I'll go ahead and read this from Calvin Frey, put the question up. This question is regarding the timing of baptism. I find that it is normal for Christians in our culture to delay baptism. For example, a youth accepts Jesus Christ as Savior, but delays baptism for a number of years. One of the reasons I think this is happening is that our church attaches church membership to baptism.
We instruct applicants for baptism in the doctrines of the Holy Scriptures prior to baptism and then receive them as members of the church at the baptism service. I've always struggled with this concept. It seems to me like the church described in Acts, baptized believers promptly after they accepted Jesus as Lord. Do we make an error in our churches today by delaying the baptism with weeks or months of instruction classes and also by attaching membership to the baptism? OK, a very good question.
One I have asked myself many times. I would have to say I do not know of a single church today who follows the practice of acts. Now, if someone knows of one correct beyond that, that's fine. But what you see consistently in acts is as soon as someone believed, they were baptized. But they and their whole household, I think, every time, unless it was a single person like the Ethiopian eunuch or something, I mean, who was by himself, it's always the whole household.
I don't know of any church that baptizes whole households. I've never been to a baptism that the whole household got baptized. It's always an individual. I don't know how to reconcile all of that. Our church doesn't practice whole household, and I'm not going to be one asking to do that. I don't know how to reconcile many things that we see like that other than, again, we have a flexible God, and I think we have to do the best we can looking at the Scriptures and what we're experiencing in life around us.
Now, on the immediate baptism, there is a difference between what we see in Acts and what we see in the earliest records in the early Christians. And someone may say, well, the early Christians erred, they moved away from it. My own personal guess is, you know, Acts, we're talking about the first couple decades of Christianity.
I'm guessing that maybe by the time of the Apostle John, that they saw a lot of people who had dropped out, who had got baptized and had not walked faithfully, and that they saw there was some wisdom in making sure people realized the commitment that they were undertaking and getting baptized. Because in the earliest descriptions we have, there's always some kind of instruction and some delay.
I mean, Justin Martyr mentions that the person would confess all of their sins to the bishop or whoever was doing the baptism, and that then they would fast for a few days and the people who had brought them into the faith would fast with them. And so there was a, yeah, a time of reflection. And they may have realized, yeah, this isn't the age of apostles. We're not having the same kind of miracles.
And it's wiser to the delay isn't going to cost anyone their eternal life, but it may save them from getting baptized and having a liability then when they turn around and don't walk in the faith because it was a momentary impulse. So they do instruction. I don't know if it's just new converts. Origen. That was one of his responsibilities. I assume it's the children of Christians that they got instructed in the faith as well as new converts before they were baptized.
I don't think anyone made it an absolute requirement that if you didn't go through this, we would not baptize you. But I do think it's a wise practice. Now, what I don't think there's any scriptural basis whatsoever is baptism is if you want to join our church and some churches make you get rebaptized, not just Anabaptists. I mean, the Southern Baptist did that. If you wanted to become a member of the Southern Baptist churches, you know, where I lived, where I grew up, you had to get baptized again.
It didn't matter. You know, if you'd already been baptized as an adult, you still had to get baptized again. Well, that's turning baptism into a sectarian initiation. And to me, that's profaning baptism. You become a member of Christ's church. You don't become a member of a specific denomination or that sort of thing. And so I certainly encourage, I try to do it gently, but in the sphere of influence I have, we need to move away from that.
That baptism isn't admission into a particular church, it's into Christ's church, and we should recognize that. Yeah, I really appreciate that. In my little bit of involvement in discipling people coming into the church, one of the things that I really want them to understand is that they're joining the Universal Church of Jesus Christ, not a local body only, and that you're going to get hurt by people. And if you tie your faith to one group of people, it can really be dangerous in the future.
But having that hope that's setting something much larger while still engaging the local body is really important.
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