A life in letters: Baptism 2

Over the years, after my experience of encounter with God in December 1973, I wondered periodically whether I was displeasing God because I had messed up when I was baptised. Given that my baptism had been completely insincere, I reasoned, how could I expect to enjoy the blessings God had promised? Surely what I needed to do was to go back to the beginning and be re-baptised. Then, somehow, all would be well.

I remember one Saturday when I was working at the Scripture Union bookshop in Falkirk being troubled by a neurotic sense that I should ask to be baptised again at the baptismal service I knew was scheduled to take place at our church, Ebenezer Hall in Coatdyke the following day. It would, I recognised, take courage to broach the subject with my parents and with the church leaders but it was something I felt I had to do. As I was locking up the door of the shop in Cow Wynd in the late afternoon sunshine I held the handle longer than I needed to. ‘The next time I touch this,’ I said to myself, ‘I will have been baptised properly.’

Well, Monday came, and I opened the bookshop door again, but nothing had happened. I’d told my parents of my wish to be re-baptised, but they’d managed temporarily to persuade me that this was unnecessary. Affirming my wish to be baptised again would have meant accepting that my original baptism had been insincere and this I suppose was simply too hard for them.

Later, when I was living on my own, and a member of Airdrie Baptist Church. I spoke to the minister, about my inclination to be re-baptised. He listened attentively and was in theory comfortable about baptising me again, but he didn’t advise me to take this step. Even though my faith had been defective on that Sunday back in 1968,  the person baptising me had done so in good faith. Baptism is not so much what you do, as what is done to you on behalf of the church. You are taken and immersed in water as a sign to yourself as well as to those watching that you have been spiritually cleansed and immersed in Christ, that you share in the benefits of his death and resurrection and that in fact in seeking and finding the spiritual life which is given in Christ you have in a spiritual sense died and risen again.

My pastor argued that perhaps my baptism had  by virtue of the faith of the person baptising me and of the people in the congregation, in some way led to the future fulfilment of what it symbolised. I could see that he was also concerned about how our church as a whole and especially the leadership would perceive my re-baptism if we were to go ahead. There would, he felt, be consternation. And yet many Baptist churches regularly re-baptise people who have been originally baptised as babies by ministers who believe, just as my pastor had suggested might have happened in my case, that the faith of those involved in the ceremony of baptism leads to what is symbolised by the sprinkling of a few drops of water later becoming a reality in the child’s experience. However, once again not seeing the way ahead, I dropped my request for re-baptism.

In 1989, I read The normal Christian birth a then new book by the Baptist Bible teacher David Pawson. (b1930) He argued that many of us live unsuccessful Christian lives because something has gone wrong in the process of our coming to faith, with some key stage  omitted. The four stages of Christian birth, according to Pawson are repentance towards God,  believing in Jesus, baptism in water and receiving the Holy Spirit.  If one of these stages is omitted, Pawson reasoned, then the only way to enjoy the full blessing God wants to give us is to go back and resolve the problem. As I read, I once again felt the conviction that I should be re-baptised. It was, I think, not so much a quiet sense that this was something I had to do, but an almost superstitious compulsion that this step would unlock the spiritual blessing I was seeking.

By this time the minister who had advised me before at Airdrie Baptist Church had moved to Kirkintilloch Baptist Church. Once again I spoke to him about re-baptism, and this time he was prepared to baptise me in the Kirkintilloch Church where because I wasn’t well-known the ceremony wouldn’t provoke the same degree of controversy as it would have done in Airdrie. But somehow I never followed up on this, because in parallel with my recovery from the worst of my anxiety and depression I realised that it was more important to seize the future than to spend time trying to fix the past.