What is the Believers Church Tradition?

The term Believers Church (BC) as such dates back to Max Weber, who in 1904 (in the first edition of his Der protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus) introduced this English term, defining it “solely as a community of personal believers of the reborn, and only these”. He linked it to the (Ana)Baptists and it is mainly within Mennonite and Baptist circles that this tradition is studied and reflected on since the fifties of the 20^th century.  A classic work is The Believers’ Church. The History and Character of Radical Protestantism (1968), written by the Church of the Brethren historian Donald Durnbaugh, defining it as “the covenanted and disciplined community of those walking in the way of Jesus Christ.” As such it is a distinctive ecclesiological type, seen as a third type of church, next to ‘catholic’ and ‘protestant’, also known under other names as Free Church and Gathering Church, or as ‘pentecostal’ (Newbigin, The Household of God, 1953) or ‘baptist with a small “b”’ (McClendon, Ethics, 2002). According to Durnbaugh these names are not so much to classify as to clarify (The Believers’ Church, 24).