Sprinkled, Poured and Dunked: One Baptism for Everyone

DearMBchurch.ca:
The minister who baptized me scooped water from a basin and poured it over my head. Years later I was the baptizer. This time I stood with a jug in my hand, and poured water over the head of a person kneeling before me. I have also waded into cold and wavy Lake Ontario with people who loved Jesus, and baptized them there. A few years ago, I even baptized someone in the calm waters of the Sea of Galilee.
            I’ve been thinking about all this because yesterday I waded into the tank and baptized two women from our church upon the confession of their faith. I am still smiling as I remember the watching eyes of the children in our church, who couldn’t believe we had a swimming pool/really big bathtub under the carpet of our sanctuary!
            Baptism is a symbol of love and unity: one Lord, one faith, one baptism. But in the Mennonite world, baptism has been a symbol of prejudice, stubbornness, and broken relationships.
            I still remember the pained voice of a General Conference Mennonite as he described how he fell in love with an MB girl. The MB church required that he get rebaptized…they told him he was not baptized if the water had just been sprinkled or poured. This scenario, played out again and again, produced bitter fruit of anger, exclusion and division in the body of Christ. All over the amount of water we use for baptism.
            You can make a case biblically for many different types of baptism, and every kind has been used in the church at some point or another. As we were getting changed out of our wet clothes yesterday, I told the newly baptized women that in the first centuries of the church, we know that people were baptized naked.
           So far as I know there has been no Mennonite splinter group that insisted people be baptized naked. Notwithstanding Stuart Murray’s book, The Naked Anabaptist!
            I hope that today we are beyond dividing the church over the quantity of water we use when we baptize someone, so that we can focus more on the love of God that cleanses us from sin. I know in the community I used to work in, they had a service of forgiveness and reconciliation between General Conference tradition Mennonites and MBs, to try to heal the deep hurt and division that came from bad theological decisions around baptism.
            I think this history should remind us to be humble in our theological claims, particularly as to who is in and who is out of the kingdom of God. What services of reconciliation must we have in future years to welcome people we are excluding now?

Love, Carol Penner, Lendrum MB Church, Edmonton, AB

Comments

[Hugh W Savage]

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I have often wondered why we spend so much time and energy over our disagreements over baptism. Perhaps the real issue is that, for some reason, we find a need to exclude folks {Miroslav Volf, Exclusion or Embrace.} And you tap on the door of that larger issue of our continuing issue of exclusion of others who are fellow followers of Jesus. How is it that excluding people around differences in answering a question that Scripture does not address is far more important that our own ignoring of our breaking of clear admonitions of Scripture? "Judge not that you won't be judged." Thank you for making your thoughts available to readers.