baptism blues

“I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name. Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas. Besides, I do not know whether I baptized any other. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect.” (I Cor. 1:14-17).

We served in Latin America for many years before moving to South Asia a couple of years ago. Why we did that is a whole ‘nother story. One of the big issues among Christians there (and just about everywhere) is who can baptize, who can be baptized, and when? (Does this sound familiar)? Most established churches have their tradition or custom and that has become “bible” for them. The last place we lived in Latin America we helped with a new house church. One of the first converts was a medical doctor. Unfortunately, we had a long-time believer from an established church that kind of pushed his way into the situation. He insisted that we should have an ordained pastor baptize this new brother in Christ. It did not matter that this pastor, who was not even involved in the house church, was not discipling this new believer. I wanted one of the lay leaders in the church to baptize the good doctor. He was a leader in the new church and one of the people discipling the new brother. I thought we had everything worked out until we arrived at the pool for baptism. There was that ordained pastor and at the last minute, he was pushed to go into the pool and stand on one side of the doctor while our lay leader stood on the other side. They both baptized him taking one arm on each side, and boy did he get dunked, but good! To make a long story short, that house church did not reproduce. A precedent was set that day with the first five baptized believers – “we must have a certain type of authorized person to baptize”. That started a “domino effect” with other issues that came up … the Lord’s Supper, “qualified” leadership, church structure, etc. It is possible that a church planting movement was killed that day by the poolside, we will never know. The Lord always finds someone else to obey His will if we are unwilling. He used someone else out of that church to start another house church that has reproduced many times over. Meanwhile, the original “house church” became a congregation with an inward focus.

Jesus commands us to make disciples and baptism accompanies obedience to that command (Mt. 28:19). Jesus modeled this in his ministry (Jn. 4:1,2). We see the pattern for immediate baptism of new followers of Christ throughout the book of Acts. It is interesting that Jesus did none of the baptizing (see Jn. 4:2). The great missionary Paul did very little baptizing (see I Cor. passage at the beginning of this post). In fact, Paul said that it was not a big deal who did the baptizing (my paraphrase of that passage). This issue (among others) had caused division in the Corinthian church. Paul rebuked them and said basically – you are missing the point! “Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel!” Baptism is still important; it accompanies the making of disciples. But extra-biblical rules for baptism should not be a barrier to obeying the Great Commission. Sadly, it is one of the barriers to the expansion of God’s kingdom on just about every mission field today.

We will continue this line of discussion in the next post. What are your thoughts? What issues concerning baptism have you faced while on mission?