears? Contemplatives, for whom God is met in stillness; liturgical Baptists (and yes, we exist!) who find sacramental depth in structured prayer and the church calendar; introverts, for whom corporate worship need not mean corporate performance; neurodivergent believers, for whom accessibility is not an optional extra but a justice issue; those formed in non-Western traditions whose spiritual grammar does not map onto Hillsong-adjacent aesthetics; progressive communities whose theology and practice have moved in directions the dominant evangelical center would prefer not to acknowledge and considers, ironically, “unorthodox”.
Yes, the irony is sharp: Gatherings that claim to celebrate global Baptist unity are, in practice, narrowing what counts as “authentically Baptist” and this is not simply a matter of stylistic preference; it is a question not only of freedom of conscience and religious belief, but justice, for whose spirituality is validated by our institutions, and whose is rendered invisible?
I write this as someone formed for ministry at Spurgeon’s College in London, credentialed by the Canadian Association of Baptist Freedoms, ordained in the community of First Baptist Church Halifax, and currently ministering in the United Kingdom while working with progressive Baptist voices across multiple continents. I do not and cannot claim to speak for all Baptists, but I do wish to boldly claim the conversation about what is happening to our shared identity needs to be far louder and far more honest than it currently is.
My experience is that Baptists are experiencing an identity crisis, and perhaps that might resonate with you too.
I hope and pray the multifaceted Baptist identity is not a relic to mourn but that it can remain a living tradition, one worth defending, nurturing and insisting upon. Our global and regional bodies have a responsibility not merely to talk about diversity while modeling conformity, but to do the harder, slower, more creative work of building spaces where the full breadth of Baptist life can be encountered.
Until they do, they are telling a story about who we are that many of us do not recognize as our own.
Luke Dowding is an ordained and credentialed Baptist minister with the Canadian Association for Baptist Freedoms. He was formed for ministry at Spurgeon’s College, London, and then completed his master of arts in biblical studies with King’s College London. His ministry is at the intersections of faith and justice, with particular attention to marginalized groups such as LGBTQ people. He is married to Steven, currently lives in London, is a devout coffee snob and an avid Trekkie.