Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 7, No. 3, 2007

ptist College, London, Nigel Wright, agrees. He also speaks of a regenerate church. 22 Indeed, he writes that ‘The doctrine of salvation defines the doctrine of the church’ 23 and insists that it should be seen as ‘a gathering church’. 24 This nuanced phrase is Wright’s understandable attempt to move away from the rather static term ‘the gathered church’, used in earlier times but not completely out of vogue today. The former is suggestive of dynamic people who are actively light and salt in the world. 25 Wright says, ‘The gathering church therefore exists as an open community of disciples’. In his earlier book, New Baptists, New Agenda, Wright says, ‘The effective church is the open church’: This seems to me to be a fundamental aspect of effective congregational life: the capacity to build a committed membership while at the same time remaining radically and welcomingly open 27 to those as yet beyond. Nevertheless, Wright suggests that the members of the church belong to one another (indicating commitment) in ‘a covenanted relationship’. He appears consciously to continue the early Baptist position: ‘As God has made covenant relationship with us so we are drawn into explicit and 28 expressed commitment to each other in the church’.“ 20 Ibid., p. 54. 21 Ibid., p. 60-61, emphasis added. In his choice of words he appears to be reflecting something of Luther’s understanding of believers being alter Christus. 22 Wright, Free Church, p. 51. 23 Ibid., p. 55. Again, this comment comes in a section in which he reflects on the ecclesiology of both John Smyth and Thomas Helwys (pp. 55-7). See also, D L Smith, All God’s People. A Theology of the Church (Wheaton, Illinois: Bridgepoint, 1996), p. 376. 24 Ibid., pp. 49-69. 25 To speak of a ‘gathering church’ rather than ‘gathered church’ encourages a dynamic in which the community has an identity defined by its centre, Jesus Christ, and an inclusive circumference rather than an exclusive boundary. See Keith G. Jones, A Believing Church (Didcot: Baptist Union of Great Britain, 1998), pp. 38-41. 26 Wright, Free Church, p. 51. 27 N.G. Wright, New Baptists, New Agenda (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2002), pp. 75, 76. respectively - emphasis added. 28 Wright, Free Church, p. 58, emphasis added. See also, Wright, New Baptists, p. 79. An understanding of covenanted church 11 Interestingly, in translating this typically Baptist ecclesiology, Wright argues that the present system of membership is inadequate for the church today. He suggests that we need to think in terms of process, envisaging the church as a series of concentric circles with a ‘very definite core both of beliefs, values and committed people’. He distinguishes between ‘community membership’ and ‘covenant membership’. Earlier he had spoken of these as ‘formal’ and ‘organic’ membership. The former is open to all, the latter to those committed together in covenant relationship. The former se