Ridgell's Originals

I admit to being frustrated sometimes at those in the church of Christ who want to spend most of their time pointing out what we have done wrong. And I am even more frustrated when I realize they are often right. But there are many things we have gotten right and can be of great value to Christianity as a whole. So over the few posts I am going to share my thoughts on some of these. Today I start with baptism.

What we got right: the core centrality of baptism to the conversion experience. Only in the last 150 or so years among American evangelicals has the idea of salvation apart from baptism been taught. God's Word is clear that baptism is the faith response to God's gift of grace. The emphasis on forgiveness of sins is Biblical. It is the time when God puts His Spirit in us.

We are right to immerse. That is the meaning of the word baptism. We are right to insist it is an act of faith.

There is a real reversal of thought in evangelical circles about the place of baptism. Much of the thought has been initiated by people raised in churches of Christ. I am proud of our heritage and of our faithfulness to what God said about baptism. So I am thrilled to know that lost people are being baptized all over this world by Christians who are not "Church of Christ", tho certainly church of Christ.

What we got wrong: too much emphasis on what baptism accomplished without teaching what it was -- a death. I heard the phrase "obey the gospel" for years before I realized that literally meant being crucified, buried, and raised with Jesus. I thought it was just a code word for baptism. We failed to emphasize that baptism was a death.

We made it one of a five step process: hear, believe, repent, confess, and be baptized. When we taught it that way, it was hard to argue that we did not see it as a work. We called it a step -- we should have called it a death.

We too often treated baptism as the end, not the beginning. Lots of work to get them in the baptistry, not so much after. No wonder so many of our children were baptized -- and so many of them were never faithful. And we put so much emphasis on the act that we baptized little kids because they understood the "act". Lots of them re-baptized when they figured out what it really meant.

We can argue about young people leaving our fellowship and worshipping with groups that do not understand baptism. Maybe it is because we didn't teach it well.

Just my thoughts. Feel free to share yours.