Episode 118: On Spontaneous Baptisms (with Caleb Morell)
Should churches practice spontaneous baptisms? In this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman, and Caleb Morell start by defining spontaneous baptism and talking about examples in modern culture. They walk through what the Bible says about baptism and how to determine the prescriptive versus descriptive nature of Acts. They finish by offering some advice to pastors who practice spontaneous baptism.
- What is Spontaneous Baptism?
- What Does the Bible Say About Spontaneous Baptism?
- Descriptive Vs. Prescriptive Nature of Acts
- Advice for Those Who Practice Spontaneous Baptisms
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Hi, I am Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
He really, really is,
Jonathan Leeman:
And I really, really am with Mark Dever
Mark Dever:
For Ashley returned from Argentina and Brazil. What were you doing down there? Having a great time, mainly talking with pastors, hearing about what the Lord is doing there, and doing some basic teaching from scripture.
Jonathan Leeman:
Speaking of talking, speaking with pastors, we’re going to do that now in Pastor’s talk.
Mark Dever:
This episode of a weekly podcast meant to edify pastors other church leaders and interested folks.
What is Spontaneous Baptism?
Jonathan Leeman:
Amen. Learn more 9marks.org. That’s it. Mark, there’s been a growing trend I want to talk about. You talked with me today about spontaneous baptisms. The first person I heard about doing this was Steve Ick at Elevation Church, but it does seem to be a growing trend.
Mark Dever:
Long before that Rick Warren was doing it. I remember Rick coming up to me, a media in Palm Springs, California, very excited about a service they had just had where one person who was there heard testimony of somebody who was getting baptized and then literally physically walked forward and said they were just converted and they got baptized
Jonathan Leeman:
Then on there. But as a kind of cultivated practice, have you heard about it before?
Mark Dever:
I have not done research on this. I would love to see what the history of it is in my experience. I think it’s happening recently in a way that has not happened normally except maybe in missionary settings or
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, right now,
Mark Dever:
Certainly among the Church of Christ who believe that baptism is essential to salvation.
Jonathan Leeman:
It makes sense.
Mark Dever:
Oh, well, you go to the church at 10 o’clock at night and you baptize them because that’s literally when they’re saved. So with that sense of urgency, I’m used to that for my Church of Christ acquaintances, but for evangelicals Protestants, I am not at all used to this.
And I think Rick’s practice and others who we’ve heard have done it is certainly an aberration from what Bible-bleeding Christians have normally understood.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, we have a new initiative in the SBC for 2020 Easter called the hashtag Fill the Tank. And since Nine Marks is your supplier of church polity commentators for church leaders everywhere,
Mark Dever:
Which sort the ESPN of polity,
Jonathan Leeman:
That is totally us. Totally. And so I thought, Hey, this would be a good thing to talk about. Let’s study it as it were and talk about spontaneous baptisms. What do you mean by that? What are they?
Mark Dever:
I’m going to church. I hear a message. I hear a call to pin and believe and be baptized.
Jonathan Leeman:
You go to church with no plans of being baptized that day.
Mark Dever:
Correct? Yeah. And I decided that I should be baptized and I am provided an opportunity at this church Rick’s, where people say, come forward and you can be baptized now, or maybe they’ll interview me.
And a very, very spontaneous one. The most spontaneous would be if I simply walk forward, tell ’em I want to be baptized as I’ve heard of Wayne Cordero’s church doing in Hawaii, and then you just baptize them with literally no questions asked.
Mark Dever:
A variation on that. That’s a significant improvement in my mind is when you decide that day you want to do it, but then you’re put in through a series of interviews or conversations and maybe even right then a class or two for an hour or two or three, and then you’re baptized at a service later have heard that.
Well, I’ve had this one friend who’s talked about doing that. I’m not sure if they have done that. Okay, so that would be spontaneous baptism with an asterisk. It’s not quite as spontaneous as most of the examples I hear.
Jonathan Leeman:
The worst-case scenarios are no questions asked straight in. And even with that are situations where the church has people coming forward, believers standing up, planning to go forward, and incentivizing others to go forward. But I don’t think we need to.
Mark Dever:
We do know of the practices at that one church assembly that we actually have our interns read and we tell ’em, no, this is not a parody. This is not Babylon Bee. This is what this church, which we’re not going to name itself has published and said that they do, including picking attractive people out to leave the way and be photographed.
Jonathan Leeman:
But let’s leave that aside.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, let’s consider that an aberration.
What Does the Bible Say About Spontaneous Baptism?
Jonathan Leeman:
Let’s consider best-case scenarios of this. You still have a problem with spontaneous baptism. I’ve heard you talk about it on a number of occasions of late. Let’s get to the Bible in a second in what it actually says. But why do you have this pastoral instinct of eh, against spontaneous baptism?
Mark Dever:
JD Greer wrote a great book a few years ago called Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart, in which he was concerned that there was a kind of cheapened Finnish version of repentance and faith evangelism, which created a lot of false converts. And that’s the concern I would have about spontaneous baptisms.
Jonathan Leeman:
It creates false converts.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
So today we did 500, but where are those people in a year?
Mark Dever:
Yeah, what do they think about themselves? What does our church think about them? What’s the relationship between their baptism to membership? Yeah. All those kinds of questions. A lot of questions
Jonathan Leeman:
Because of the casualness and the care of the method effectively.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I want to be very careful about either of those that could be taken to go to Motive, and I don’t want to go to Motive.
Is Spontaneous Baptism Careless?
Jonathan Leeman:
No, I’m talking about the method itself. The method itself.
Mark Dever:
Well, it’s hard to
Jonathan Leeman:
Involves a kind of carelessness of what the person believes. I think I’m saying what you’re saying. You’re saying the method itself is not taking care to have conversations, make sure this person knows.
Mark Dever:
Well, lemme tell you one that’s too bold a statement because of what you don’t want to talk about.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why does he always have to say bald?
Mark Dever:
Because of what? You don’t want to talk about the Bible,
Jonathan Leeman:
Right?
Mark Dever:
I don’t think Peter at Pentecost was being careless. So what you’ve just said is that spontaneous baptism by its very nature is these things. And I’m going, that’s too, I can’t say that. My concern would be that without the supernatural signs that you say at Pentecost, then my concern is going to be that yeah, you’re going to baptize people who are not truly regenerated, but
Jonathan Leeman:
In the way, it’s practiced today.
Mark Dever:
imp pinning no one’s motives.
Jonathan Leeman:
Got it.
Mark Dever:
Got it.
Jonathan Leeman:
But in the way it’s practiced today, even in some of the better case scenarios, you still have those concerns about false.
Mark Dever:
And I understand you’re never going to have, we could have them delay for a month or three months of training or 11 months like Spurgeon’s Church used to do. We can have all kinds of things built in a year-long for the catechumens and the early church before they’re baptized at Easter.
We can do any of that, and we will still have people who are false comforts. I understand that, but I simply think the proportions are going to be way off when you’re having your spontaneous baptisms versus when you’re having your more carefully curated baptisms.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right. Well, speaking of history, and to help us with this conversation we have with a delayed introduction,
Mark Dever:
Caleb Morell, good to be with you guys. How do you spell that last name? They’re more Ls than Os. More Ls. MOR one RELL two Ls. Caleb Morell.
Jonathan Leeman:
I was corrected before this conversation on just that, Caleb, thanks for joining us, pastoral assistant at Capital Baptist Church, who has written a long-ish article on this topic that we hope to publish around the same time this interview comes out, so you can see more there on this.
You talk about historical precedent a little bit. You go back to the Diday in the 96 ad, you mentioned Cy of Jerusalem and Ambrose and Milan. Is this, what were they doing back then?
Membership and Baptism Go Hand in Hand
Caleb Morell:
Sure. When you look at church history and baptism, you see a couple of things. One is that membership and baptism go hand in hand. So the process of becoming a member of the church and the process of being baptized look very similar.
Mark Dever:
So it’s a process that’s going to lead you to begin taking the Lord’s Supper.
Caleb Morell:
That’s right. And especially, and that’s
Jonathan Leeman:
Across every kind of church.
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Caleb Morell:
Yeah. In the three hundred, especially around the time that Christianity became legalized and tolerated in the Empire, it became more popular to be Christians. And so you see examples of churches that become more careful in their membership process, more careful in their 380 AD.
Mark Dever:
It becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Caleb Morell:
That’s right. More careful in their process of baptism. And you see very long processes. One historian calls the process long and arduous because it involved 40 classes to sit through.
And it’s interesting when you read Cyro of Jerusalem’s lectures, he’s really warning the people about baptism. He’s really almost trying to scare them away and say, Hey, make sure you’re really converted. Examine yourselves, and examine your heart before you go through this process.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, you mentioned, as I said, the Diday from 96, probably 96-ish ad, which requires one or two days of prayer and fasting. Sure. Yep. So right there, you have the first entry, but let’s turn to this topic.
Caleb Morell:
Go ahead and just a note, they dealt with a form of spontaneous baptism at that time, and it would be kind of a deathbed, spontaneous baptism. So someone who’s not sure if they’re, they haven’t lived as a Christian, but they’re afraid of dying and going to hell, and so they ask if they can be baptized.
And so you have debates about whether that’s permissible because it seems like it’s too spontaneous according. So Augustine argued against the Amber has argued against that.
Mark Dever:
It also presumes a kind of efficacious baptism in a way that we would think the New Testament does not teach.
What Does the Bible Say about Spontaneous Baptism?
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. Well, you accuse me of not wanting to talk about the Bible. I want to talk about the Bible. I do. In fact, let’s talk about the Bible. The surface-level glance or look at the New Testament, especially the Book of Acts, does look like you have a practice of immediate, instantaneous, spontaneous baptism.
There are nine examples of baptism in acts. Let me go to the trouble of briefly mentioning them all to you. In Acts Two, you have about 3000 people baptized in Chapter 2 41. Immediately that day it happens. The Samaritans in Acts eight, immediately when they believed Acts eight, 12, and 13, were baptized in Acts 8 36, and 38 with the Ethiopian Unix. See here is water.
What prevents me from being baptized, Paul? Then he rose and was baptized in Acts 9, acts 10, Gentile, centurion, Cornelius. Can anyone withhold water from baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit?
Jonathan Leeman:
Just as we have now Acts 16 with Lydia. It’s a little ambiguous. So we hear the Lord opened her heart and eventually she is baptized. Doesn’t say how quickly. It’s just unclear. Okay, so that’s one exception. Number seven, act 16 with a Philippian jailer in his family.
He was baptized at once. He and all his family, number eight, Crispus, and many of the Corinthians, it’s again, this one is an ambiguous one. Hearing Paul, they believed and were baptized, doesn’t say immediately, doesn’t say at once, just as they were.
And then finally Acts the ninth example, acts 19 on hearing this, they were baptized. That’s the 12 disciples of John the Baptist. So you have Tom Shriner, New Testament scholar, and author of many books summarizing all of this by saying in the New Testament era, it was unheard of to separate baptism from faith in Christ.
For such a long period, baptism occurred either immediately after or very soon after people believed. The short interval between faith and baptism is evident from numerous examples. In the book of action, he mentioned the one I just read.
Mark Dever:
I think that’s fair.
Jonathan Leeman:
But you’re still nervous about this. Aren’t you working against Scripture?
Mark Dever:
Well, I’m not nervous. The passage about the practice in the New Testament,
Jonathan Leeman:
You’re nervous about the practice today, but aren’t you working against the Bible?
Mark Dever:
I don’t understand myself to be at all.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, help us out. Why not?
Mark Dever:
Because the Bible is very clear from the way Jesus himself was baptized. Very interesting. He was baptized not at 12 when he went to the temple, but 30 to the way John the Baptist himself talked about baptism to the way Jesus then commanded it as part of teaching ’em to obey everything I’ve commanded you, making disciples.
That’s the verb, that’s powering that imperative in the Great Commission to when you go to Roman six, and Paul can write to a church that he’s never been to the church at Rome, and he can say, he can assume that everyone who’s a member of that church has been baptized and is a new creature in Christ. And I could keep going.
When you put all this New Testament theology together about baptism, not just representing regeneration as say even our Pato Baptist friends would agree, it does. But seeming to be a testimony that the one baptized has themselves been regenerated, been born again, just like participating in the Lord’s Supper is not only a proclamation of the provision of the sacrifice of Christ but also a testimony that that partaking has themselves participated in its benefits. Okay. It’s that certainty, that brought us the group called Baptists,
Mark Dever:
Which I think also stands against taking simply the baptisms in the Book of Acts and their immediacy
Mark Dever:
As themselves, the pattern for what we do. I think they’re important to show. This is not something you lead till like Constantine did on his deathbed. It’s something that you front-loaded in the Christian life, definitely, certainly for adults anyway, for those who believe, who can have a credible profession of faith, but that you want it to be of these kinds of people, people who are themselves converted.
Well, those questions were answered at any time that the Lord’s spirit picked me up, and dropped me down next to an Ethiopian government official who was reading Isaiah and having that kind of question. I am good with baptizing him immediately if there’s no church back in Ethiopia.
So you put me in those exact circumstances, and yes, if it’s the day of Pentecost and we have the exodus of the New Testament, God creating his people with obvious visual miracles going on, yes. You take those miracles away. I’m just going to get a little bit more cautious about how quickly we intend to give a public affirmation of faith
Jonathan Leeman:
Because of what baptism is symbolizing,
Mark Dever:
This is because the series is for the one who’s baptized and what it does by bringing them into the me of the local Church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Caleb, you make a similar argument about the nature of the baptisms in acts in your article. Can you sum that up for us? What did you
Caleb Morell:
Yeah. The first involves the claim that the uniform pattern of acts is spontaneous baptisms. While you do see a series of spontaneous baptisms in acts, there are two notable instances where
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s ambiguous,
Caleb Morell:
Where it’s ambiguous and top-notch scholars such as Peterson look at that and say, actually, the implication here is that there was a process, there was a process of teaching. There’s a process of instruction that later resulted just because of the
Mark Dever:
Tense of the Verb.
Caleb Morell:
Yep, exactly.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. So number one, it’s actually not uniform.
Caleb Morell:
It’s not uniform.
Jonathan Leeman:
Point one, 0.2.
Descriptive Vs. Prescriptive Nature of Acts
Caleb Morell:
Point two would be that even if there was a uniform pattern of baptisms in acts that would not necessarily warrant practicing spontaneous baptisms in our churches today because of the discontinuity between now and then. So we know that when we read acts, not everything that’s descriptive is prescriptive in our churches today.
Now some things are, but when you look at it, all of the instances are accompanied by supernatural signs except for the two more normal baptisms that we see. And that’s Lydia, and that’s the Corinthians in Acts 18. So if you were looking for an example to work off of from Acts four as a model for our churches today, those would be the two you’d want to focus on.
In addition, both of them are in frontier settings. They’re in settings where a church isn’t yet established. There’s nobody for them to be baptized into, so to speak because that body doesn’t exist yet. They’re going to be the first converts. So even there, the situation isn’t exactly analogous to a church today that’s established.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I think frontier settings, you think of John Peyton in the new Hebert. You think of Edna Judson and Burma. Judson has his first convert after seven years. And then how long does he take from when that brother says he’s converted to baptism?
I don’t know the answer to that. I’m sure we could find it if we go look in a Judson biography, but if you put people in those pioneer situations and you read accounts of what they’d done, that would be a much closer parallel to acts, I think on this point.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, yeah, just a, you have this helpful table, Caleb, in your article, supernatural signs and baptisms and Acts two, you have the outpouring of the spirit and tongues of fire that you mentioned, Mark.
Mark Dever:
It’s kind of, that would burn all the hair off your head, I think if it were real fire.
Jonathan Leeman:
True.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Is this a common baldness again?
Mark Dever:
No. You’re sensitive about that.
Jonathan Leeman:
I must be.
Mark Dever:
You are reading microaggressions into what I’m saying.
Jonathan Leeman:
I must be. That’s my fault. Again,
Mark Dever:
It’s the younger generation. I’m to it, my fault. Again, I’m used to dealing with sensitive types.
Jonathan Leeman:
Acts eight. Well, Samaritans, there’s no supernatural science proceeding, but immediately following, they begin speaking in tongues, right? Philip tells the angel, and the Holy Spirit tells Philip where to go.
So you have acts supernatural sign proceeding and Acts eight, acts nine. Lord appears to Anize in a vision and tells him where to find Paul. Okay, so
Mark Dever:
This is where to find Peter, sorry, Paul, Paul Stein Paul.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. So you have a clear divine affirmation there. Acts 10, the Holy Spirit visibly falls on Cornelius in his household, maybe begin speaking in tongues
Mark Dever:
And the whole vision before that brought Peter there.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, that’s right. No supernatural signs in the conversion of Lydia. But again, as you pointed out, that was ambiguous, right? How long was it?
Mark Dever:
Well then just pause that soon followed up by the supernatural sign of the earthquake in the Philippian jail.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, that was where
Mark Dever:
I was going next, but that is following up.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, no, but it’s proceeding the baptism of the Philippian jailer, which is more immediate says at once, but it was proceeded by this earthquake, and
Mark Dever:
The jailer comes in and follows the feet
Caleb Morell:
Saying, what was the say?
Mark Dever:
Asking there?
Caleb Morell:
Asking if Luke takes pains to note the immediacy of the Philippian jailer’s baptism
Mark Dever:
As opposed to Lydia’s.
Caleb Morell:
Why doesn’t he use the same language to describe Lydia’s baptism? If it is in fact immediate, yeah, why not mention that?
Jonathan Leeman:
So again and again, I could go through a couple more examples, or you go to the article and see it again and again. You have these remarkable signs proceeding or immediately following in a couple of cases, the baptism, the immediate baptisms of these individuals.
In the two cases where you don’t have any signs, Lydia and the Corinthians, that’s where it’s less clear how quickly it happened. You’re just paying closer attention to what actually happens in the book of Acts in this article, Caleb. And she said, oh, okay. There’s something unique and redemptive history going on here.
Caleb Morell:
Can’t inch the fact of how few are actually recorded. Think of Paul’s whole first missionary journey, not a single baptism was recorded.
Jonathan Leeman:
What’s your point?
Caleb Morell:
Well, Luke’s purpose in recording these baptisms as opposed to other baptisms,
Jonathan Leeman:
The thousands that would’ve happened through the Book of Acts.
Caleb Morell:
Yeah. As he’s highlighting a particular theme, he’s writing his book for a purpose, and these baptisms play a role in driving forward his narrative purpose in the book of Acts, which is to highlight the unity of the church in the Holy Spirit built on the foundation of the apostles. As the church is expanding, the church is expanding,
Mark Dever:
Progressing from Jerusalem to Rome, and these are the key movements, the key, which reflect Jesus’ statement of the Great Commission, Jerusalem Judaism are most parts of Acts one, eight.
Caleb Morell:
And so there’s a purpose to them and there’s a uniqueness to them as well,
Description as a Prescription
Jonathan Leeman:
Which kind of gets us back to the whole descriptive or prescriptive conversation. How do we know what to do in acts? And I think guys are careless. People are careless about whether or not you’re taking all the description acts as prescriptive.
So classic example is Roman Catholics, for instance, who will point to the replacing of Judas with Mathias as an argument for apostolic succession. And if Judas was replaced, how much more, even Peter, and there you have an argument for the succession of the Pope. So it’s just like, let’s be super careful. Can we please take the description as a prescription?
Caleb Morell:
And I want to be sympathetic with our brothers who are advocating spontaneous baptism in a sense because they are seeking to be faithful to what the New Testament teaches. They’re trying to follow what they understand scripture should be teaching. I think it just requires a little more careful thinking about the church, a little more careful thinking about acts, and a little more careful thinking about the nature of baptism.
Mark Dever:
Well, and I think if you meditate pastorally on the horror of false conversions, I did a talk of T four GA a few years ago called False Conversion of the suicide of the local church. You just go listen to that message again. Then I think you begin to really not want to induce lots of people, maybe the majority, maybe the overwhelming majority of the people that you’re baptizing into baptism, who you really have no grounds for any confidence
Mark Dever:
In their conversion. And I think that the seriousness with which you take the eternity that they’ll be spending and the continuing effects on your own church’s life through a diluted membership, both of those things would encourage more caution. And then when you look at the history of the church, even if you just look at the history of Protestants, even if you just look at the history of Baptists in the last 500 years, why have there not been more spontaneous baptisms?
We’re Baptists in the past less attentive to description than we are. We’re Baptist in the past, more reluctant to do things that would appear radical than we are. Or are there other reasons for more Finnish kind of excitement that would cause this to be a movement today, especially among powerful auditors that have large congregations and draw great crowds?
I mean, can we understand more reasons why spontaneous baptism would be recovered in such circles with perhaps sincerity, but why so many people, ministers, faithful pastors around the world who’ve also read, studied, believed in the book of Acts and in a sort of baptistic understanding of the local church that it is believers, it is as best we can tell the regenerate who comprise the local church, why they have not practiced that kind of baptism and that as maybe a more historically might type.
Mark Dever:
That gives me pause. It doesn’t settle the issue. The Bible settles the issue, but that gives me pause and makes me want to look at the Bible and think, huh, what were they seeing in valuing that if I’m moving now toward filling the tank and getting as many people baptized as possible on Easter Sunday that I maybe am not looking at and valuing the same way.
Jonathan Leeman:
So the alarm bells going off in your mind are big time. Well, the specific alarm bells are nominalism false conversions, people going to hell who have been assured by a church that they aren’t the diluted witness of the church, and so forth. But what would the brothers advocating spontaneous baptism say you’re missing? What’s the impulse behind it?
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I assume it’s a sincere urgency and evangelism and a desire to see Pentecost-like results. Thus the emphasis is on the numbers of those baptized.
Jonathan Leeman:
But in the process, you’re suggesting this might be short-term thinking, brothers, you might actually be feeling the pews with people you shouldn’t be.
Mark Dever:
Well, I’m convinced it is short-term thinking, not that’s their intention, but in fact, it’s what it’ll show itself to be. So I’m thinking a hundred years from now, there’s no debate on this if the Lord tarries,
Jonathan Leeman:
But suppose now you’re listening to this program and you’re not convinced by what we’ve been saying.
Mark Dever:
Sure.
Advice for Those Who Practice Spontaneous Baptisms
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. What advice would you have for those individuals? How can they do this better rather than on worse?
Mark Dever:
Fair question. Interview the people before they’re baptized. Ask them questions that would, depending on certain answers, would cause you not to baptize them. Try to reconnect this to membership in your local church and the commitments that entails.
Yeah. Any delay you can build in of 30 minutes or four hours would be useful because that will cut down the sort of excitement factor.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, you recently, no, that’s good. You mentioned to me a church that we both know that I guess last year did 480 or something, had an exact number, 500 something, I forget the number, but it was 400 or 500.
It would be worthwhile. I would love for that church to go back and say, okay, you know what? We did this. We had 400, say 73. Let’s track down those 473. Where are they today?
Mark Dever:
And they may have done that. I would love to know more about that. So if you’re listening to this and you’ve been practicing spontaneous baptism for a while, I would love to hear accounts from you whether or not it’s supporting what I’m saying and my concerns or helping to ameliorate them and say, oh no, mark,
I think we can actually do this really well and faithfully. I’m not trying to be right. I’m trying to understand the truth, and I would just love more evidence, more anecdotes, more reasoning,
Jonathan Leeman:
And trying to understand not just the truth, but wisdom. Because some of this is in the category of wisdom
Mark Dever:
Very much,
Jonathan Leeman:
This is why at the beginning you were reluctant to completely close it down to say there may be a time and a place where
Mark Dever:
I’m sure there must be. Right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Caleb, any final thoughts from you? And then I’ll go to you, Mark, for any final thoughts.
Caleb Morell:
Yeah. I love the words of Charles Spurgeon in his book, the Soul Winner, he writes to pastors thinking about membership. He tells them, to do their work steadily and well. So those who come after you may not have to say that it was far more trouble to them to clear the church of those who ought never to have been admitted than it was to you to admit them.
Jonathan Leeman:
His church took a number of months, typically, and a number of steps to draw people baptize these into membership. People can’t see you nodding your head.
Caleb Morell:
Yeah. His example of thoroughness and carefulness in membership, really when he was such a popular preacher is commendable.
Mark Dever:
And the elder interviews, we can read them in the Soden trial and copies of, there’s a new book I think that they came out with that have copies of these elder minutes of the interviews recorded, and I’ve read ’em in our staff meeting. They’re just wonderful. They’re just like our membership interviews and very encouraging to read.
Jonathan Leeman:
So as I said, Mark, this has been something you’ve been concerned about for a little while. Any last things in this conversation that you’ve not yet said that you have the burden to say,
Mark Dever:
Hebrews 1317, understand that church leaders keep watch over your souls as those who will have to give an account. Well, that’s a very serious account, and the more we see a church as a thinner thing, an event that one attends,
Mark Dever:
It could be multiple times, multiple places, but the same dude preaching stamped the same way with the same font used in the illustrations or something that is projected, the thinner the church becomes, the less it seems, instinctually strange to do something like spontaneous baptisms. I think our defenses against it fall the more you understand a church service to be a unique weekly gathering that’s a unique part of our Christian obedience and is a community that we are knit into as we gather with these people literally every week.
The thicker in that sense, the church becomes the stranger. Something like spontaneous baptism would be, it’d be more like talking about spontaneous weddings, but I don’t think there’s going to be a huge move to spontaneous weddings with that kind of commitment. Although baptism can entail every bit as much laying down your life as a wedding and maybe even more in some places in the world,
Jonathan Leeman:
That is to say, if this conversation about spontaneous baptisms doesn’t make sense to you, it may be that your view of the church is already more thinned out than perhaps you realize.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Brothers, thank you for the time in the conversation.
Mark Dever:
Thank you, Jonathan.
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