A Need to Know

Some time ago, I was having lunch with a member of our prayer group. We had gotten together to look over and discuss the material in a manuscript I had written about water baptism. We had laid it aside for just a moment while looked at the menus.

We made our choices and laid down our menus as a young waitress approached our table. After she wrote down our selections, the young lady, barely out of her teens, picked up our menus and seemed to hesitate just a moment as she glanced over at the title of my manuscript. She then thanked us for our orders, set the menus down on the papers we had temporarily laid aside, and suddenly swooped everything up and headed toward the kitchen.

It happened so fast. She had the only copy of my manuscript! I quickly summoned another waitress and told her what had happened. She set off for the kitchen at a run to retrieve the papers.

It wasn’t long before the first waitress reappeared; manuscript in hand, tears running down her cheeks.

I tried to set her at ease. I told her I didn’t think she meant to take my pile of papers or at least wasn't planning on destroying them. But she only cried harder, pausing just long enough to blurt out, “Oh, but I did take them on purpose!”

And then she told me her sorry plight. She said she had been living with her boyfriend and they had become pregnant. “We want to do what’s right for the baby and all, and get back into church and all," she said, "but we aren’t sure which is the right church anymore."

And then she started crying again. She said she had been raised Catholic but her boyfriend didn’t like attending church anymore. She saw "baptism" written across the top of my papers and she wanted to read it "so she could find out stuff for the baby.” And then she started to cry again.

I asked “Are you worried about whether God will forgive you?” I thought perhaps I could show her what God says about forgiveness in the Bible and maybe that would relieve her mind.

But she answered no. “I’m not worried about that because my grandma is Pentecostal and she prayed with me about salvation already. But now she says the Bible also says I should be baptized in water to show Jesus I really meant what I prayed.”

The young waitress said she had asked the priest from her church to baptize her, but he said 'no - that she had been baptized when she was a baby and that was enough for her!' “I just don’t know what’s right any more,” she said, beginning to cry again.

She is not alone! The confusion caused by having two different water baptisms is wider than most churches are willing to admit if the inquiries online are any indication. There were 371,000 Web sites with references to baptism in 2001 but a more recent check showed the number had grown to more than twelve million.

Yet at the time when I asked the lady at a customer service desk at our local Christian bookstore for books on water baptism, she could find only one thin booklet!