Write About Now

Christian Standard’s enews comes out every Wednesday, and one of today’s stories is a recap of two more baptism celebration weekends, one at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas, one at Mountain Christian Church in Maryland. As with the cardboard testimony craze, people around the country are learning about the huge impact of these weekends—in which the pastor preaches on baptism and invites everyone who wants to make a decision to come forward in whatever they’re wearing and be baptized at that moment—and trying the idea at their own churches. I can be kind of snarky about bandwagons, but you can’t argue with these results: Savannah Christian Church kicked off the idea with hundreds of baptisms, Christ’s Church of the Valley dunked 482 one weekend in January (with another 100+ the next week), and Crossroads Christian in Corona, CA baptized 518 on Palm Sunday.

And then there are these latest two with stories that are wonderful, and wonderfully too numerous to fit in just one online update: Mountain Christian reports “the elderly woman who, with trembling lips, just before she was lowered in baptism, said, ‘Jesus, I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long;’” the woman who cleans the church handing her mop to someone and coming forward in her cleaning uniform; the husband who ran on stage when he saw his wife in the baptistery, shouting his love for her over the music.

Jud Wilhite, senior pastor at Central, writes, “I watched college students, CEOs, soccer moms, bikers, models, entrepreneurs and every other kind of person you could imagine climb into cold water in their street clothes with no regard for themselves, for their clothes, or for their appearance—only Jesus. I stood by a thirty-something guy decked out in $1,000 clothes who could care less about them. He just wanted Jesus.”

Jud notes that his invitation was straightforward and not based on an emotional appeal. “This was not about great programming, but about our great God who chose to move in people’s lives in a tremendous way, in one of the world’s least likely cities,” he says. “I’m reminded of what Paul wrote: ‘God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God…. As the Scriptures say, ‘If you want to boast, boast only about the Lord’ (1 Cor. 1:27-31, NLT). We are boasting about the Lord today and so thankful that we could witness his move.”

Hard to be snarky about that.