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Baptists

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==Beliefs==
Since there are at least sixty-five Baptist bodies with no structured ecclesiology, it's hard to precisely define their doctrines. Nevertheless, there are some points common to all Baptists. For example, most adherents place strong emphasis on the indepedence independence of the individual person ("individual soul liberty"), independence of the each church, affirmation of the believer's baptism, and distinctively American concepts such as freedom of religion and separation of church and state.
Orthodoxy disagrees with Baptists on:
===Church authority===
Baptists are part of the "congregationalist" heresy, meaning that they don't have bishops or any traditional ecclesiological structures. Instead, Congregationalist church governance gives autonomy to individual local churches in areas of policy, polity and doctrine. Baptist churches are not under the direct administrative control of any other body, such as a national council, or a leader such as a [[bishop ]] or [[pope]]. Administration, leadership and doctrine are usually decided democratically by the lay members of each individual church, which accounts for the variation of beliefs from one Baptist church to another. Such a system allows for each person to decide independently to believe whatever they wish, making it effectively impossible for a single Tradition or the [[One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church]] to be preserved.Also, Baptists ascribe to a doctrine called the "priesthood of all believers." This notion states that every Christian has direct access to God and the truths found in the Bible, without the help of an aristocracy or hierarchy of priests[[priest]]s. Thus priests are made into mere church leaders or financial managers, not the center of Christian life as the celebrants of the [[Divine Liturgy]].
===Scripture===
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