Another Paedo-Baptist Post

I was talking to one of my mothers who I have not talked to in a while.  She still goes to my old church even though she is going to see if they decide to leave the PCUSA before she goes somewhere else.  And if the current pastor will leave if that happens.  We pined over the good ole days when Smyrna actually screened their employees and before they canonized saints.  Then I talked about other Reformed Churches in the area.  I said, I'm so glad I'm not like other denominations and that I'm Presbyterian, pretending I'm that Pharisee in Jesus's parable.

Then she said, "the only thing I just don't like is infant baptism."  She had been Baptist most of her life.  She thinks it is more meaningful if kids remember their baptism.  I remember neither my baptism nor my conversion.  I remember dedicating my life to the Lord in middle school, but there's not a time when I remember not believing in God.  However, I do remember confirmation class where Martha taught us the book of John.  And I relive my own baptism every time someone else gets baptized.  It's like I can feel him or her entering the covenant community that is for both believers and their children.

Folks forget that this is how we baptized people for 1500 years.  Families were considered as a unit, not as individuals.  If the head of the house believed, then that made the rest of the members holy and they could all be baptized. (1 Corinthians 7:14) The Philippian jailer and his household.  Lydia and her household.  One bad byproduct of the reformation, besides the visible church falling apart (the invisible church never can fall apart) is people going so far to not be Catholic that they started insisting on individual rights and preferences instead of seeing how God wants all Christians to live as a covenant community on earth where if kids are not baptized they were cut off from God's mark.  Just like when kids weren't circumcised in the Old Testament, they weren't considered visible Israel.  You need to be in a visible church to be truly a Christian and you need to be marked by baptism, a circumcision without hands, from birth.  The Bible says nothing about an age of accountability.  Even if there was one, people these days drop the ball by baptizing their kids yet doing nothing to train them in the faith at home.  Or sometimes unwed mothers will baptize their kids without showing any repentance.  All denominations do the sacraments so wrong these days.

But praise God, he can override our mistakes and keep the invisible church together no matter what they argue over.