So a question here by Justin Zier. Should we encourage folks who come from a very traditional Anabaptist setting and who did baptism merely to join church so they could go on with their life, for example, getting married to be rebaptized when coming to a setting of more earnest expectations and accountability? OK, that will be somewhat up to the church. I don't want to try to contradict what another church may be practicing.
Personally, since, you know, the early church, like I say, they rarely, if ever, rebaptized. You know, they saw Paul's words. There's one baptism, one faith. And so it was really rare that they rebaptized. I mean, like, if you got baptized with John's baptism, which wasn't even a Christian baptism, yes, you had to get rebaptized.
So personally, I would say if you believed in Jesus Christ, if you were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if you knew what you were doing, in other words, someone didn't force you into it. You weren't intoxicated or something. My personal feeling is that it's a valid baptism. What you need to do then is to make sure your life is now committed to Christ that you're walking with Him.
However, the practice in our church is if somebody is really bothered in their conscience, they really, really feel their baptism was not valid because they understood nothing about it, they had not repented of their sins, then we will do a conditional rebaptism. I mean, again, I don't want to force somebody against their conscience if it's bothering them.
But at least our congregation would not encourage, you know, actively go out, well, you need to get rebaptized because your church didn't teach the right thing about baptism.
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