When I was out driving today I passed a church with the sign “St. Phillips Baptist Church.” I didn’t think Baptists had saints. Can someone enlighten me?
I think that Baptists (& Protestants in general) believe in saints, but don’t pray to them. The Protestant belief is that every believer in Christ is a saint.
All Christians are “saints” by the Biblical definition of the word. Some churches (not the Baptists) simply recognize some of them as exemplary for others, a porcess called canonization.
Typically Protestants shy away from the term “Saint” as an appelation before a name, for just that reason. St. Bricker, St. Skammer, and St. Raindog can presumably volunteer other perspectives on this.
When Protestants do speak of “St. N—”, it’s nearly always one of the New Testament figures, notably the Twelve Apostles (plus Matthias, minus Judas Iscariot), Paul, Barbabas, the two non-Apostle Gospel writers (John) Mark and Luke, the Holy Family, and maybe one or two others. And that is relatively rare. St. Philip, FWIW, was one of the Twelve; he doesn’t get much “face time” in the Gospels, but asks one of the key questions in Jesus’s Farewell Discourse on John’s Gospel.
Anglicans (if you consider them protestant) and Lutherans are more “Saint-friendly” than other Protestants. They don’t “pray to saints,” but then Catholics don’t exactly do that either in the way that people think. Of course, it also depends on how “high” the church is, YMMV.
Googling “Baptist church Saint” turns up quite a few Baptist churches named after saints, although there are a lot of false positives generated by churches whose city or street names contain “Saint”.
This.
There are two people who one might suspect such a church to be named after. One is the Philip who was one of the apostles. The other is someone usually referred to as Philip the Evangelist who is mentioned in the book of Acts. Their names are more commonly spelled with one “l”, but just by Googling I find a number of Baptist churches with the two “l” spelling for the name of the church (i.e., St. Phillip Baptist Church). If it’s really important to you, why don’t you just stop at the church and ask them who it’s named for? Wouldn’t that be better than our guesses?
I am aware of the apostle Phillip and I assumed that that was for whom the church was named. My point was that I didn’t know Baptists named their churches after saints and I was asking for a clarification of that point.
Like St. James-Bond? 
My guess is that this is an African American church. It is much more common to see African American protestant churches to include the name of a saint within the chruch name. I do not know why this is a common practice, but it is.
As a matter of fact, it was in a Black neighborhood.
At revivals there, were participants shaken, not stirred?
I’m waayyyy too embarassed to admit that I never realized Philip the Evangelist and Philip the Apostle were different people. :o In 30 years of church-going and bible studies, not to mention college NT courses, how did I miss that?
If it makes you feel better, a lot of other people, including Eusebius, didn’t realize it either.
Here is a discussion of saints in Anglicanism.
I think most Protestant churches still honor the saints who had been canonized before the break with Rome, but they do not “venerate” them. The same is true for saints recognized by a Protestant church since then (and some do not name new ones at all). Someone more versed in doctrine will have to elaborate on that distinction.
I would agree with Polycarp that I’ve never seen a Protestant church named after any saint, however, other than the ones he noted. (It took me a moment, though, to realize that his typo referred to Barnabas, and not Barabbas). :smack:
This seemed right to me, but out of curiosity I looked up the list of churches in my (Episcopal) diocese. To my surprise, we had quite a few churches dedicated to saints not on Poly’s list – I’ve indicated the rogues with a (*), which by my count are 12/27 of the total.
– All Saints Church*
– Church of St. James the Less
– Church of St. Joseph of Arimathea*
– St. Agnes Mission*
– St. Andrew’s Church (we have two of these)
– St. Ann’s Church*
– St. Anselm’s Church*
– St. Augustine’s Chapel*
– St. Barnabas’ Church
– St. Bartholomew’s Church
– St. Bede’s Church*
– St. Bernard’s Church*
– St. David’s Church*
– St. George’s Church*
– St. James’ Church (x2)
– St. John’s Church
– St. Luke’s Church
– St. Mark’s Church
– St. Mary Magdalene Church*
– St. Matthew’s Church
– St. Michael’s Church*
– St. Paul’s Church (x2)
– St. Peter’s Church
– St. Philip’s Church