Southern Baptist (non-Calvinist)

The grace reading leans towards free response without reaching the pole, because of a very Baptist pairing. Grace goes to all and can be refused, which is synergism: the view that a person freely cooperates with the grace God gives, or in the plainer word, free will. But once someone truly believes, God keeps them, which is eternal security, or “once saved, always saved” in the phrase people actually use. Classical Arminians hold that a believer can fall away; these churches do not, so they reject both labels.

Three readings sit at the very edge, and they are the marks of a free church rather than of that argument. Authority is Scripture alone, with no creed and no bishop over a congregation. The Supper is a memorial and baptism the immersion of a believer. Worship belongs to the church, not to a book.

On Israel and the church the sketch leans dispensational: a distinct future for national Israel, and a church caught up in the rapture before a time of tribulation. The Baptist Faith and Message does not require it, since its article on last things settles nothing, but the expectation runs through the preaching and the study Bibles this stream grew up reading.

The gifts reading leans cessationist without reaching the pole. No confession says the gifts have ended; there is simply a long settled practice of not seeking them, and a conviction that Scripture is enough without them.

What all this looks like on a Sunday is the invitation. The service ends with the congregation standing, a hymn, and a call to come to the front and settle it now, which makes sense only if the decision is genuinely the hearer’s to make. Churches in the Calvinist stream have often dropped that moment, and when the two sides argue about it they are really arguing about the doctrine underneath.