my life and my doctrine

Our daughter Sophie was baptized last Sunday morning. There were three decisions we needed to make about it.

1. Did we want to do it?Tom was baptized at under 6 months. Sophie was 16 months when she was baptized. We trust in a great and sovereign God who is often portrayed as choosing, saving, caring for families, not just individuals. We trust that baptism is a sign which points to God welcoming Sophie into his kingdom and our local church congregation welcoming her into the church family.Therefore, last year, our final year at college, when Sophie was born, we decided to wait until we knew were we would be at church in 2009, so that she would be welcomed into a local church that we would be attending for more than the one year we were at our last church. It took until July on the purely pragmatic reason of trying to get two out of three godparents in the same city at the same time.

2. Who would baptize her?When we finally picked a date based on godparents’ availability, our rector was going to be on leave. He suggested that  I baptize Sophie. I must admit I found this a little odd as it would mean asking myself, with three others, some promises and then making them too. We then asked another friend on staff to baptize her, but in the end the rector was going to be around.Jo and I ended up getting our preferred option. It was preferred because it felt more like Sophie was being welcomed into the congregation by the rector representing the whole congregation. Would it have bothered us if someone else did it? Not at all, for the baptism makes clear that the person baptizing does so on behalf of the congregation, reminding us of the promises in God’s word.

3. What promises would we make?By default, I would have expected to use the AAPB first order service. By default, our church uses a combination of that with promises drawn from the gospel tract Two Ways To Live. Initially this threw me a bit. Mostly I think, because I’m conservative. It’s important to remember that the baptism is symbolic and there is nothing magical or mystical about which words are used.Most important is that the promised display and convey our and the godparents’  trust in the biblical message of salvation.

So, we promised different promises to what we did for Thomas, but neither is more baptized than the other because of it. May God continue to look after my kids, keep them close to him and bring them to our heavenly home in his time.