Baptizing Without Limits
I wrote this post "How Baptism Works with Your Online Campus" in 2013. Where has the time gone? It feels like I wrote it a few months ago. Five years ago, we had never facilitated a remote baptism because people would travel to a campus if they needed to get dunked. I never had too much of an issue with our approach because I got meet them face to face and baptize them myself. The problem is airplane tickets are expensive, and quickly you'll discover not everyone is made of money. It's not a scalable process, and the Bible doesn’t put many limitations on who can baptize. Have you put your faith in Jesus? Do you have the Holy Spirit? Guess what? You can baptize! "No experts needed" was Jesus's mantra in the New Testament.
Since 2013, we’ve rolled out four methods of facilitating a baptism through the Online Campus:
- Travel to a Saddleback Church campus to be baptized
- Commute to the nearest church who does water baptism (DOWNLOAD SAMPLE EMAIL)
- Train a friend or family member to perform the baptism (DOWNLOAD SAMPLE EMAIL)
- Wait till a Saddleback Church pastor is in the area to baptize
SAMPLE OF VIDEO FOR LANDING PAGE
5 Stories of Baptizing Without Limits:
1. Casey is part of our online community. Was living in China, but traveled to a Saddleback campus to get baptized. Cheryl and I had the privilege to baptize her a few months ago.
2. Cindy took our membership class from Japan but hadn’t been baptized. She was traveling to San Francisco for a work trip, and I trained a small group host to baptize her while she was in America.
3. Tuyisingize lived in Rwanda and wanted to get baptized. He didn’t have any believers in his town, but we found a nearby church to make it happen. It took an hour bus ride, but Tuyisingize got to publicly declare his faith to Jesus through the act of baptism.
4. We have many small groups all around the globe, but a few years ago I was regularly going up to visit groups in Northern California and on one of those trips got to baptize three members of a small group in a bathtub. It was awesome!
5. Linda wanted to be baptized but didn’t have anyone nearby, and we couldn’t fly to her at the moment. I found a local small group host to baptize her. They did it in their pool. Thanks, Mike and Cheryl for making this happen!
Consider lifting any limitations on baptism. Let God work through your online community!
