The name tells you what makes Free Will Baptists different. They are Baptists who believe human beings possess a genuine, God-given ability to respond to or resist the grace of God. That put them on the non-Calvinist side of one of the oldest theological debates among Baptists, and it explains why a denomination that looks fairly conventional at first turns out to have a surprisingly distinctive history.
Before looking into them more closely, about all I knew was that Free Will Baptists weren’t Reformed. That’s true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Their disagreement with Calvinism affects their understanding of the atonement, election, conversion, perseverance, evangelism, and even the possibility of apostasy. They also wash feet, have roots extending back to the early eighteenth century in America, and unexpectedly provide one of the historical connections leading to E. W. Kenyon and eventually into portions of the modern charismatic movement.
Before There Were Free Will Baptists
The theological story begins before the denomination itself. English Baptists divided early between General Baptists and Particular Baptists. The distinction concerned the extent of Christ’s atonement. General Baptists believed Christ died for humanity generally and that salvation was genuinely available to everyone who believed, while Particular Baptists held the Calvinistic position that Christ’s saving work was intended particularly for the elect.
Those labels sound strange today, but the theological disagreement is still familiar. Did Christ die in some meaningful sense for everyone, with salvation offered genuinely to all, or did He die specifically and effectively for those whom God had sovereignly chosen to save?
Free Will Baptists inherited the General Baptist side of that argument. Their official history traces their theological ancestry to English Baptists of Arminian persuasion and identifies Free Will Baptist roots in England as early as 1611. That means Free Will Baptists aren’t a modern reaction against Reformed Baptists. The disagreement is nearly as old as the Baptist movement itself.
Paul Palmer and the Southern Free Will Baptists
The American story begins with Paul Palmer, who organized a Baptist congregation in North Carolina in 1727. Palmer had previously ministered farther north, and the movement associated with him maintained connections with the English General Baptist tradition. His congregation became the beginning of what Free Will Baptist historians call the southern or Palmer line.
This was decades before the American Revolution and more than a century before the Southern Baptist Convention existed. Free Will Baptists therefore belong among the older Baptist traditions in America rather than being an offshoot of one of the large modern Baptist denominations.
The Palmer movement taught a universal provision of salvation and rejected the stronger Calvinism found among Particular Baptists. It survived and developed primarily in the Southeast, eventually organizing churches into associations and conferences. Meanwhile, something remarkably similar was developing hundreds of miles away.
Benjamin Randall and the Northern Movement
Benjamin Randall was born in New Hampshire in 1749. One of the pivotal events of his life occurred in 1770 when he heard the famous evangelist George Whitefield preach. Whitefield died only two days later, and Randall later described the news of his death as instrumental in awakening him spiritually. There’s an interesting irony here. Whitefield was one of the most famous Calvinistic evangelists of the Great Awakening, but the young man influenced by his preaching would eventually become one of America’s most important anti-Calvinist Baptist leaders.
Randall initially joined a Congregational church, later became a Baptist, and eventually found himself uncomfortable with the strict Calvinism he encountered. In 1780 he organized a congregation at New Durham, New Hampshire, built around two convictions that would become central to his movement: human free will and the universal offer of the gospel. By the end of the eighteenth century, the name Freewill Baptist was appearing in records of the movement.
Here is what makes the story particularly interesting: Palmer’s southern movement and Randall’s northern movement weren’t originally branches of one organization. They developed independently while reaching similar theological conclusions. Both emphasized free grace, free salvation, and free will. Eventually their histories would converge.
What Does “Free Will” Actually Mean?
The name can create the impression that Free Will Baptists believe people save themselves by exercising free will. That’s not their theology. They affirm salvation by grace through faith and regard salvation as something made possible entirely through Christ.
Their disagreement with Calvinism concerns how that grace operates.
Free Will Baptists believe God genuinely desires the salvation of all people and that Christ’s atoning death provides salvation for everyone. Human beings can respond to God’s gracious offer through repentance and faith, but they can also resist it. Their official description contrasts this directly with the belief that God predetermined particular individuals for salvation while Christ died only for those elect persons.
That places Free Will Baptists broadly within the Arminian rather than Reformed tradition, although they have developed their theology within a distinctly Baptist framework. They aren’t Methodists who happen to baptize by immersion. They’re Baptists whose doctrine of salvation developed outside the Calvinistic Baptist tradition.
Did Jesus Die for Everyone?
Free Will Baptists answer yes. The atonement is universal in provision. Christ’s death is sufficient and genuinely intended as the basis upon which anyone may be saved. Salvation isn’t automatically applied to everyone, however. The benefits of Christ’s atonement are received through repentance and faith. That produces an evangelistic message with a straightforward meaning when the preacher tells an unbeliever, “Christ died for you.” He doesn’t have to wonder whether the person standing in front of him might belong to a group for whom Christ never intended His saving death. God’s invitation is sincere because the provision of the atonement is genuinely available.
That doesn’t mean everybody will be saved. Free Will Baptists emphatically reject universalism. People can resist grace, reject Christ, and remain lost. The universality is in the provision and invitation, not in the final outcome.
Election Without Calvinism
Free Will Baptists don’t reject the biblical language of election. They reject the Calvinistic explanation of how election works. Their theology attempts to preserve two biblical themes simultaneously: God initiates salvation through grace, and human beings are genuinely responsible for responding to Him. God’s foreknowledge doesn’t eliminate human responsibility, and His gracious initiative doesn’t transform people into passive objects incapable of responding.
That puts Free Will Baptists into a theological conversation that extends far beyond Baptists. Wesleyans, Methodists, many Pentecostals, and numerous other evangelicals have wrestled with the same question. How can salvation be entirely by grace while human beings remain genuinely responsible for believing or rejecting the gospel? Free Will Baptists believe Scripture requires us to affirm both.
Can a Christian Lose His Salvation?
Here we encounter one of the most important Free Will Baptist distinctives. They don’t teach unconditional eternal security. Their current doctrinal summary says there are strong reasons to hope that believers will persevere because God’s grace is available to sustain them. A Christian who sins can repent and be restored. Nevertheless, because human beings continue to possess genuine freedom, Free Will Baptists believe it is possible for someone to make shipwreck of his faith and ultimately be lost.
That’s an important qualification. They aren’t teaching that a Christian loses salvation every time he commits a sin. Their concern is apostasy. A person who genuinely believes can subsequently abandon the faith. God’s grace is sufficient to preserve the believer, but grace doesn’t eliminate the person’s capacity to turn away.
This is one area where I find their position particularly interesting. Hebrews contains warnings about apostasy that are difficult to reduce to hypothetical situations involving people who were never really believers in the first place. Free Will Baptists take those warnings seriously without turning Christian life into constant terror that one mistake has erased salvation. That’s a considerably more nuanced position than the caricature, “You can get saved Monday and lose it Tuesday.”
Once Saved, Always Saved?
This naturally distinguishes Free Will Baptists from the familiar Baptist doctrine commonly summarized as “once saved, always saved.” Southern Baptists and many other Baptists teach the perseverance or eternal security of genuine believers. Someone who appears to abandon Christianity permanently is therefore often understood as demonstrating that his original profession wasn’t genuine.
Free Will Baptists allow another possibility. The profession may have been genuine, the faith may have been genuine, and the apostasy may also be genuine. That gives biblical warning passages real consequences. When the New Testament warns Christians against falling away, Free Will Baptists generally understand the warnings as describing an actual danger rather than an impossible hypothetical. At the same time, they emphasize God’s sustaining grace and the possibility of restoration for the believer who falls into sin and repents.
Baptists Who Wash Feet
After our discussion of Primitive Baptists, this will sound familiar. Free Will Baptists traditionally recognize three church ordinances: believer’s baptism by immersion, the Lord’s Supper, and washing the saints’ feet. Most Baptists recognize only the first two.
Free Will Baptists look at John 13, where Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and tells them to follow His example, and conclude that Christians should actually do what He did. Foot washing functions as a visible lesson in humility, service, equality, and Christian love. Their theological explanation is rather beautiful. Baptism portrays identification with Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. Communion remembers His sacrificial death. Foot washing portrays His humility and the believer’s obligation to serve fellow Christians.
This isn’t merely an obscure historical practice. A denominational survey published in 2016 found that more than 84 percent of responding Free Will Baptist pastors said their churches still practiced foot washing, usually between one and four times per year. So apparently my great-grandfather’s Primitive Baptists weren’t the only Baptists taking John 13 literally enough to get out the basin and towel.
Baptism and Communion
In most other respects, Free Will Baptist ordinances look recognizably Baptist. Baptism is for believers and is administered by immersion. It symbolizes the believer’s identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ and doesn’t function as baptismal regeneration. The Lord’s Supper commemorates Christ’s sacrificial death. Traditional Free Will Baptist theology rejects transubstantiation and treats the bread and cup symbolically, calling believers to remember Christ, examine themselves, and participate reverently.
Adding foot washing therefore doesn’t mean Free Will Baptists have adopted a sacramental theology resembling Catholicism or Orthodoxy. They remain firmly within the Baptist ordinance tradition. They simply count to three instead of two.
What Happened to the Northern Free Will Baptists?
The Randall movement grew rapidly during the nineteenth century and expanded westward. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the northern Free Will Baptist movement contained roughly 1,100 churches. Then something happened that could easily confuse anyone trying to follow the denominational family tree.
In 1910–1911, most of the northern Free Will Baptists merged with the Northern Baptist Convention, the organization that eventually became American Baptist Churches USA. More than half of the churches and the denominational institutions went into that merger. But not everyone went along.
The remaining Randall-line churches reorganized in Missouri in 1916 as the Cooperative General Association of Free Will Baptists. Meanwhile, the southern Palmer churches continued developing their own associations and had organized a General Conference by 1921. Now there were surviving northern and southern Free Will Baptist groups with compatible theology and related historical identities. Eventually they decided they belonged together.
The National Association Is Born
On November 5, 1935, representatives of the surviving Randall movement and the southern Palmer movement met in Nashville and formed the National Association of Free Will Baptists. That makes the modern denomination relatively young even though the traditions composing it are considerably older.
The new National Association adopted a Treatise establishing its basic doctrine and practice. That Treatise, revised over the years, continues to provide the theological framework for the denomination. The resulting structure is recognizably Baptist. Local churches remain self-governing, own their property, and call their pastors. At the same time, churches voluntarily cooperate in missions, education, publishing, and other ministries that would be difficult for individual congregations to accomplish alone.
That sounds remarkably similar to the recurring Baptist formula we’ve encountered throughout this project:
“We’re independent.”
“Would you like to cooperate?”
“Absolutely.”
Original Free Will Baptists
There is another wrinkle. The Convention of Original Free Will Baptists is a separate body, particularly associated with North Carolina. It also traces its heritage to Paul Palmer and the 1727 beginnings of the southern Free Will Baptist tradition. Its convention was organized in 1913 to coordinate ministries among affiliated churches and conferences.
So when we encounter a Free Will Baptist church, we shouldn’t automatically assume that it belongs to the National Association. This is one of those Baptist family-tree problems that makes denominational history entertaining. Baptists divide, reorganize, cooperate, merge, refuse mergers, form associations, insist the associations aren’t denominations, and occasionally create enough organizations to require a flowchart.
The theology is often easier to grasp than the organizational history.
Evangelism and Missions
Free Will Baptist theology naturally lends itself to evangelism. If Christ died for everyone, if God genuinely desires everyone to be saved, and if people can genuinely respond to the gospel, then preaching and missions possess tremendous urgency.
The National Association today supports missionary and church-planting efforts in the United States and internationally. Its churches cooperate through national ministries while retaining local autonomy. That provides another useful contrast with the Primitive Baptists. Primitive Baptists historically questioned whether missionary societies themselves were biblically authorized. Free Will Baptists developed cooperative missionary structures and regarded evangelistic proclamation as an important means through which people encounter God’s offer of salvation.
Both traditions practice foot washing. After that, the similarities begin thinning out rather quickly.
E. W. Kenyon Enters the Story
This is the connection that initially made Free Will Baptist history especially interesting to me. E. W. Kenyon became associated with the Free Will Baptist tradition during the late nineteenth century and ministered within that environment before his later independent ministry. Kenyon would eventually become a highly influential teacher whose writings affected a number of twentieth-century Pentecostal and charismatic ministers, most famously Kenneth E. Hagin.
That doesn’t mean Free Will Baptists created Word of Faith theology. They didn’t, and it would be historically misleading to read Kenyon’s later theology backward into the denomination. But the connection is significant because it reminds us how interconnected American religious movements can be. A minister can begin inside one denominational tradition, encounter other theological influences, develop ideas in new directions, and eventually affect movements far removed from the denomination in which he began. Kenyon eventually became one of those people.
Kenyon Before the Word of Faith Movement
This is particularly important because Kenyon is sometimes discussed almost exclusively as a precursor to the Word of Faith movement. That can make him seem as though he appeared out of nowhere shortly before Kenneth Hagin discovered his books. He didn’t.
Kenyon belonged to an earlier American evangelical world shaped by revivalism, holiness teaching, divine healing, Baptist theology, and the rapidly changing religious environment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His Free Will Baptist background therefore deserves attention. It places him within an existing tradition emphasizing human response, evangelism, and a non-Calvinist understanding of salvation before his theology developed in other directions.
When we eventually write the Jew & Greek material on Kenyon and Word of Faith, that earlier history will matter. People rarely begin their theological lives at the point where history eventually remembers them.
Are Free Will Baptists Pentecostal?
No. Free Will Baptists are historically evangelical Baptists, not Pentecostals. Their denominational identity wasn’t built around baptism in the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, prophecy, or charismatic gifts. That makes the Kenyon connection even more interesting.
Kenyon’s later influence upon charismatic Christianity shouldn’t cause us to classify the denomination from which he emerged as charismatic. It illustrates transmission of ideas across denominational boundaries rather than theological identity between the movements. This is the kind of distinction that’s easy to lose when church history gets compressed into a few paragraphs.
What Do They Believe Today?
Modern Free Will Baptists affirm the Trinity, the deity of Christ, His atoning death and resurrection, the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith, believer’s baptism by immersion, the local church, evangelism, missions, the return of Christ, final judgment, heaven, and hell. Their most recognizable theological distinctives remain universal provision in Christ’s atonement, genuine human response to grace, conditional perseverance, and foot washing as a church ordinance. Their official doctrinal materials also continue to address apostasy explicitly rather than quietly avoiding the subject.
That combination gives them an unusual place among Baptists. They are conservative and evangelical without being Calvinist, Baptist without embracing unconditional eternal security, and traditional without simply reproducing the theology of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Are They Still Around?
Very much so. The National Association currently describes itself as more than 100,000 people in nearly 2,000 congregations across about 40 states, while its broader denominational history reports thousands of affiliated churches in the United States and abroad. Because different denominational pages count domestic and international congregations somewhat differently, the figures shouldn’t be treated as one perfectly uniform membership statistic.
The denomination maintains national ministries, educational and publishing work, domestic and international missions, and an annual national convention. Its 2026 convention met in Columbus, Ohio, and the 2027 convention is scheduled for Grand Rapids, Michigan. So Free Will Baptists aren’t merely an interesting remnant from nineteenth-century Baptist history. They’re a living denomination with institutions, churches, missionaries, pastors, and an identifiable theological tradition.
Why Free Will Baptists Matter
Free Will Baptists demonstrate something we’re discovering repeatedly as we work through Baptist history: there has never been one Baptist theology beyond the basic convictions that make Baptists Baptist.
Some Baptists became strongly Calvinistic. Others rejected Calvinism.
Some insisted genuine believers could never finally fall away. Others believed the New Testament genuinely warns believers against apostasy.
Some recognized two ordinances. Free Will Baptists recognized three.
Yet they could all practice believer’s baptism by immersion, defend local-church autonomy, emphasize biblical authority, preach conversion, and call themselves Baptists. Free Will Baptists also preserve one of the oldest alternatives to Reformed Baptist theology. Their doctrine wasn’t invented during the modern backlash against Calvinism. Its roots run through the General Baptist tradition in England, Paul Palmer in colonial North Carolina, and Benjamin Randall in eighteenth-century New England.
And then, almost unexpectedly, the trail passes through E. W. Kenyon before branching toward an entirely different chapter of American Christianity. That’s what makes denominational history worth studying. You begin by asking why some Baptists put the words Free Will on their church sign, and before long you’re standing somewhere between George Whitefield, eighteenth-century arguments about election, nineteenth-century foot washing, E. W. Kenyon, and the distant beginnings of ideas that would eventually show up in twentieth-century charismatic Christianity.